In Trump’s Win, G.O.P. Sees Signs of a Game-Changing New Coalition

Republicans have sounded alarms for more than a decade about the limits of their overwhelmingly white party. To stay competitive for the White House, strategists warned, they would need to bring more Black, Latino and other voters of color into the fold.

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump showed how it could be done.

His victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was decisive, broad and dependent on voters from core Democratic constituencies. Results showed that Mr. Trump continued his dominance with the white, working-class voters who first propelled his political rise. But he also made modest gains in the suburbs and cities, and with Black voters, and even more significant inroads with Latinos.

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There was evidence of Mr. Trump’s inroads across the country. In the heavily blue-collar community of Fayette County, Pa., outside Pittsburgh, Mr. Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote, expanding his margins by about five percentage points since 2020.

Nationally, Hispanic-majority counties on average shifted toward Mr. Trump by 10 percentage points. That included Yuma County, Ariz., a heavily Latino county along the southern border with Mexico, where Mr. Trump is on track to win by nearly 30 percentage points.

Mr. Trump’s gains with Black voters were less significant but still notable in smaller communities across Georgia. Hancock, Talbot and Jefferson Counties, all majority-Black counties with no more than 15,000 people, shifted toward Mr. Trump. The Trump campaign celebrated a victory in Baldwin County, Ga., where 42 percent of the population is Black. Republicans had not won the county for decades.

Asian American voters, who make up the fastest-growing eligible electorate in the country, also appeared to have drifted away from Democrats, according to exit polls and unofficial returns.

“The strength of Trump’s reach into the traditional Democratic coalition of voters of color was stunning,” said Daniel HoSang, a professor at Yale who has written about the rise of right-wing political attitudes among minority groups.

Ms. Harris’s defeat is not entirely explained by these voters’ embrace of Mr. Trump. After months of flagging voter enthusiasm, there were signs that many Democrats simply failed to show up in key party strongholds.

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But the common thread among those who did gravitate toward Mr. Trump appeared to be a working-class identity — regardless of neighborhood. {snip}

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More often, Mr. Trump invited Latino and Black voters into his us-versus-them campaign, rallying them against elites, out-of-touch liberals and the undocumented immigrants he claimed were taking “Black jobs” and “totally destroying our Hispanic population.”

He used cultural issues like gender-affirming surgery for prisoners and transgender female participation in sports — issues that affect relatively few people — as broad metaphors for a left-wing ideology run amok.

At one point last month, about one-third of the Trump campaign’s television budget was devoted to a commercial that played on anti-trans prejudices. The campaign ran a similar ad in Spanish and another aimed at Black voters.

“Kamala is for they/them,” the narrator said at the end of the spot. “President Trump is for you.”

Many Latino voters were not turned off by Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Polling showed that about one-third of Latino voters supported his policies for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

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The result was a far cry from the party’s infamous “autopsy” report following Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, which urged Republicans to adopt more compassionate immigration policies and paths to citizenship for certain undocumented people already in the country.

Instead, Mr. HoSang said, the winning formula was much closer to what Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, has called “inclusive nationalism.”

“All of the most aggressive tones of the Trump campaign around gender, immigration and crime seemed to effectively broaden the MAGA base,” Mr. HoSang said. “The results challenge the foundations of racial liberalism that have been dominant since the civil rights movement.”