The Most Important Divide in American Politics Isn’t Race
Updated on November 7, 2020 at 11:55 a.m. ET
Two themes seem to define the 2020 election results we’ve seen so far—and also build on a decade or more of political developments: the depolarization of race and the polarization of place.
Democrats have historically won about 90 percent of the Black vote and more than 65 percent of the Latino vote. But initial returns suggest that Joe Biden might have lost ground with nonwhite voters.
The most obvious drift is happening among Latinos. In Florida, Biden , especially Miami-Dade County, whose Cuban American population seems to have turned out for Donald Trump. Across since 2016. In southern Texas, Trump won several heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley, including Zapata, the second-most-Latino county in the country, which hadn’t voted for a Republican . Even in the Democratic fortress of Massachusetts, cities with the highest share of Latino voters saw the starkest shifts toward Trump, according to , the research director for the MassINC Polling Group.
