How Trump Exploits Divisions Among Black and Latino Voters

 

news analysis

How Trump Exploits Divisions Among Black and Latino Voters

 

Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigrant message is exposing longstanding tensions and challenging Democrats’ hopes for solidarity.

 

Jennifer Medina

By Jennifer Medina

Oct. 29, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/us/politics/trump-black-latino-voters.html

 

In the Democratic imagination, “people of color” is a unifying term, a label for a durable coalition of Black and Latino voters, as well as Asian Americans, Arab Americans and Native Americans.

 

Donald J. Trump is showing just how imaginary that unity might be.

 

For months, the Trump campaign and its allies have effectively exploited divisions and bigotry within minority communities, pitting them against immigrants and each other.

 

Mr. Trump’s social media posts warn Black and Latino voters that immigrants are coming for their jobs. His promises to save cities that have been “invaded and conquered” are a feature of his rallies, including Sunday’s in New York, a city where politicians have long stoked racial divisions to win elections.

 

In many ways, these appeals to Black and Latino voters are not markedly different than those aimed at white voters: Your problems can be blamed on illegal immigration. Lack of affordable housing? Stagnant wages? Struggling schools? Urban crime? Mass deportation is a single, seemingly simple, solution, the argument goes.

 

The us-versus-them framing has long characterized political alliances, across the ideological spectrum. But Mr. Trump has been far more direct than any recent presidential candidate in inviting Black and Latino voters to be part of the “us,” so long as they acknowledge that there is a “them.”

 

In one of the Trump campaign’s most widely broadcast Spanish-language television ads, attacking Ms. Harris for her support of transgender medical care for immigrants, it closes with “Kamala Harris is with them. President Trump is with us.”

 

At the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, a lineup of Trump campaign surrogates unleashed the most plainly anti-immigrant, racist remarks of the campaign — notably while speaking to a crowd that was more racially diverse than most of Mr. Trump’s rallies.

 

Tucker Carlson, the conservative pundit, called Ms. Harris, who is Black and Indian American, “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor.” Stephen Miller, a Trump policy adviser, said “America is for Americans and Americans only,” a version of a slogan used by the Ku Klux Klan.

 

Whether this all draws in more Black and Latino voters than it repels is a question only the election itself will answer. The Trump campaign did distance him from the remarks of one speaker, a comedian who called the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

 

But the campaign has attracted an increasing number of Black and Latino voters even as it has used incendiary and at times racist language.

 

“Kamala’s support is collapsing with Black voters,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social last week, claiming without evidence that “their cities are being used as illegal alien dumping grounds.”

 

The post went on to warn that if Ms. Harris wins, “The Black community loses its political power forever because their neighborhoods will all be majority migrant.”

 

He has frequently repeated the unsupported claim that immigrants are taking jobs away from Black and Hispanic people and that migrants are “devastating for the Black and Hispanic patriots of our nation.”

 

“Kamala is killing Black and Hispanic heritage, she is killing their legacy and their rights,” he recently wrote, in all caps, on his platform.

 

The strategy is strikingly similar to the one he has employed to attract white, working-class voters, tapping into their fears that another group is getting ahead unfairly. And it plays on a reality that many Black and Latino activists have privately acknowledged for years: The presumed solidarity between both groups is fragile and may be splintering again.

 

For decades, liberal political leaders have nurtured the theory that minority groups of all sorts would band together in the name of civil rights. Political scientists have advanced the notion of a “linked fate” — the idea that an individual’s well-being is linked to the group’s, as a whole.

 

But tensions have always been there, particularly in urban politics, where Black and Latino politicians have battled over power and dominance.

 

The Rev. Al Sharpton, the Democratic activist who tussled with Mr. Trump for years in New York City, said that tensions between Latino and Black communities stretch back decades.

 

“These were two groups that have been denied rights that were then competing on who was going to get their grievances dealt with first, rather than understanding if we were united, we could get all of our grievances addressed,” he said.

 

Much of the former president’s approach relies on the lessons he learned in New York over decades, Mr. Sharpton said.

 

“He knows how to play into the divide because New York politics was a laboratory to national politics,” Mr. Sharpton said. “You had to drive a wedge. He knew there was enough bias in the Black community to use the Mexican border issue, and he knew there was enough bias in some of the Latino community to say, you don’t want to be like the Blacks.”

 

In a New York Times/Siena Poll earlier this month, just a third of Hispanic registered voters said they feel Mr. Trump is talking about them when he talks about problems with immigration. Roughly one in five Black voters said that “obstacles that once made it harder for Black people to get ahead are now largely gone.”

 

The poll also found that 40 percent of Black voters support mass deportation of immigrants living in the United States illegally, double the 20 percent who say they plan to vote for Mr. Trump.

 

Democrats who assumed that such policies would turn all Latino voters off appear to have been mistaken.

 

“The notion is that even if they are not speaking about me directly, they are in some sense,” said Daniel HoSang, a professor at Yale who has studied and written extensively about the rise of right-wing political attitudes among minority groups. “But now there’s lots of evidence that is not necessarily the same framework everybody is using. It doesn’t seem to be happening at this point.”

 

As the response to Sunday’s comments made clear, there are still large shares of Latino voters who are offended by attacks from Mr. Trump and his allies.

 

While Mr. Trump has relied primarily on attacks on immigrants during this year’s campaign, the 2020 campaign also included frequent references to the Black Lives Matter protests. In that election he saw a dramatic increase of support from Hispanic voters, many who blame Democrats for ignoring their concerns.

 

“It’s obvious what’s been going on over the years — they’re not doing nothing for us. Everything they do is for the Blacks and the white people, and that’s it,” said George Rodriguez, 57, who lives in Las Vegas and plans to vote for Mr. Trump again this year. “It’s a Black and white world and we’re not OK with that.”

 

For months, the Trump campaign has courted Latino voters by emphasizing their American identity. And polling shows that Trump supporters are far less likely than Harris supporters to say that being Hispanic or Black is important to their personal identity.

 

Ian Haney López, a law professor who writes about racial politics and has worked with Democratic strategists, said that for many voters “the nagging anxiety that they are not respected in this society makes them especially susceptible to a politician who flatters them as among the good people.” In the Trump campaign’s telling, Hispanic and Black Trump supporters are enlightened and independent because they are breaking with the longstanding majority support for Democrats.

 

“Trump repeatedly warns voters that they are good people beset by bad people, and that his supporters are among the good ones while his opponents are nothing short of evil,” said Mr. López, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. “Many Americans — of all races — want to be among the good ones.”

 

Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting

 

Jennifer Medina is a Los Angeles-based political reporter for The Times, focused on political attitudes and demographic change. More about Jennifer Medina