James Johnson is co-founder of JL Partners. He was the Senior Opinion Research and Strategy Adviser to Theresa May as Prime Minister, 2016-2019.
A year ago I visited Gabriel, a 23-year-old black man in Tennille, Georgia. He told me then that the black community is “waking up” and becoming more Republican as they balk at the more liberal direction the Democrats have taken.
This weekend I saw him again, after weaving through trees downed by tornados related to Hurricane Helene to get to the coffee shop we met at. This time Gabriel – who is voting Trump – was more downbeat: “Harris is doing better now, no doubt about it. People I spoke to a while back when Biden was in the race, they were going Trump. But now they’re quiet. They’ll vote for her, I bet”.
Gabriel’s words get at a key dynamic in this race: how non-white votes land will determine the election.
In Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, the black population makes up more than one in ten people in each state. In the latter two, the black population exceeds 20%.
The black vote has been historically highly Democratic, and that is overwhelmingly likely to continue to be the case. In the words of Gabriel, Harris has shored up the Democrat vote that was wavering amongst African Americans before Biden left the race.
But there remain some signs of inroads for Trump: amongst black men in particular. Our J.L. Partners polling shows that amongst black women, 11 per cent say they will vote for Trump versus 75 per cent for Harris. Amongst black men, 19 per cent say they will vote for Trump versus just 66 per cent for Harris. Where margins are tight, that could make a difference.
Black men seem more distant from Harris than black women are. Two black men in a recent focus group I held in Cobb County, Georgia, said their biggest hesitation about Harris was “she is a woman” and “woman problems” because women could be more “emotional” than men and “this country has been run by being a dick”.
What is likely to be the more important question, however, is whether Harris can mobilize the black vote to turn out for her. In cities like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, to Detroit in Michigan, to Atlanta in Georgia, that will matter. The Democrat ground game is seriously impressive, with a huge number of local offices set up in Georgia and other key states that far outstrip that of the Trump campaign. Though I detect nothing like the levels of enthusiasm there was for Obama, Harris may match Biden’s success in turning out black voters at the last election.
In the states of Arizona and Nevada first, second, and third-generation Hispanics make up substantial populations of each state. The Hispanic vote has become even more important in Nevada, where an electoral registration change in 2020 means people are added to the electoral roll the moment they receive a driver’s licence.
In 2012, Democrats led by 31 points amongst Hispanics nationwide. In 2016, they increased their margin to 38 points. But in 2020, Democrats fell to an advantage of just 21 points. The Hispanic turnout rate has also risen from a steady 40 per cent for most of the 2000s to 53 per cent in 2020. Much of this is due to Cuban Americans in Florida.
But polls show Trump continuing to narrow the gap across other Hispanic groups too including Mexican Americans, again especially so with men. These voters, who often juggle multiple jobs, cite inflation as a key concern. A more socially conservative group overall, they are frustrated by what they feel Democrats are pushing onto teaching their kids, especially on issues such as trans ideology. On the border, they feel particularly scorned: they came into the country the right way and watch on as others get handouts who did not.
There is another group that could hold the key to this election: Muslims in Michigan. For the first time yesterday, our election model showed Michigan moving from a tossup state that leans Harris to a tossup state that leans to Trump. One reason why might be the views of US Muslims, who make up around 2-3 per cent of the population, especially in Dearborn in the outer suburbs of Detroit.
Muslims in the US are the only Muslim group in the world not to be made up of one ethnic group: they are diverse, with around a quarter white, a quarter black, a quarter Asian, and the rest made up of those of Arab and Hispanic descent.
But there are signs they are not convinced by Kamala Harris to the extent they were by Biden in 2020. In polling we released on Sunday, we found only two in three of Biden’s 2020 Muslim voters said they were backing Harris, with the rest fracturing to undecided, Trump, Green candidate Jill Stein, or not voting at all. Their top issue? The Israel-Palestine conflict. That could make all the difference in the key state of Michigan.
These three groups – Blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims – all hold the key to the next election. They will do it for some time to come. Demographic trends make it likely that these groups will continue to – some more slowly than others – drift to the Republicans.
Hayward, an older black man who attended my focus group in Cobb County Georgia, summed it up, reaching back to Emancipation enacted by Republican president Abraham Lincoln in 1863.
“I think history is starting to repeat itself when you come to talking about what Republicans have done for black folks. They’re the reason we’re not out in the hot sun picking cotton and all of this stuff, man. Because they’re the ones that said, okay, you guys can go. And they made all that possible. And now because everybody’s more educated, you know, we have our own creative ideas as to how to create wealth for ourselves. And once we do that, then we know that if we go to the Republican route, we’re covered.”
Remember the Red Wall in England in 2019? The basis of that thesis was that there were many people in the North of England who looked like Tory voters but did not vote Tory. They eventually did, and the result was a Tory landslide.
We might just be seeing the formation of a similar phenomenon in America: an ethnic minority vote that looks like it should vote Republican, but currently does not. It might not happen this time, but that pattern looks set to change.