For decades, the Democrats have depended on the overwhelming support of minority voters to keep their party electorally viable. Even when they nominate candidates with spotty civil rights records, like President Biden, the Democrats could count on at least 90 percent of the Black vote and about 70 percent of the Latino vote. This year, however, polls suggest that the President and his party can no longer take these voters for granted. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll, for example, found that Biden’s lead over former President Trump among non-white working class voters has plummeted to 6 points (47-41). In 2020 Biden enjoyed a nearly 50 point lead among these voters.

The New York Times/Siena College poll is no outlier. A Gallup poll released in February also found a sharp decline in the advantage Democrats once enjoyed among minorities, including a 20 percent drop in Black support in just three years. Likewise, a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in January found that the percentage of Black voters who support Biden has fallen from 87 percent in 2020 to only 63 percent. Biden’s Latino support collapsed from 65 to 34 percent. These polls and several others with similar findings prompted John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter at The Financial Times, to do a deep dive into the underlying data. His assessment and its accompanying chart bode ill for Biden’s campaign

Predictably, Burn-Murdoch’s realignment claim has received a lot of pushback from Democrats and the corporate media. The most common objection involves polling error, but he emphasizes that his conclusion wasn’t reached by looking at a single survey: “America’s gold-standard national election surveys show a similarly sharp decline, with non-white proximity to Democrats now at its lowest since the 1960s.” Another complaint about the realignment theory involves the claim that it is premature. Over the weekend, this very objection was echoed by Nate Cohn in the New York Times. Evidently under the impression that Burn-Murdoch based his analysis solely on the poll published by the Gray Lady, Cohn offered this peevish critique:

This claim strikes me as, at best, premature. The general election campaign is barely underway, and poll results in February do not constitute realignment. As we have written several times: No one should be remotely surprised if Mr. Biden ultimately reassembles his support among Black and Latino voters. Alternately, many of the dissenting voters may simply stay home, as they did in the midterms. This would be bad for Mr. Biden … But even in the worst case for Democrats, Mr. Biden would probably still win among Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters.

Cohn references FDR’s New Deal coalition as an example of a genuine realignment, but he seems to have forgotten what caused it. Black voters overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party from the time of Abraham Lincoln until the 1930s, but the GOP didn’t seem to grasp how badly these voters were suffering under the weight of the Great Depression. FDR pledged to do something about their plight, and many voted Democrat for the first time ever. A similar dynamic is at work today. We’re not in a depression, but Black and Latino voters have been watching inflation consume any wage increases they have received during the last 3 years. Yet President Biden has consistently insisted that real wages have gone up since he took office. (READ MORE from David Catron: Will the 2024 Election Get Lost in the Mail?)

But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), real earnings have declined during his tenure. BLS reported a 2.6 percent decrease from February 2021 to February 2022, a 1.3 percent decrease from February 2022 to February 2023 and a 1.1 percent increase from February 2023 to February 2024. That comes to a net decrease of 2.8 percent. Ironically, this decrease understates the hardship Bidenomics has created for Black and Latino voters. The cumulative increase in the CPI during Biden’s tenure has hit 17.1 percent: 7.9 percent in his first year, 6.0 percent in his second year and 3.2 percent in his third year. These numbers have created what Jason L. Riley at the Wall Street Journal describes as the President’s worst nightmare:

Prior to the pandemic, tens of millions of working-class voters — a disproportionate number of whom are black and Hispanic — enjoyed low inflation, low unemployment and rising wages. For them, Mr. Biden’s record doesn’t compare … Mr. Trump isn’t leading Mr. Biden because voters are ignorant about what they’d get in a second Trump term. Joe Biden won four years ago because voters wanted the Donald Trump economy without Donald Trump. That’s not what Mr. Biden delivered, and he’ll have to do more than call his opponent a threat to democracy if he’s going to win re-election.

At some level, both Biden and his handlers understand this, regardless of their rhetoric. It is why the Department of Justice and the White House are colluding with various and sundry prosecutors to get former President Trump convicted of something — anything — before the November election. It is also why partisan prosecutors like New York Attorney General Letitia James want to bankrupt him and gleefully fantasize about seizing his private jet. Their TDS has blinded them to the probability that it would create a backlash that all but guarantees a Trump victory in November. As GOP pollster Frank Luntz warned on CNN, “You’re going to create the greatest victimhood of 2024, and you’re going to elect Donald Trump.” (READ MORE: The State of the President)

Luntz, mind you, is not a Trump supporter. He just pointed out what will be blindingly obvious to any rank-and-file voter, regardless of party affiliation. Americans in general, including Black and Latino voters, are very much invested in a concept that no longer seems to resonate among elected Democrats — fairness. They will not be pleased if they conclude that Trump, whom they associate with peace and prosperity, is the victim of unfair treatment by the Washington establishment. Will this result in a genuine realignment among voters of color? Who knows? It is by no means unheard of in American politics. Combined with the economic travails most of us have endured at the hands of the Biden regime, it is a real possibility.