In 2016, Donald Trump won the white vote 57% to Hillary Clinton’s 37%, including white women 52% to 43%. (Who can forget, “I want a woman president, just not this one…”)
In 2020, Donald Trump won the white vote 58% to Joe Biden’s 41%, including white women 55% to 44%. Trump actually did better with white voters in this election despite the Democratic nominee being a boring old white guy.
A significant difference between Trump winning and losing was that white voters were 74% of the 2016 electorate but only 72% in 2020, according to data firm Catalist. And it’s part of a longer trend—with white voters making up 76% of the 2012 electorate and 77% in 2008—that doesn’t bode well for Republicans.
There’s a reason the Republican National Committee had a program of outreach centers to win support in communities of color, but it was among the first things Trump’s handpicked team cut after taking control earlier this year. Trump certainly has had zero interest in appealing beyond his core white base, doubling down on some of the worst Nazi-style racism we’ve seen in years.
I just wrote a three-part series on how conditions are forming this year for a potential landslide victory for Vice President Kamala Harris. Part of that is the ongoing browning of the American electorate. There will almost certainly be a smaller share of white voters this year, and for Trump to win, he’ll need to either grow his share of the white vote, grow his share of the nonwhite vote, or grow both.
But what happens if Trump manages to do none of that? Remember, in 2020, Trump won the white vote by 17 percentage points and white women by 11 points.
The latest YouGov poll for The Economist shows Harris leading nationally, 49% to 45%, but Trump is winning white registered voters by only 10 points. The same is true for two other recent polls. The latest Ipsos poll for ABC News poll has Harris leading 51% to 46% among all adults, while Trump is winning white people by 12 points. And the latest HarrisX poll for Forbes shows Harris leading Trump in a multicandidate race, 50% to 47%, among registered voters (when the candidates’ parties were mentioned), but Trump is winning whites by just 6 points.
But how much can we trust this polling?
Subgroup figures are always fraught with danger. Their sample size is necessarily smaller, introducing far more error in their results. That effect is magnified the smaller the subgroup is—say, Latino voters between ages 18 and 34. But there is one pollster that has tracked a large number of respondents over time, allowing for a granular look at the shifts in public opinion, and that is the firm Civiqs.
Here’s Harris’ favorability rating among white registered voters over the past three months:
And here is the chart for white female voters:
But there’s a reason Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are so busy (and intentionally) stoking racial resentments, and it isn’t because they feel good about the current state of the race. Depressingly, it may even be working. A year ago, Trump was 7 points underwater among white voters. He’s now 5 points above with them.
White people are keeping Trump in the game. But will they turn out in the same numbers as 2016 and 2020 and vote for him at the same rates? How much will the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and abortion continue impacting the vote of college-educated white women?
When the final story of 2024 is written, the answer to that question will be a large part of the final outcome.
