How immigration swung voters of color to Trump

President-elect Donald Trump's relatively strong showing among voters of color has been one of the most striking takeaways from the 2024 election. According to data from AP VoteCast, the Associated Press's next-generation spin on the traditional exit poll, Trump's share of the Black and Latino vote increased by 8 points each between 2020 and 2024.

Analysts have proposed several different explanations for those shifts, including sexism within communities of color, pessimistic views of the economy and inflation, disinformation, social class and the ongoing ideological sorting of nonwhite conservatives into the Republican Party. While there's probably merit in some of these, my analyses suggest that one of the biggest factors behind Trump's growing support from nonwhite voters may be opposition to immigration.

There are two main reasons for this. First, nonwhite Americans' attitudes about immigration moved sharply to the right during President Joe Biden's term. That resulted in a much larger pool of Black and Latino voters who were receptive to Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Second, voters of color with conservative immigration attitudes were especially likely to defect from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024 — even after accounting for other plausible reasons for these changes.

Shifts in immigration opinions

Back in August, I wrote about how the rise in anti-immigrant sentiments made immigration a winning issue for Trump in the 2024 campaign. That article, along with a recent Democracy Fund report, explained how the public's immigration attitudes have largely followed the changing discourse about the issue since Biden became president. As politicians and the media shifted from criticizing unpopular Trump-era policies like family separation to expressing concern about the record number of border crossings under Biden, Americans' opinions moved in a similar direction.

Those sizable shifts were not limited to any single racial or ethnic group, either. In fact, the chart below shows that the percentage of white, Latino and Black Americans who agreed with the statement "immigrants drain national resources" all increased dramatically from June 2020 through December 2023 in YouGov's biweekly tracker surveys.

This same trend appears in the 2016 and 2024 exit polls as well (the 2020 exit poll did not ask about immigration). The share of Black voters who preferred deporting unauthorized immigrants to offering them a path to citizenship doubled from 12 percent in 2016 to 24 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, the share of Latinos said the same increased from 17 percent to 27 percent.

To be sure, this data shows that large majorities of nonwhite voters still oppose policies like mass deportation. But the rightward shifts in immigration opinions under Biden provided Trump with a much larger reservoir of receptive nonwhite voters whom he could target with anti-immigrant appeals. As The New York Times reported last month, "Trump is seeking to win over Black and Latino voters by pitting them against undocumented immigrants, whom he has long blamed for a litany of economic, public safety, national security and social problems."

Immigration attitudes and vote shifts

The campaign's strategy seems to have succeeded. Indeed, data from YouGov's SAY24 project suggests that immigration attitudes played a powerful part in shifting some of Biden's 2020 voters over to Trump in 2024.

The YouGov/SAY24 project has a few big advantages over other surveys in estimating such shifts among voters of color. For starters, its enormous August-September 2024 poll of almost 100,000 likely voters provides relatively large samples of Latino, Black and Asian Americans. YouGov also surveyed most of these same respondents four years ago and asked them how they voted in the 2020 election. We can, therefore, calculate net shifts in support for Trump by simply subtracting these panelists' support for him in 2020 from their 2024 vote intentions.

The chart below plots those 2020 to 2024 vote shifts for white, Latino, Black and Asian Americans according to how they felt about using the military to deport unauthorized immigrants.

The chart shows that Trump actually lost a bit of support from 2020 to September 2024 among voters who opposed this policy, regardless of their race. You can see, instead, that Trump's gains were heavily concentrated among voters of color who supported using the military for deportations. His vote share increased by 8 points from 2020 to 2024 among both Black and Asian Americans who favored this policy, and he performed 10 points better than he did four years ago among Latinos with more conservative views of immigration. Trump did not improve nearly as much with white voters who have anti-immigrant attitudes in large part because this group already overwhelmingly supported him in 2016 and 2020.

It's important to note that this strong relationship between immigration attitudes and vote shifts to Trump remains intact even after controlling for such factors as sexism, ideological conservatism, education, age, gender and income. In other words, Trump's growing support among nonwhite voters with anti-immigrant attitudes isn't merely a byproduct of the fact that these voters also tend to be less educated, more ideologically conservative or more sexist.

Nor is this relationship likely an artifact of these voters simply adopting Trump's immigration opinions after they've already decided to support him for some other reason, like inflation. John Sides and I showed back in April that Latinos who have shifted away from Democrats in recent years already had more conservative views about race to begin with. And our prior research found that white Americans who supported less immigration before 2015 were the most likely to support Trump in 2016 after voting for former President Barack Obama in 2012.

We'll need more post-election data to help pinpoint the causes and durability of Trump's surging support from voters of color. But these preliminary findings strongly suggest that immigration attitudes are a big piece of the puzzle. They also dovetail with prior political science research showing that voters of color who had shifted to Trump from 2016 to 2020 had more conservative views about race and immigration.

So, even though voting was less polarized by race and ethnicity in 2024 than it's been in the past, racial attitudes and opinions about immigration are more important than ever in explaining many people's votes.