After the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton lost White voters by 15 points, it seemed as if Democrats might need to accept their losses and rely more on minority voters for their next majority. But the opposite has happened. In recent polls, Joe Biden has held President Donald Trump to a single-digit margin with White voters, even managing to beat Trump with Whites in one CNN poll. At the same time, Biden has been underperforming Clinton with Black and Latino voters, causing some to worry that the party's base is eroding.
Fortunately for Democrats, Biden's numbers with non-White voters aren't as bad as some have suggested. A quick look under the hood shows that Trump is mostly fiddling with the edges of his coalition, while Biden appears to be putting together a workable majority. Future Republicans could make serious gains with non-White voters, but Trump likely won't.
For all the concern about his performance with non-White voters, Biden is still far ahead among both Black and Latino voters: Quinnipiac, the Economist, Navigator and CBS/YouGov show him leading by 72, 64, 85 and 74 percentage points, respectively, among Black voters, and those same pollsters put him ahead by 20, 34, 35 and 38 points among Hispanics, respectively. It's true that he's lagging Clinton in these areas, though. In 2016, she lost the election while winning the Black vote by 85 percentage points and the Latino vote by 38 points. And, according to Center for American Progress, Obama's 2012 margins with these voters were larger, at 88 percentage points with African Americans and 39 points with Latinos.
These shifts might seem scary to Democrats. Black and Hispanic voters are the party's bedrock, and Biden would be in serious trouble if they left him in droves. Despite claims to the contrary, Trump isn't radically increasing the GOP's share of the non-White vote.
In recent national polls from Quinnipiac, the Economist, Navigator and CBS/YouGov, Trump earns 11, 11, 5 and 9 percent of the Black vote, respectively. That represents a small improvement for him - Trump won 6 percent of the Black vote in 2016 - not a sea change. Before the Obama era, Republicans routinely won 10 percent of the Black vote, and Republicans may be returning to that normal now.
The story is similar with Hispanic and Latino voters. The Economist/YouGov poll puts Trump's national Hispanic support at 26 percent, and Quinnipiac has the number at 36 percent. That's not nothing: Hispanic voters who agree with Trump on social issues, like his persona or support Republicans for some other reason make up 7 percent of the party. But it's not clear that Trump is improving on the GOP's medium-term average, which is a quarter to a third of the Hispanic or Latino vote.
Biden's problem isn't that Trump is rapidly expanding the Republican base, it's that Biden isn't quite living up to Clinton's final vote share. In the polls listed above, Biden is winning an average of over 80 percent of the Black vote, while Clinton took 91 percent. Similarly, Clinton won 66 percent of the final Hispanic vote, which is five points higher than what Biden earned in these surveys.
The likeliest outcome is that Biden wins over undecided voters, and Trump ends up with something close to 10 percent of the Black vote and 25 percent to 35 percent of the Latino vote. During Trump's first term, he mostly pursued the same fiscally conservative policies that Black and Latino Americans voted against in the 2000s and 2010s, and he's repeatedly broadcast his antipathy toward both groups. Sure, Trump has gotten a few favorable polls in Florida, but he's unlikely to make dramatic gains. Biden, on the other hand, has the forces of political gravity working in his favor: Partisanship and disapproval of Trump will likely push some Black and Hispanic voters back into his column.
That doesn't mean Republicans will be stuck at 10 percent of the Black vote and 30 percent of the Latino vote forever. Future Republicans could chuck Trump's racist rhetoric, pursue more generous economic policies and create the sort of multiethnic populist, traditionalist party that some on the right have dreamed about for years.
If Trump ends up with 20 percent or more of the Black vote, or 40 percent or more of the Latino vote, we data wonks will need to revisit all our assumptions about voting behavior and what parts of Trump's appeal did or didn't work. But until then, the simplest prediction -- a return to pre-Obama levels of Black support for the GOP and a normal share of the Latino vote -- is the best bet.