Opinion | Democrats: It's Time to Retire the Term 'People of Color'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : But Trump got more support among those groups than Democrats expected.
58% : For instance, it appears a substantial portion of Asian voters perceived Harris' Asian heritage, which Trump delighted in using as campaign trail fodder, as a complete non-factor in deciding whether to support her.
52% : Despite these nuances, we've been primed to see Latinos -- and all other racial and ethnic minority groups -- as generally uniform in their cultural beliefs and political and economic concerns.
50% : Nonwhite people voted in higher percentages for Trump in 2024 than they did in 2020, in some cases by double-digit increases.
49% : This kind of curation is especially important if the party hopes to mount an effective defense against the anti-DEI movement, which is poised to roll back gains and stymie opportunities for all racial minorities for generations to come.
45% : Social theory posits that these voters' beliefs can be a manifestation of internalized racism, a psychological process whereby a person comes to identify more with the dominant race and ignores or downplays subtle acts of racism, or microaggressions, directed at members of their own race.
45% : All of this undercuts many of the conventional ways that academics and political strategists have come to think about how voters perceive race and racism and points to an overdue reorientation -- one that begins to grapple with the fact that race in America works in far more complex ways than most political strategists have appreciated.
40% : In contrast, Trump and Republicans have largely avoided using the expression -- unless it's a pointed attack at liberal "wokespeak" which also includes words like "Latinx."
40% : There is another factor complicating how racial minorities understand Trump.
39% : For his part, Trump has been adept at propelling grievances between minorities -- for example, that undocumented Latino immigrants take "Black jobs," and that Black Americans obtain educational opportunities at the expense of Asian Americans.
34% : In November, Latinos swung hard for Trump, and the former president had a notable hike in support from Asians.
27% : My reading of this is that many in those groups and in Black America don't regard Trump or many of his followers as "real" racists, but rather as what I call "ambient" racists.
25% : You could argue that Trump, in contrast, is an ambient racist and is perceived to have animus, but not hate, toward some Black people.
23% : In the last three election cycles, Democrats assumed that the vast majority of racial and ethnic minorities would reject Trump due to his anti-immigration rhetoric -- which he typically aimed at Mexicans, Central Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims.
22% : For example, in an interview weeks before the 2024 election, Trump claimed migrants at the southern border have "bad genes," reanimating eugenicist language that has been used by politicians for centuries to justify discrimination and violence against minority groups.
19% : A persistent theme this election cycle has been that minority voters whom Trump maligned -- especially those who are lower income and less educated -- didn't really believe that Trump was speaking specifically about them or their loved ones.
17% : This means, at worst, they believe Trump and his acolytes traffic in the casual racism that most racial minorities at least periodically experience, but not in the sensational cross-burning, white-hood-wearing brand of racism that Democrats and liberal media have sometimes pinned on Trump and the MAGA movement more broadly.

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