Donald Trump’s lead over President Biden among white voters has been cut almost in half since 2020, with the former president’s loss of support among white voters outpacing any gains he has made with black voters, a new analysis finds.
While Trump led Biden among white voters by 17 percentage points in 2020 exit polls, he’s now leading Biden by an 8.8-point margin in recent polling, according to an analysis from Republican polling firm WPA Intelligence.
The analysis included a review of the six most recent polls featured on RealClearPolitics that had publicly available cross-tabs on race. Five of those polls showed Trump “well below his 2020 levels with whites and an average of all six polls revealed that he has lost nearly half of his lead over Biden among whites since 2020,” Bryon Allen, a partner with WPA Intelligence, told National Review in a statement.
Allen explained that Trump’s losses largely occurred among white college-educated voters, which he noted is consistent with trends that began in 2018, though there was also some erosion among white voters without degrees, he said.
“Barring some miracle or a third-party candidate that splinters the Democrats, if Trump is the nominee and is only nine points up against Biden with whites, he has little chance of winning the election,” he said. “It’s worth recalling that John McCain outperformed Barack Obama by twelve points with white voters in 2012 — and lost in a landslide.”
Trump’s supporters have touted his growing support with black voters. Some Trump allies, including Donald Trump Jr., have suggested that the former president’s recent legal woes will win him support in the black community.
The younger Trump said African-American security guards at a recent event he attended told him they would never vote for Biden and that they “get all of this stuff.”
“Republicans have talked about this forever: Maybe one day people will realize that the Democrats have literally done nothing to help the African-American community. If anything, they’ve done incredible irreparable damage to that community,” Donald Trump Jr., said. “These guys got it.”
“They’ve been dealing with it for a long time.” Don Jr thinks Donald Trump being arrested and having a mug shot is helping to win over Black voters. (Video: Newsmax) pic.twitter.com/m8FcfOlZ25
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) August 29, 2023
“I think as they see it further play out that could be a game-changing demographic,” he added. “I’m sure that’ll be a demographic that will be attempted to be weaponized.”
A 2020 Fox News voter analysis showed Trump’s support among black voters at 8 percent, while a recent Fox News poll found his support in the black community growing to 20 percent. By contrast, Biden’s support dropped among black voters: He notched 91 percent support in 2020, compared with just 61 percent more recently.
But Allen suggests that that support for Trump does not go far enough to make up for the former president’s erosion of support with white voters.
“It is odd to highlight the polling data on black voters and overlook the more reliable data coming from samples that are approximately six times larger and show Trump struggling with whites,” Allen said. “In fact, the same Fox News poll that his supporters like to cite because it shows him at 20 percent with blacks reveals a lead of only four points among whites.”
“The idea that former president Trump could secure a substantial portion of the black vote as the Republican presidential nominee seems implausible,” he added. “This narrative is based on a few polls with small numbers of black respondents, where the black subsamples are unlikely to be representative of the black electorate.”
Black respondents in national telephone and online polls tend to “disproportionately be middle-class suburban black voters who are either home during evening/weekend hours to be interviewed by phone or online frequently enough to join online panels,” he said, adding that “this cohort is somewhat less loyal to the Democratic Party than their urban counterparts.”
That Trump could see a substantial rise in support among black voters would also defy historical trends. Democrats have won on average 90 percent of the black vote in every national election since 2004. This is “despite most of those elections having seen at least a few national polls suggesting Republicans making inroads with black voters,” Allen said, calling black voters Democrats’ “most loyal constituency” and “unlikely to shift in massive ways without a focused financial, messaging, and manpower effort from Republicans.”
“They certainly aren’t likely to shift because of a few memes related to President Trump’s arrest,” he said.
And despite polling showing a drop in support for Biden among black voters, many African-American voters are likely to ultimately vote for him anyway, in large part because Biden has the “entire Democratic Party infrastructure” behind him, including its allies in culture and the media, Allen concluded.