WASHINGTON—A massive, detailed survey of 9,400 voters, a deep dive far different from network flash exit polls, reveals three-fifths of all voters, finds two-thirds of Latinos and three out of four African Americans are worried that the criminal President-elect Donald Trump “will promote hate and division and will encourage violence and bloodshed” when he takes the Oval Office again in January. Two-thirds of all the Black voters are “very worried” he will do so.
And 46% of white voters—the sole racial group among the five in the American Electorate Voter Poll to back Trump’s White House bid—agree with that assessment of his hate and violence promotion.
The Service Employees, Unidos US, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and more than a dozen other organizations commissioned the poll, conducted by BSP Research and the African-American Research Collaborative.
Though the survey and its authors didn’t discuss the reasons for that fear in an hour-long November 12 teleconference on their findings, past evidence, including but not limited to, the Jan. 6, 2021, Trumpite U.S. Capitol insurrection, invasion, and attempted coup d’etat, backs that popular conclusion.
Other evidence includes Trump’s orders via social media and an incendiary speech just before his invaders marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to disrupt the electoral vote count that January day. The Trumpites delayed it and sent lawmakers, staffers, reporters, and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, running for their lives.
The D.C. National Guard, whom Pence called out to help D.C. police and Capitol Police halt the rampage when Trump wouldn’t, eventually cleared the Capitol. At least four police officers later died of injuries—physical and depression—and more than 140 were injured. Later, Congress officially certified Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s win over Trump.
Threats from Trump during his time in office began with his declaration seven years ago that neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville, Va., included some “very good people,” even though one neo-Nazi killed peaceful counter-protester Heather Heyer by ramming her with his car.
It also includes his constant rants, all unjustified lies, about “an invasion” of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump slams such migrants, all of whom are people of color, as rapists, murderers, drug dealers and gang members.
He demands to round them all up, detain and deport them. The voters polled disagree with that draconian solution. They, even Republicans, prefer a path to legalization.
And Trump threatens to arrest, jail in concentration camps, and deport all ten million undocumented people in the U.S.—threats which in the past U.S. immigration agents have used to round up any Latino-looking citizen or not—and to jail political foes and journalists.
Those three threats, combined in one question about Trump’s Project 2025 platform, were presented to survey respondents, too. They drew equally scared reactions: 60% from Latinos, 71% from Blacks, 58% from Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and 55% from Native Americans. Even 42% of whites are worried about those threats—and two-thirds of that group is “very worried.”
The margins of error in the survey were plus or minus 1.01% overall, +/-2.5% for whites, +/-2.3% for African Americans, +/-1.6% for Latinos, including Puerto Ricans on the mainland, +/-2.3% for Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters and +/-4.4% for Native-American voters.
The rest of the survey shows Trump gained more voters of color on November 5, compared to four years ago, but didn’t win majorities among them. Vice President Kamala Harris did.
But far more whites voted than the combined tallies from Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The top-heavy white Trump majority won him the election.
Or, as one analyst on the November 12 Zoom teleconference put it, “Without whites, the outcome would have been different.” The report itself adds: “By raw population, the pro-Trump shift among white men was the single largest shift in raw votes, given their large population share.”
Why the Republican win? The economy, especially voters’ economic circumstances, trumped everything else for a majority of voters, according to the poll. The analysts agreed Trump had a simple and simplistic message, even if it was full of lies, that appealed to voters suffering economic pain.
A struggle connecting
“Democrats have had a decades-long struggle connecting with Americans on economic issues,” said Clarissa Martínez de Castro, vice president of Latino Vote Initiative at UnidosUS. “For them [voters] the questions are ‘How am I doing and who is in charge?’”
Further, Harris rolled out only pieces of her economic plan rather than a comprehensive whole and did not relate it to issues that moved voters, including emphasizing more issues like corporate greed, monopoly power, income inequality, and the price of groceries.
Across the board, the analysts said, 57% of white voters supported Trump, and college-graduate white women were the only majority-Harris subgroup among whites, narrowly.
Voters of color broke heavily for Harris. She drew 90% of Black women, 78% of Black men, 61% of Asian American-Pacific Islanders, 57% of Native Americans, and 62% of Latinos. But the Latino margin for Harris shrank to 51%-48% for voters under 40. Those voters, in particular, have known little but economic buffeting, from fruitless job hunts to low pay, to school loan problems, to joblessness.
“When it comes to Harris, I think there’s more of a racial gap than a gender gap,” said Penn State political scientist Ray Block, who specializes in African-American voting patterns. But he cautioned younger Black men were “less Democratic than their elders.” As Democratic nominee, Vice President Harris still won them, but not by the ratios Biden did four years ago.
