One common explanation for last week’s “blue-bath”—the election night triumph by Democrats just one year after President Donald Trump retook the White House—is that the GOP’s “multiracial coalition” collapsed.

There’s just one problem: That coalition never existed, at least not to the extent imagined by doomsaying Democrats and wish-casting Republicans. Grasping this basic reality is necessary to understand the macro trends in American politics.

Even after decades of mass immigration from the Global South, the red team has remained overwhelmingly white. Trump’s voters in 2024 were 84 percent white, according to the comprehensive AP VoteCast survey of 120,000 voters. That’s not much more diverse than Mitt Romney’s 88 percent in 2012. Romney, you may remember, was hammered in the media for not winning minorities.

Compared to the nation as a whole, the GOP looks even whiter today than it did under Romney. The 2010 census found that 63.7 percent of Americans were non-Hispanic white. By the time of the next census in 2020, that number had sunk to 57.8 percent. Joe Biden’s open-border policies have surely accelerated the trend.

Trump’s not-so-rainbow coalition looks whiter still when compared to Kamala Harris’s voters, who were 66 percent white, 18 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. That’s an actual multiracial coalition, roughly corresponding to the demographics of voting-age Americans. 

Barring radical and unforeseen changes to either demographics or electoral politics, the Republican Party will struggle to win national elections by the time the United States becomes majority non-white in the next couple decades. Indeed, since whites tend to be more evenly divided than non-whites between the two major parties, the struggle is already here.

To be sure, Trump made some gains among non-whites in 2020 and again in 2024, to the benefit of the Republican Party. But dig deeper and you’ll find that these gains have been exaggerated and misconstrued.

You’ve probably heard that a whopping 46 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump in 2024 and that this augurs a racial realignment of American politics. Many analyses of last week’s elections cited this figure and noted that Democrats reversed Trump’s huge gains with Hispanics.

The figure comes from a widely cited exit poll conducted by Edison Research, and skepticism is warranted. Traditional exit polls can be useful at providing a snapshot of the electorate, but they do not reliably capture voter demographics.

While Pew has similarly found that 48 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump, other polls indicate the Edison number is wrong—perhaps wildly so—in the other direction. One conducted by Harvard University found that Trump won only 37 percent of Hispanics. AP VoteCast—whose methodology is designed to overcome exit polls’ biases—found that 43 percent of Hispanics voted for Trump. Notably, according to the rosiest (for Republicans) of polls, the Democrats still won a majority of Hispanics in 2024, even as Trump won the overall popular vote.

Hispanics, unlike blacks, sometimes flirt with the GOP in presidential elections, but four years later, a strong majority of them always vote for the Democrat. This isn’t a law of physics, but it is a consistent voting pattern. For example, George W. Bush won 44 percent of Hispanics in 2004, but in 2008, 67 percent of Hispanics voted for Barack Obama. Trump’s plummeting support among Hispanics since the inauguration suggests the cycle is repeating itself ahead of the 2028 elections.

One reason for the “multiracial coalition” mirage is that Trump did make real gains among Hispanics between 2016 and 2024, to the shock and horror of liberal elites. He also did well in the latter election relative to John McCain’s and Romney’s dismal performances with Hispanics against Obama, who proved uniquely appealing to minorities.

In short, Trump seems to have brought the GOP’s support among Hispanics back to its Bush numbers, which was a salutary development for Republicans but hardly evidence of an enduring and transformative racial realignment.

The same basic pattern holds for non-Hispanic minorities. Wikipedia’s entries for presidential elections provide useful breakdowns of voter demographics. Not much has changed in 20 years. Eighty-eight percent of blacks voted for the Democrat in 2004, compared to 86 percent in 2024. Fifty-six percent of Asians voted for the Democrat in 2004, compared to 55 percent in 2024. Are these the seismic shifts that the “realignment” cultists have been heralding? Somehow, I fail to be stirred.

Much has been made about Trump’s gains among Arab Americans in the swing state Michigan. No doubt, the Gaza war hurt Harris’s chances there. Democrats do seem to have hemorrhaged support from Arab Americans in the Great Lake State between 2020 and 2024. 

But Arab Michiganders voted against Harris rather than for Trump. According to one study by researchers at Michigan State University, up to 40 percent of Arab Michiganders voted for a third party in 2024, compared to just 1 percent in 2020. Many simply stayed home. One analysis by the Guardian found that Harris got at least 22,000 fewer votes than Biden in Arab American and Muslim cities across the state, whereas Trump gained only 9,000 votes in the same areas.

Some conservatives have detected a redshift among Indian Americans and see them as natural allies on cultural issues. Trump does seem to have made modest inroads with this demographic in 2024, but in a pre-election survey, 61 percent of registered Indian American voters intended to support Harris and only 32 percent Trump. While it’s somewhat interesting to observe that minority racial groups can vary in the degree to which they support the Democrats, fixating on that variation has distracted from the obvious reality: The Republican Party is a white party, and the nation is becoming majority non-white.

To glimpse the future of American politics, look at New York City, where the socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani last week won a decisive victory over the centrist Andrew Cuomo, a lifelong Democrat who ran as an independent. Based on information available, it appears that blacks favored Mamdani over Cuomo 61 percent to 35 percent, and Hispanics did so 57 percent to 37 percent. Asians were more evenly divided, going 47 percent for Mamdani and 43 percent for Cuomo. The Republican, as usual in recent years, was an afterthought, more comic relief than a serious candidate. 

The last time a true Republican ascended to New York’s mayorship was in 1994, when Rudy Giuliani promised to kick street criminals in the teeth. (Michael Bloomberg, a Democrat, ran as a Republican in 2001 to avoid a crowded Democratic primary.) Giuliani relied heavily on white voters and failed to assemble a multiracial coalition, according to contemporaneous reporting. You can’t become New York’s mayor that way anymore. The Big Apple was majority white in 1980, 43 percent white in 1990, and under 30 percent white today. 

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America is heading in the same direction as New York City demographically. Available evidence suggests it is heading in the same direction politically as well. 

The analysis above does not inherently suggest that the Republican Party should ramp up outreach to minority voters or, alternatively, that it should write them off. Nor does it shed much light on what actually went so wrong for the Republicans between last year and last week. As to the broader structural factors, my best guess is this: The national electorate was still white enough in 2024 for Trump to defeat an awful candidate, but educational polarization has left the GOP with low-propensity voters who don’t show up in off-year elections.  

What this analysis does show is that excited talk of the GOP’s “multiracial coalition” is about as substantial as cotton candy. The black pill is the bitterest to swallow.