By: Jason L. Riley – wsj.com – June 3, 2025

Blacks and Latinos have the same priorities as everyone else—schools, jobs and public safety.

Leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounce Republicans as “oligarchs,” yet millions of blue-collar voters flocking to the GOP remain unpersuaded. Liberals are in denial about these trends, but the reality, according to the Times, is that “Republicans are overwhelmingly making gains in working-class counties,” while “Democrats are improving almost exclusively in wealthier areas.”

The paper’s county-level distillation of Trump-era voting patterns reveals how badly Democrats miscalculated in allowing progressive elites to determine the party’s priorities. Donald Trump “has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America—1,433 in all,” the Times reported. Worse for Democrats indulging in class warfare, only three of those counties had a median household income of more than $100,000.

Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented among lower-income voters and those without a college degree, and Democrats are also losing ground with nonwhites. “The erosion of working-class support—among Black, white and Latino voters alike—has unnerved every ideological wing of the Democratic Party,” the Times noted. While most blacks remain loyal Democrats, “in his three presidential campaigns, Mr. Trump made serious inroads in heavily Black counties, across the Deep South and beyond.”

The problem for the left has to do with its identity-based appeals to certain voting blocs. Minority voters are courted as minorities rather than as Americans who have the same priorities—good schools, safe neighborhoods, gainful employment—as everyone else. Instead, Democrats have pretended that Hispanics don’t care about illegal immigration, or that blacks think policing is a bigger problem than crime, even though polls have consistently pointed in the opposite direction. This is what happens when a small subset of progressives set the policy agenda for tens of millions of people.

Last month marked five years since George Floyd’s death—a half-decade that overlaps with declining minority support for the Democratic Party. The tragedy of Floyd’s death was politicized to attack law enforcement broadly. Activist organizations, such as Black Lives Matter, used it to raise money. Democratic elected officials used it to secure black votes. Floyd became a left-wing martyr, the black everyman who is targeted daily by villainous police officers. The media ran with this preposterous narrative, and street protests and riots ensued nationwide.

The political fallout hasn’t been what Democrats expected. A Gallup poll released last month shows that black confidence in law enforcement has increased since Floyd’s death. Since 2022, it’s grown significantly faster than the average among all groups. In 2024, 64% of black respondents expressed confidence in police, which is up from 58% in 2023, 55% in 2022 and 59% in 2021. Gallup also found that 64% of black adults “are satisfied with the relationship between the police and their local community, which has edged up three points since 2023 and five points since the low point in 2022.”

The irony is that black support for law enforcement, even after Floyd’s death, remained above 50%, notwithstanding efforts by liberal activists, academics and cable-news commentators to shrink police budgets and curry favor with black voters. This comes as no surprise to anyone who listens to the residents of high-crime neighborhoods and not to the intelligentsia who claim to speak for the black underclass. A 2021 ballot initiative in Minneapolis that would have replaced the police department with a “public-health oriented” department of public safety was voted down, and some of the strongest opposition came from low-income black neighborhoods.

Crime control isn’t the only matter on which average black voters and left-wing elites diverge. Surveys show that most blacks support school choice, voter ID laws and colorblind college admissions—all of which the Biden administration opposed and the Trump administration supports. Democratic outreach based on black victimhood, anger and paranoia isn’t working like it used to. So long as the party refuses to change its methods, Republicans stand to benefit. If black voting habits are increasingly driven by issues rather than by blind partisan loyalty, it’s a welcome trend.

George Floyd wasn’t representative of black people any more than Derek Chauvin is representative of police officers. But the fallout does fairly represent how the left’s racial politics have backfired. It also helps explain why, as the Times concluded, the Democratic Party “is hemorrhaging vital support from what were once among its most rock-solid constituencies.”

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Source: Why Democrats Are Losing Minority Voters – WSJ