How Trump Is Dividing Minority Voters. And why it could propel him to a second term
How Trump Is Dividing Minority Voters. And why it could propel him to a second term
How Trump Is Dividing Minority Voters
The most succinct explanation for how Republicans expect Donald Trump to win in November may have come from, of all people, the firebrand Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.
“What I can tell you,” Gaetz said earlier this year, “is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”
What Gaetz is saying, in his somewhat stereotypical racial shorthand, is that even if Trump alienates a growing number of well-educated white women (“Karen”), he can overcome those losses by attracting more blue-collar, nonwhite men (“Julio and Jamal”).
Even most Democrats agree that Trump appears positioned to gain ground this year among Black and Latino men without a college degree—groups that already moved in his direction from 2016 to 2020, according to studies of the vote such as the analysis of the results released by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. And even many Republicans acknowledge that Trump in 2024 could face an even bigger deficit among college-educated white women, who already voted against him in larger numbers in 2020 than in 2016, according to those same studies.
Those offsetting movements among white women with a college degree and nonwhite men without one point toward the shifting demographic dynamics that could settle the rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.