Why working-class people of color may determine MAGA’s political future

The cornerstone of the modern Republican coalition continued to shrink as a share of the electorate in 2024, raising the stakes for whether the GOP can hold President Donald Trump’s landmark gains among minority voters. Even with Trump having inspired robust turnout among white adults without a college education, two new analyses found those solidly Republican-leaning voters continued their long-term decline as a proportion of all voters in 2024. Trump offset that decline mostly by winning a bigger share of non-White voters, especially men and those without a four-year college degree, than he did in his first two presidential races. But polls now consistently show Trump’s approval rating among those minority voters dropping below his 2024 vote share among them, and his standing for managing the economy falling even further. Republicans once viewed Trump’s improving performance with minority voters as a luxury for a party powered primarily by its overwhelming margins among blue-collar White people. But as that bloc continues its seemingly irrevocable decline, rebuilding Trump’s support among non-White voters for the 2026 midterms and beyond is becoming a GOP necessity. “Trump was able to get out a lot of White voters who had not participated in the process, but it’s still not enough,” said Alfonso Aguilar, director of Hispanic engagement for the conservative American Principles Project. “You still need that broad coalition.” An irreversible trend The receding of blue-collar White people in the electorate is one of the most enduring trends in American politics. White people without a college degree made up about two-thirds of all voters around the time of Ronald Reagan’s two presidential victories in the early 1980s, according to an analysis of census data by William Frey, a demographer at the center-left Brookings Metro think tank. They dipped below 50% of voters for the first time in the 2008 presidential election. Over the three elections with Trump on the ballot, Frey’s calculations show, White people without a college degree have fallen as a share of the electorate by about the same amount each time — just over 2 percentage points. They edged below 40% of all voters for the first time in 2020, according to census data, and slipped again to just over 37% of the vote in 2024. Other major data sources on the electorate believe blue-collar White people represented a slightly larger share of the vote than the census found. Catalist and the AP VoteCast, for instance, both estimated that White people without a college degree cast 42% of all votes in 2024. But those sources generally show the same downward trend. Catalist has calculated that blue-collar White people declined 2 percentage points as a share of voters in every election since 2012, almost exactly the same rate of decline Frey and others have tracked in the census data. This erosion is especially striking because it has come despite Trump’s undeniable success at inspiring more working-class White voters to come out on Election Day. Turnout among eligible White voters without a college education spiked from 57% in 2012 to over 64% in 2020 before dipping back below 63% in 2024, according to Frey’s analysis. That was a much greater increase in participation than for Latinos or college-educated White voters over the same period. Black voter turnout in the Trump years — though robust in 2020 —has fallen considerably from its peaks in the Barack Obama era. Yet despite growing turnout, White voters without a college degree are still shrinking as a share of all voters. The explanation for that seemingly incongruous trend is that turnout is only one of the two factors that shape how large a share of actual voters each group makes up. The other factor is the number of potential voters in each group. For White people without a college degree, rising turnout isn’t enough to overcome the decline in their share of the eligible voter pool as American society grows better educated and more racially diverse. “A lot of people say demography isn’t destiny, but in this case, it is,” Frey said. No amount of political mobilization by the GOP, Frey said, has been able to offset the fact that blue-collar White people “are a smaller part of the population.” And that trend is likely to continue. From election to election, the political impact of this erosion can be almost imperceptible. The steady decline of blue-collar White people as a share of the electorate didn’t prevent Trump from increasing his overall share of the vote in each of his three national campaigns. But the imprint of this change deepens over time. Trump, in his three runs for the White House, has won about two-thirds of White voters without a college degree — roughly the share that Reagan captured in his 1984 landslide, according to the exit polls. But while that support was sufficient to net Reagan nearly three-fifths of the total votes cast that year, Trump hasn’t reached a majority of the popular vote in any of his three races. Trump did cross 49% and win the popular vote for the first time in 2024, but that required him to achieve a breakthrough with voters of color. Nothing may influence the GOP’s prospects in 2028 and beyond more than whether the party can hold those gains — which already look more tenuous than they did last November. Who is filling the gap? As White people without a four-year college degree have waned as a share of the electorate over the past generation, two other groups have surged. White people with at least a four-year college degree have grown from less than one-fifth of all voters during Bill Clinton’s first victory in 1992 to just over one-third in 2024, a record high, Frey found. But minority voters have registered the biggest long-term increase. In Clinton’s first victory, they cast about 15% of all votes, according to Frey’s analysis of the census data; they reached nearly double that share in 2024, at just over 29%. Broadly speaking, these two growing groups have moved in opposite directions during the Trump era. Since Trump became the face of the national Republican party, Democrats have posted their best results among college-educated White voters since the development of modern opinion polling after World War II. Trump’s relentlessly belligerent new term, with its focus on the cultural grievances of blue-collar White people, could leave him especially vulnerable to further defection among these voters. They may be most likely to recoil from many of his pugnacious second term priorities — like attacking elite educational institutions, slashing funding for scientific research, and raising prices on everyday goods through tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs they consider irrelevant to their lives. By contrast, Trump has made steady gains among minority voters since his first election. The