Meet the unlikely Trump voters

Donald Trump’s thumping US election victory this week was a historic moment. At the current count, the former president persuaded over 72million voters to hand him back the keys to the White House. But who are these voters? Are they, as is claimed by the holier-than-thou corporate graduates in the Democratic Party, really all ‘deplorables’, ‘garbage’ and ‘fascists’?

Contrary to the belief that Trump’s popularity is driven by white, racist right-wingers, he actually drew respectable levels of support from a variety of sections of the American population – including non-white voters. Nationwide, according to the CNN exit poll, Trump won 46 per cent of Latino voters. This rose to almost three in five in the key battleground state of Michigan, where he emerged as victor. He also won a majority of ‘other racial / ethnic’ voters, which would include America’s diverse Arab and Pacific Islander populations. When it came to Native American voters, Trump trounced his Democratic rival, outgoing vice-president Kamala Harris, by two-to-one.

Trump did also not, as the media might have you believe, purely appeal to older voters. This election, he actually improved on his performance among younger voters aged between 18 and 29. In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, he won 36 per cent of voters in this age group. In this election, that increased to 43 per cent.

Given how much is made of Trump’s supposedly ‘extremist’ appeal, it is also striking how well he performed among America’s self-declared independents – usually a politically moderate group. In the last presidential election, when he lost to Joe Biden, Trump trailed his Democratic rival by 13 percentage points among registered independents (54 per cent to 41 per cent). This time, he narrowed the gap to just three percentage points, winning 46 per cent of independents according to the CNN exit poll. Two in five voters who described themselves as ‘moderate’ voted for Trump – an improvement from his 34 per cent in 2020.

While Harris’s campaign tried to mobilise around reproductive rights and the pro-choice cause, this failed to materialise a landslide victory. But this doesn’t mean Trump voters are anti-choice. Among the third of Americans who think abortion should be legal in most cases, Trump and Harris ended up neck and neck, winning 49 per cent of the vote each. A similarly surprising pattern emerged when it came to immigration. The majority of the American public believe that most undocumented immigrants should be offered a chance to obtain legal status (56 per cent). And more than one in five of those Americans voted for Trump.

What unites this otherwise disparate group of voters? Above all, disillusionment with the status quo. The CNN exit poll found that nearly three in four Americans feel either dissatisfied or angry over how things are going – and no wonder, given the country is struggling to get to grips with problems such as the cost of living, affordability of healthcare, illegal immigration and drug addiction. Of those angry and dissatisfied Americans, 62 per cent voted for Trump. Whether he can effectively tackle these issues remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that he benefited from this groundswell of discontent.

It may be inconvenient for liberal political commentators, but the reality is that Trump was able to win his fair share of centrist, moderate and non-partisan independents in this presidential election – as well as vast swathes of ethnic-minority voters, whom the Democrats thought they could rely on. Voters were ultimately frustrated with both the sheer incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration and the moralising self-righteousness of the Democrats. In the end, the establishment vastly underestimated the size of this coalition of the disaffected.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.