Minority and working class voters who shifted away from the Democratic Party said the party no longer supports their values and vision for the country.
Minority working class voters explained what drove them away from the Democratic Party and towards President-elect Donald Trump this election, in a New York Times report titled, “For Minority Working-Class Voters, Dismay With Democrats Led to Distrust.”
While the Democratic Party has long relied on minority voters and working class voter support, Trump made historic gains in the 2024 election among Black, Hispanic and blue-collar voters.
The Times report revealed that over the past year in their interviews of Latino, Black and Asian American voters across the country, they repeatedly heard the same concerns about how the Democratic Party had failed them.
Daniel Trujillo, an East Las Vegas barbershop owner, said he and many of his customers now feel the Democratic Party is the party of the elites instead of the working class.
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“Democrats flipped,” he told the Times. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.”
“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”
Voters told the newspaper that the Democratic Party’s harried warnings about Trump being a threat to democracy didn’t sway their vote as much as their concerns about the cost of living.
David Paiz, a 52-year-old maintenance worker for the city of Las Vegas, fled California due to the high costs of living and views Trump’s victory as a new era of more opportunities for his family.
“There’s a lot of things that I want to do, that we want to do for our sons, for their future, to prepare them for success,” Paiz told the paper. “But with the current administration, I didn’t see that happening. Now that Trump’s going to be our new president, I see a lot more opportunities.”
Other voters who supported Trump in this election expressed similar sentiments about the constraints the high cost of living has placed on their families.
“People can’t afford nothing,” Walter Mendoza, a 30-year-old financial adviser who lives with his mother in Allentown, Pennsylvania told the newspaper. “So I’m voting for somebody who could more manage [sic] the country better.”
Instead of living paycheck-to-paycheck, Mendoza said he hoped that most Americans would now be able to afford “a couple nice things” under Trump’s leadership.
Many minority working-class voters had come to view the Democratic Party as “condescending” and “overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives,” such as abortion and the transgender rights debate, the report said.
Trump swept all seven battleground states in the 2024 election. According to a Fox News Voter Analysis, 63% of voters who identified themselves as “falling behind financially” supported Trump over Harris. Trump gained six points with Hispanic voters and eight points with voters under 30 years old in this election.
