During the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won 20 percent of the Black vote, compared to only 10 percent in the 2020 election and eight percent in the 2016 election. Now a new report reveals Trump’s Black support is plummeting to such a low that any hope of a permanent Black shift toward Republicanism is evaporating.
"Black supporters sought prosperity and governance, but the Trump administration has mostly delivered chaos,” wrote The Washington Post’s contributing columnist Theodore R. Johnson. “They needed belonging but found hostility."
From his draconian immigration policies and sweeping federal workforce cuts to rising unemployment and prices, Black voters feel either threatened by Trump’s seeming support for white nationalist politics or ignored by the supposedly prosperous economy he repeatedly touts.
"Their support primarily rests on two pillars — successful implementation of policies they can point to with pride, and a sense of belonging to a movement that outweighs racial differences within it,” Johnson wrote.
He later added, "For Black Trump voters, the problem is less the policy than the careless and erratic execution." As an example, Trump quoted a regretful Black Trump voter who supported the president’s conservative agenda but is unhappy with how it is being implemented.
"In a focus group of regretful Trump 2024 voters, one Black man gave Trump a particularly poor grade,” Johnson reported. “‘Everything that’s been enacted,’ he said, ‘all these ICE escapades and everything like that, it’s rough, and I just don’t think he’s doing anything about it or helping at all.’"
This is not the only report that Trump’s diverse 2024 coalition is disintegrating.
"The next two sets of elections nationwide, this year and in 2028, will determine the scope of the damage Trump has inflicted on his party’s coalition," reported veteran political journalist Thomas Edsall. "Polling shows substantial self-inflicted damage..."
Based on NPR/PBS/Marist surveys conducted in January and February 2025, Edsall demonstrated Trump has squandered goodwill he had previously built up with Black and Latino voters.
"The surveys showed Trump’s ratings among Black voters falling from 36 percent favorable and 55 percent unfavorable in February 2025 to 32 favorable and 64 unfavorable last month,” Edsall explained. “Among Latino voters, Trump’s ratings fell from 44 percent favorable and 46 unfavorable to 38 favorable and 54 unfavorable.”
He concluded, “Put another way, Trump’s net favorability fell by 13 percentage points among Black voters and by 14 points among Latinos."
In addition to Trump’s policy performance, Trump voters are increasingly and explicitly white nationalist in their politics. A recent study in the journal Advances in Psychology, researchers found that “perceiving oneself to be ‘last place’ was not associated with the lowest objective income nor the lowest objective education among the White Americans in our samples.” Instead they found that White Americans who generally feel "last place aversion," or fear being "tied" with Black Americans economically, are overwhelmingly likely to back Trump.
“This line of research was motivated by recent political trends among some white Americans, including support for DEI bans, alignment with alt-right ideology, and endorsement of political violence in pursuit of political goals (e.g., January 6th),” wrote study authors Erin Cooley and Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi, associate professors of psychology at Colgate University and the University of Virginia, respectively. “Many of these attitudes are not only extreme but also anti-democratic, raising questions about how such views can coexist with identities centered on being ‘most American’ (e.g., white nationalist belief systems).”