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Why Trump’s racism isn’t an issue – or enough of one – for some voters of color

Since Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election, many have publicly speculated why people of color – with whom Trump made some gains – would vote for a racist candidate. Throughout his campaign, Trump and his supporters spouted a series of racist remarks aimed at Black and Latino people, immigrants at large, and other marginalized groups. He also promised to utilize the military to carry out mass deportations, ban sanctuary cities, and escalate attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the federal level.

Swaths of non-white voters still supported Trump at the ballot box. And though this sort of data can vary in reliability, experts agree that Trump made inroads among some minorities despite his bigoted comments.

A record 46% of Latinos voted for Trump, a 14-point increase from 2020, according to Edison Research exit polls. Asian American support for Trump increased by five points, rising to 39% this year versus 34% in 2020. Black voter support for Trump sat at 13% in 2024, relatively unchanged from 12% in 2020. And though it’s true that the majority of people of color voted for Harris across the board, experts have warned that assuming these groups would automatically reject a racist candidate such as Trump ignores important nuance, particularly with regard to concerns about the economy.

Shifts away from Democrats, particularly among Latino voters, suggest that they may be pliant about Trump’s anti-immigration and xenophobic messaging, according to the journalist Paola Ramos. Being Latino doesn’t make voters immune from “racism or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-Blackness”, she said, as many have been taught to “idolize and romanticize whiteness”.

“That racial baggage is one that we’ve carried in this country and through American politics for a long time,” said Ramos, referencing the glorification of white identity in Latin America. “And I think [that] has now been finally revealed in very clear ways through Trumpism.”

Many Latino voters may have a more distant relationship with immigration, and hold xenophobic beliefs themselves, said the producer and author Dash Harris.

“We cannot act as if the Dominican Republic isn’t deporting thousands of Haitians right now,” she said, referencing the ongoing removal of Haitian immigrants from the country by Dominican officials, a practice that has received international outcry. “If Latin Americans are migrating from fascist countries, they are going to support fascism in their new space. It’s a continuum of interest convergence.” The rise in far-right leaders in Latin America and the continuation of “Nazism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, misogynoir” is unbroken “in the Western hemisphere”, she said.

Trump’s xenophobia was also intertwined with an economic message that is resonant for some, Ramos said. “In every single message: ‘[Immigrants] are taking your jobs. They are coming after you.’ … Inevitably, particularly if you’re part of certain ecosystems, you’ll start believing that rhetoric.”

Factors for why Asian American voters have increased their support for Trump are similarly layered. The majority of Asian American voters are foreign-born, have weaker party identification and may be more persuadable by either political party based on their priorities, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, the executive director of AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) data at the University of California at Berkeley.

While racism and discrimination “were dealbreakers” for Asian American voters overall, meaning they couldn’t support a candidate who wasn’t aligned on this issue, the economy and immigration were more significant for some Asian American voters, according to pre-election surveys. Asian American voters reported a “fair amount of personal financial struggle”, Ramakrishnan said, and were also largely dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy. That could suggest that voters were more interested in punishing the incumbent party for the economy versus supporting Trump’s agenda, he added.

On immigration, specifically as it pertains to undocumented people, Asian Americans voters have “shifted more conservative”, said Ramakrishnan, after they previously supported liberal policies such as a pathway to citizenship, from 2008 to 2016. While views on immigration are still a partisan issue among Asian American voters, those who supported Trump did so as “the Trump campaign and the Republican party did a very effective job at portraying the border as out of control, and cities [as] overrun by immigrants, and they framed it as one of illegal immigration”, he said.

Voting priorities also occurred alongside a potential decrease in voter turnout among Asian American Democrats, said Ramakrishnan, especially as Harris received 7m fewer votes overall than Biden in 2020. “It might be a story not as much of Asian Americans shifting over to the Republican party right, but of Asian American Democratic voters not feeling enthusiastic enough to show up,” he said, adding that questions of turnout also include how many Asian American Republicans voted versus Asian American Democrats.

For Black voters, the story of support for Trump followed a different pattern. Prior to last week’s election, many had panicked about a perceived increase in Black Republican support, particularly among Black men. But 85% of Black voters supported Harris.

“The story of this election is you didn’t see the same types of shifts in Black communities that you saw in other minority communities, in particular in Hispanic communities,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University.

Black support for Trump doesn’t fall in with any major “realignment”, Gillespie added, noting that Trump performed as well among Black people as past conservative presidents have after Black people largely left the Republican party in the 1960s. “The story of Black voting behavior is still a post-1964 realignment story,” she said.

Economic concerns, pre-existing partisanship and targeted outreach from the Trump campaign might explain why some voters support Trump despite his racism, Gillespie added. In particular, dissatisfaction with the economy under the Biden administration was likely influential in pushing some Black voters towards Trump, especially given tax credits and stimulus checks under Trump as well as Harris’s current role as vice-president in Biden’s unpopular administration, Gillespie said.

“There are people who think the economy is in bad shape, and think that the incumbent administration is at fault for this bad economy,” she said.

“It would make sense that there would be people who would want to punish the administration, and those people might not be thinking primarily about civil rights issues or what was the latest racist thing that Donald Trump said.”

Overall, there isn’t enough data to support a singular theory on Trump’s gains amid voters of color. But approaching any minority block as a monolith ignores historical trends that can reframe where support for a racist candidate comes from.

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