The new driving force of identity politics is class, not race

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. New fault lines are emerging in American society based more on class than race. The shift helped deliver the White House to Donald Trump and could continue to alter the political landscape if more Americans identify themselves less in the context of race and gender and more as belonging to a certain economic class.

“Race is not an issue for me," said Aaron Waters, a Black unionized construction worker in Chicago who voted for Trump after voting for President Biden and Barack Obama in past elections. “It’s about what you can do for each and every one of us as a whole, as a U.S. citizen." Trump made gains with most demographic groups in this month’s election.

But one of the biggest swings was among voters of all races who don’t have a four-year college degree. He won them by 13 percentage points this time versus 4 percentage points in 2020—a huge change in a group that accounted for more than half of the electorate. College-educated voters of all races also swung to Trump, but to a much smaller degree.

Black and to a greater extent Latino Americans, meanwhile, ceded some of their longtime allegiance to Democrats. Trump gained with nonwhite voters of all education levels, but he made bigger gains with those who don’t have degrees than with those who do. Overall voting patterns still clearly reflect racial division.

Black voters still overwhelmingly backed Harris, and a slim majority of Latino voters did, too. William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer, said the voting shifts could be a “blip" related to sharp inflation, and that it is too soon “to predict a multiracial transformation of the GOP." There is evidence the shift in voting patterns predates this election. In 2022, for