Almost a month has passed since President-elect Donald Trump claimed a decisive victory on Election Day, winning 312 of the electoral college votes over his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, who won the remaining 226 votes. As Democrats continue to grapple on how this came to be and think about how they can change their strategy for the 2026 midterm elections, a recent analysis by The New York Times starts providing them with some answers.
The recent analysis indicates that Harris needed to perform better than President Joe Biden in urban cities in order to successfully upset a win. However, she ended up doing worse, getting 15% fewer votes than Biden in some cities.
For instance, in Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Harris's gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Trump's uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state's rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia— a swing state he narrowly lost to Biden in 2020.
Likewise, in Chicago, Democrats saw a dramatic decline in their previous stronghold. Even though Harris won the city by a 58-point margin, she lost ground in nearly every precinct. She picked up just 127,000 votes in Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, 47,000 fewer than Biden earned in 2020. The Times categorizes cities like Chicago as being emblematic to the Harris campaign's "chief problem."
As it has been well-documented since Election Day, Latinos dramatically moved to the right this cycle, swiftly handing Trump his second term in the White House.
Even though the majority of Latinos (56%) still voted Democratic, as the group has historically done, Trump saw historic gains, winning around 42% of the demographic's support. That figure bested George W. Bush's 2004 performance, which had previously been the record to beat among Republicans. Latinos today account for about 15% of the total U.S. voting population.
This was highly evident in Florida, which has rapidly solidified itself as a Republican stronghold. In Miami, particularly, Trump received 20% more total votes in Latino neighborhoods where Cubans are not the predominant Latino group, like those with large populations of Nicaraguans or Colombians. This trend ultimately helped him flip Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988.
But this was also visible in highly Democratic cities. In New York City, one of Democrat's strongest territories, Latinos accounted for nearly half of Trump's total gains compared with 2020. While Harris won these precincts by a 40-point margin, that fell short of Biden's 66-point margin in 2020. In a city with a diverse population of Latinos, Trump's vote grew among all of them, such as Puerto Rican, Dominican and Mexican neighborhoods.
The shift has been noticed by both parties, an early indication on how they could change their approach to understand the Latino community moving forward.
"The losses among Latinos is nothing short of catastrophic for the party," said Representative Ritchie Torres, an Afro-Latino Democrat whose Bronx-based district is heavily Hispanic. Torres worried that Democrats were increasingly captive to "a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters."
As per Republicans, they are celebrating their historic gains, acknowledging they are becoming the multi-ethnic party to represent Americans, a goal they sought to achieve in 2012 as part of a party "autopsy" following Mitt Romney's loss against former President Barack Obama.
"America is undergoing a huge realignment, and the Republican Party is now a multi-ethnic, multi-racial coalition of hard-working Americans who love their country," Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said the morning after Election Day. "Now it's time to get to work and put the interests of Americans first."
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