Bad news for Biden from the New York Times.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden are essentially tied among 18-to-29-year-olds and Hispanic voters, even though each group gave Mr. Biden more than 60 percent of their vote in 2020. Mr. Trump also wins more than 20 percent of Black voters — a tally that would be the highest level of black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Hispanic voters have occasionally become a swing constituency. Unlike black voters, they don’t seem to have a baked-in party loyalty and their primary concerns are economic.
Young white voters (despite what you see in the media) vote Republican. But younger voters as a whole tend to be diverse and thus vote Democrat. So what we appear to be seeing here is that younger minority voters are the ones more likely to dump Biden. And that makes sense. The church ladies are not going to switch parties.
The polls suggest that Mr. Trump’s strength among young and nonwhite voters has at least temporarily upended the electoral map, with Mr. Trump surging to a significant lead in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada — relatively diverse Sun Belt states where Black and Hispanic voters propelled Mr. Biden to signature victories in the 2020 election.
Mr. Biden nonetheless remains within striking distance. He has maintained most of his support among older and white voters, who are much less likely to demand fundamental changes to the system and far likelier to say that democracy is the most important issue for their vote. As a result, Mr. Biden is more competitive in the three relatively white Northern swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
That’s been the flip side. Democrats have been eating up college-educated and suburban voters who might have once voted Republican. Trump has gained with working-class white voters who might have once gone Democrat and Biden gained with college-educated suburbanites.
Now Trump is boosting his numbers among young minority voters while Biden is gaining older white voters who might have gone with Republicans.
These are still margins and far from a total flip but it’s an interesting phenomenon.
As is Trump’s ability to run as the change agent.
A bigger challenge for Mr. Biden than disengaged voters may ultimately be the disaffected and the disillusioned — those who desire fundamental changes to American society, or who believe that the political and economic systems need to be torn down altogether. Not long ago, these anti-system voters might have been reliably Democratic, but Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment populist brand of conservatism has flipped the usual political dynamic.
Seventy percent of voters believe that Mr. Trump will either bring major changes to the political or economic system or tear down the systems altogether, compared with 24 percent who expect the same from Mr. Biden. And while many voters express deep reservations about Mr. Trump personally, 43 percent of voters believe that he will bring good changes to the country, compared with 35 percent who think the changes will be bad.
Mr. Trump fares especially well among those who believe that the political and economic systems ought to be torn down, a group that represents about 15 percent of registered voters. He leads among these anti-system voters by 32 points, and the tear-it-down voters are especially likely to have defected from the president.
A gamechanger indeed.