Among Democrats, the economy finished second to guaranteeing democracy for all, through “enacting the John Lewis Voting Rights Act” to restore and strengthen that landmark legislation.
The American Electorate Voter Poll confirmed another trend seen in other forms and on other issues during the last several election cycles: A disconnect between voting on issues and voting on candidates. The survey, which the Service Employees co-sponsored, included precinct-by-precinct breakdowns of voting, focusing on precincts with high percentages of voters of color.
That disconnect has been apparent for years, but especially come to the fore in the last two years over the federal constitutional right to abortion. The three Trump-named Supreme Court justices were the core of the High Court’s ruling Republican bloc that deleted it two years ago.
Biden was (and is) president when the justices ended that right. Voters either blamed him for it or blamed congressional Democrats for not reversing it, said Jenny Lawson, vice president of organizing and electoral campaigns at Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Restoring the right to abortion finished between second and fourth among issues voters named, depending on the group.
“Roe v Wade fell on Biden’s watch and the perception was easily misconstrued,” as voters didn’t make the connection between Trump’s justices and the ruling that overturned Roe and ended the decades-old right. “The further perception was that the Democrats couldn’t fix that,” Lawson said.
In other findings, nine of every ten voters support strengthening the Voting Rights Act, eight of every ten want the government to move against price gouging, and seven of every ten want to restore the federal right to abortion. More than three-quarters want to expand the use of clean energy and the same ratio wants to impose a 15% surtax on big business, while 63% support a law to provide permanent legal status to Dreamers and other undocumented people.
As expected, Harris carried precincts with high shares of voters of color, the analysts said. For example, she won large majorities in heavily Latino precincts in Maricopa (Phoenix) and Pima (Tucson) Counties in Arizona, which together control the state. But she ran five to seven percentage points per precinct behind the ratios her boss, Biden, posted over Trump four years ago. There went Arizona.
Lack of interest blamed
Much of that difference was likely due to sheer lack of contact, said the analysts, who crunched the numbers for the communities they hail from. Fewer than one-third of Latino voters reported any party contact, especially from the Democrats. The other three groups of color each reported party contacts with half or fewer of their members. Whites reported more than half got party contacts.
The parties “are not investing in voter mobilization and turnout,” said Frankie Miranda, president and CEO of The Hispanic Federation. Nor were outside political big givers.
Contacts from non-partisan, voter information, get-out-the-vote groups were even fewer, the analysts said. They did not split out contacts by labor union canvassers. But when the non-partisan contact occurred, group members responded and turnout jumped, they added. Otherwise, “When turnout drops, they [the parties] turn around and blame us,” the voters, one analyst noted.
Latinos in Philadelphia topped the examples. There was little contact there, Miranda said, until the last weekend before the election when a so-called “comic,” at Trump’s windup rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, called Puerto Rico and its citizens “a floating island of garbage.”
The Democrats jumped on that in Latino precincts in Philly, the biggest city in the biggest swing state, and Latino turnout and ratio there increased to 70% for Harris, the highest in any swing state. But it wasn’t enough to save Pennsylvania for her.
Harris’s gender played a role in the voting, both ways. She was the first-ever African-American and Asian-American woman to run for president as a major party nominee. She didn’t play it up. But 39% of Black female voters said her gender and race were big factors in their pro-Harris votes, and one-fourth of white men said they were a big factor in voting against her and for Trump.
Besides the economy and abortion, the other top two issues were preserving the U.S. Constitution, which was second among Democratic voters, and immigration, which finished second among Latino voters and among Republicans, for, ironically, the same reason: Both want legalization.
An enormous majority of Latino voters and a smaller majority of Republicans prefer enacting a path to legalization for undocumented people in the U.S., coupled with tighter controls at the U.S.-Mexico border. All the groups, Latinos, whites, and Republicans included, rejected Trump’s solution of immigration bans and mass roundups and deportations of undocumented people.
When it came to the top four issues voters named, from the economy through immigration through preserving constitutional rights to restoring the right to abortion nationwide, voters—even white voters—agree with progressive positions. But there’s a disconnect, and not just on abortion, between how voters cast ballots on issues and how they vote on candidates.
The survey’s contradictory findings on issues—progressive—versus candidates—less so—should give both major parties pause when trying to push through policies the demands of their bases.
“There is a deep dissonance between candidate choice and policy positions, and that’s a problem for the Democrats,” said Clarissa Martinez of UnidosUS. Both parties, when they won eight years and four years ago, respectively, overreached, she added. “And on economic issues,” Democrats “have struggled to connect with voters in a meaningful way.
“For the Republicans, they would be wise to keep in mind that their policies would be rejected by all groups of voters,” including whites.
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