[rayiner]

It probably wasn’t either inflation or Harris’s race, because the rightward swing was heavily skewed by race. Compared to 2016, all of Trump’s gain came from non-whites: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/03/18/opinion/18eks-sho....

Whites didn’t shift at all from 2016 to 2024. Latino moderates shifted 23 points to the right, and Asian moderates shifted 11 points to the right.

It’s hard to explain how inflation would cause a racially unbalanced shift like that. The 2016 election was a pretty neutral baseline—the economy was fine and had been for years. So if inflation was the cause, why didn’t white voters shift right compared to 2016? It doesn’t make sense that inflation would only cause hispanics and asians to shift right.

Likewise, if race was the reason, why didn’t white voters shift right, compared to 2016 when the candidate was a white woman? And why did black conservatives (a bloc about the same size as black liberals) shift 8 points to the right?

[gopher_space]

Conservative minorities don't shift to the right, they're far right and temporarily move left whenever the Republicans get a little too on-the-nose. A Democrat in office means they won't be exposed to that rhetoric for a few years so the "bloc" will swing back to their baseline for a cycle or two. I'm trying to think of a visual analogy that isn't a double pendulum.

I feel like the "voting against their best interests" trope exists because people don't realize that conservative minorities vote as far right as the GOP will let them. Because they're conservative.

[notahacker]

Doesn't seem so hard to believe that Latino moderates were worried about Trump in 2016 and somewhat less worried about him and more worried about inflation in 2024...

[rayiner]

That doesn’t explain the lack of movement among whites though. Moderate whites were 52% Clinton, 55% Biden, and 52% Harris. 2016 was a good economy and Obama was relatively popular. So among moderate whites, Harris didn’t do any worse than Clinton did despite the inflation under Biden. The 3 point swing from Biden could easily be explained by the fact that Biden had a long track record as being moderate, while Harris always has been liberal.

The bigger signal here is racial depolarization. Historically, moderate to conservative minorities tend to vote Democrat anyway, which leaves them as disproportionately the more conservative wing of the party. What you saw from 2016 to 2024 was significant racial depolarization—moderate to conservative blacks, hispanics, and asians voting more their ideology and less their race.

[Der_Einzige]

The shift is because of rapid evangeliszation and abandonment of catholocism in American Latino communities in the past 10 years. It’s a sociological phenomenon.