More younger Black and Latinx men voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, and some of them cited the economy and jobs as reasons for their choice at the ballot box.
According to The Associated Press, Trump gained a larger share of those voters than he did when he ran against Joe Biden in 2020.
Overall, voters, including Black and Latinx voters, cited the economy and jobs as a reason they voted for Trump, although Trump’s policies are expected to make the cost of living even more expensive.
Juan Proaño, the CEO of LULAC, the largest and oldest civil rights organization for Latinx Americans, claims the election results made it clear that the groups he represents responded to Trump’s messaging on the economy.
“I think it’s important to say that Latinos have a significant impact in deciding who the next president was going to be and reelected Donald Trump,” Proaño told the AP
.“(Latino) men certainly responded to the populist message of the president and focused primarily on economic issues, inflation, wages and even support of immigration reform.”
Rev. Derrick Harkins, a minister who has served Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and has overseen outreach to Black American religious communities for over a decade, told the outlet that Trump’s bombastic approach got younger Black men to vote for him.
“I think that Trump, with this bogus machismo, has been effective amongst the young men, Black, white, Hispanic,” Harkins said.
“And I think, unfortunately, even if it’s a very small percentage, you know, when you’re talking about an election like we just had, it can be very impactful.”
Inflation has been a dominant theme of
the election cycle, and according to David Wessel, the director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institute, several factors caused it.Many people, particularly politicians, point to either the American Rescue Act Plan of 2021 or supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, but inflation is much more complex than two factors.
“There’s a confluence of factors — it’s both,” Wessel told NBC News. “There’s a lot of things that pushed up demand and a lot that’s kept supply from responding accordingly, as a result we have inflation.”
Politically, Trump parlayed dissatisfaction over the increased prices Americans have paid during inflation into votes, despite the Biden administration’s ability to corral inflation close to its 2% target, low unemployment numbers, and higher wages.
According to first-time voter Alexis Uscanga, a 20-year-old college student from Brownsville, Texas, “Everything just got a lot more expensive than it once was for me.”
Uscanga told the AP, “Gas, grocery shopping, even as a college student, everything has gone up in price, and that is a big concern for me and other issues like immigration.”
Uscanga stated that although he did not like Trump’s rhetoric, he believed life was better for him under Trump.
Although Black and Latinx voters helped Trump win, it goes almost without saying that Trump would not win without the votes of white people, who have not voted in favor of a Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Act in 1965.
In the eyes of Terrance Woodbury, the co-founder of HIT Strategies, this dynamic makes Black and other men of color the new swing voters.
“Men of color are beginning to emerge as the new swing voters. For a long time, we talked about suburban women and soccer moms who can swing the outcome of elections. Now men of color are really beginning to emerge as that, especially younger men of color, who are less ideological, less tied to a single party, and more likely to swing either between parties or in and out of the electorate.”
RELATED CONTENT: Trump Promises Mass Deportations On Day 1