How Trump Built a Multiracial Populist Coalition to Win

President-elect Donald Trump made stunning gains with black men, Hispanic voters, and younger Americans in the 2024 presidential election, challenging long-held political assumptions.

One person saw it coming more than a year ago. Patrick Ruffini, founding partner of Echelon Insights, published “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP” in November 2023. He spoke with The Daily Signal when the book published last year.

Ruffini returned this week to share his insights on Trump’s victory and how the Republican Party can build upon his electoral success. Read an abridged and edited transcript below or listen to the full interview.

Key highlights include:

• Dramatic shifts in voting patterns across diverse communities
• Why traditional Democratic strongholds are crumbling
• The emergence of a new multiracial populist coalition
• How economic issues and cultural dynamics are reshaping voter allegiances

Rob Bluey: If you look at the exit polling data, Donald Trump made gains with the very groups that you wrote about in the book. What did you see happening a year ago that led you to draw some conclusions that ultimately played out?

Patrick Ruffini: I didn’t write this as a book of political prognostication or trying to predict one election cycle, but really trying to describe changes that were ongoing and happening in American society that would probably end up playing out maybe over decades. … Maybe if Republicans play their cards right, they can win the popular vote, maybe in 2036, with this multiracial populist coalition.

But history has a way of happening faster sometimes. And I just think the way things were going in the country really created the conditions for this to happen on a very accelerated timeline.

It was both, I think, Trump pivoting in some ways. He was really talking to that group of disaffected upper Midwest voters in 2016, the group that had been hit hardest by deindustrialization, by jobs going overseas. And he really talked in an emotional way for a lot of these workers about those issues. And he won them over. …

What we had going on in 2020 was a pandemic in which particularly Hispanics, African Americans, couldn’t go to work as much and needed to go to work. It’s not like they could safely work from home. And so what we saw in 2020 was a reaction to the leftist overreach with the lockdowns and particularly among Hispanics, gravitating to Donald Trump as somebody who would defend their economic interests.

You saw Trump aiming his message at a new generation, younger voters, many of whom are more diverse voters, going on podcasts, not necessarily changing his appeal and what he was talking about, but changing who he was talking to in a way that really paid off in a really big way.

The issue environment was obviously very important. And the issue environment was one where the administration was seen as failing, as being a failed administration, particularly on the issue of the economy and inflation as something that hit home the hardest among these voters that were moving toward the Republican Party—younger voters and more diverse voters who really had the chance to compare and contrast two different approaches to the economy and said, “All right, we’re going to go with Trump’s version of the economy because we’ve actually seen what it looks like.”

Bluey: Before we get into those issues in more detail, you’ve had a chance to look at the exit poll data. Among what groups did Trump make the biggest gains compared to previous years?

Ruffini: I would say it was black men. Hispanics were a huge gain across the board, and you look at that, and that’s true in the precinct data that’s coming out. You’re seeing 20-point shifts, 30-point shifts in a lot of cases. Asian voters continue to trend right.

But you had younger voters in particular. It’s not something you see in precinct-level data, but in the exit polling data. You saw young voters as a group of people who, back to 2008, were 2-to-1 for Barack Obama. In this election, the youngest group of voters only voted for Harris by about four to five points. And those same voters who voted for Obama the first time, who are now not 18-29, they’re 30 to 44, they were within three points.

Trump had an appeal, more than other Republicans before him, to Hispanic voters, to a lot of these more diverse voters, who tend also to be younger.

This was also a referendum on an economy that was failing for young voters, specifically as it relates to housing, as it relates to interest rates, making the dream of home ownership really unaffordable for younger voters and something that really hit them hardest.

What you’re really seeing is a combination of a bunch of things kind of forming a perfect storm.

Bluey: So is 2024 a phenomenon that’s unique to Trump or can the Republican Party, as your book articulates, really maintain these gains that they’ve made with black men, with Hispanics, with younger voters?

Ruffini: It’ll be harder for sure. I mean, I don’t think we’re going back to the Obama era in terms of where some of these groups were.

We are seeing over the long term—and these are more of the issues I go into in more detail in my book—why some of these trends are likely to be long-lasting, especially among black voters. We’re just seeing a fundamental change in terms of political engagement. In some of these communities, there was a sense that this is just what we do as a group of people, we vote for Democrats, and this is almost our identity, and this is what we need to do to maintain our group interest.

You saw that to some extent among Hispanic voters as well. That narrative has broken down. And I think it’s going to be very, very difficult for the Democrats to get that back.

Now, that said, Trump was very adept at reaching some of these audiences, whether it’s going to UFC matches, going on Joe Rogan. He is a cultural figure who transcends politics, and so that is very difficult for any other Republican or Democrat, frankly, to recreate.

But what I would say is to go back to the message of my book. This is a long-term trend. This is not just a one-election trend. So even if you see a couple point shift—things kind of normalize, go back a little bit like the way they were—they’re not going to go all the way back to what the way they were before. Get used to this coalition as being the shape of the conservative and Republican coalition moving forward.

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