exit polls, AP VoteCast and Catalist all found that Trump in 2024 posted big gains among Latinos, and solid improvement with Black and Asian American voters. Across all these groups, Trump ran especially well among men, younger voters and people without a four-year college degree. Despite his aggressive rhetoric on race-inflected issues like immigration, crime and diversity, “the sense of Trump as an existential threat to Black and Latino communities just wasn’t there in 2024,” said Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California. Matt Morrison, executive director of Working America, a group that politically organizes working-class voters who are not in unions, said those results showed the mounting consequences of Democrats’ failure to deliver an economic message that blue-collar workers find persuasive. “The same problems that I think Democrats had with White non-college voters, in terms of not having a sufficiently clear product on offer for them, are now showing up in these other communities,” he said. Polls show that these groups continue to express relatively little confidence in Democrats. But Trump’s standing with them also looks much weaker today. Multiple national polls around his 100th day in office put his approval rating among non-White voters without a college education at just 27%-29%, which is lower than the roughly one-third of the vote he attracted from them in 2024. Those blue-collar voters of color, many of whom are economically squeezed, express overwhelming opposition in surveys to Trump’s tariff agenda. Aguilar believes Trump has demonstrated that the audience for conservative messaging on cultural issues such as transgender rights and a tougher approach to border security was greater than Democrats believed, particularly among Hispanic voters. But he said it would be a mistake for Republicans to assume that Trump’s record 2024 performance among Hispanic voters represents a reliable new floor for the party. Instead, he maintains, Trump’s capacity to defend those gains will depend on whether he can ease the cost-of-living squeeze on Hispanic Americans more effectively than President Joe Biden did and whether he can assuage growing concerns about his deportation agenda targeting people who are not criminals. While Hispanic voters “before were moving to the Democratic Party, they are now swing voters,” Aguilar said. “What matters with Trump is results.” Most Democrats believe that blue-collar non-White voters remain more open to them than working-class White voters. Morrison noted that even when his door-to-door canvassers can deliver an effective economic message to blue-collar White people, they often still collide against a visceral affinity for Trump’s polarizing racial and cultural messages. That second line of defense for Trump, he says, is rarely present to the same degree among working-class minority voters. “They are clearly not as anchored to that (cultural) appeal,” Morrison says. Yet Morrison agreed the persistence of Trump’s gains signals that “it continues to be a struggle” for Democrats to win the votes of working-class minorities. Dan Kanninen, the battleground states director for the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris campaigns in 2024, likewise said that even if Democrats recover some ground with those voters in 2026 because of dissatisfaction over the economy, they could struggle again 2028 if they don’t rebuild their own economic credibility. “That’s still dangerous for Democrats,” Kanninen said. “The non-White, non-college voters, they may not like Trump, but they don’t feel Democrats have shown up for them.” An inescapable irony These tectonic changes in the electorate’s composition interact in different ways to shape the environment in each campaign. Democrats formerly faced a structural disadvantage in midterm elections because they relied so heavily on younger and non-White voters whose turnout plummeted outside the presidential year; now both parties believe midterms favor Democrats because of their strength among college-educated adults, who are the most reliable voters in off-year elections. Conversely, the electorate’s new alignment presents greater challenges for Democrats in presidential elections, when turnout rises among casual voters, particularly those who are younger or non-White or who lack college degrees. All of the major data sources agree that during presidential years, voters without a college degree significantly outnumber those with at least a four-year degree — a point stressed by those who believe Republicans have now opened a durable edge over Democrats in the battle for the White House. Yet even on that front the balance is shifting. From 2000 to 2023, the number of adult US citizens without a four-year college degree grew by only about 3.5 million, Pastor has calculated from Census data. Over the same period, the number of adult citizens with a four-year college degree increased by more than 32 million. In 2000, about 1 in 8 Black and 1 in 10 Latino adult citizens held at least a four-year college degree. Now, in both groups, the share of college-educated adult citizens has roughly doubled to more than 1 in 5, Pastor found. In Catalist’s data, people with at least a four-year college degree cast 41% of the vote in 2024, up from 32% in 2008. The Electoral College and the Senate still magnify the influence of working-class White voters beyond their overall presence in society because they are so heavily represented in smaller states and many key battlegrounds (particularly the former “blue wall” states of the industrial Midwest). But from almost every other direction, the math is increasing the pressure on the GOP to preserve Trump’s beachhead among working-class minority voters. White people without a four-year college degree are shrinking in the voter pool, probably irreversibly. Both White and non-White people with a college degree are growing as a share of the electorate, and both groups seem likely to continue tilting against the GOP in the near term, possibly by wider margins than in 2024. The full implications of these changes were obscured in 2024 because the widespread dissatisfaction with Biden’s record allowed Trump to run competitively with all those groups. But over the long term, the GOP’s best path out of this demographic squeeze is to hold, and even expand, Trump’s gains with working-class Asian, Black and, above all, Latino voters. Despite his sagging second-term poll numbers with those groups, Trump might yet succeed in doing exactly that. But the irony of the situation is inescapable. Hardly anyone might have predicted that solidifying minority voters’ support would be crucial to the president’s political legacy, nearly a decade after he first descended the escalator in Trump Tower to give a campaign announcement speech in which he depicted Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers.