In the 1912 presidential election, incumbent Republican William Howard Taft finished third behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson and former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, who ran as a third-party candidate. Taft won only two states’ electoral votes, Utah and Vermont, which were the most Republican in voting patterns.
Half of that last set of facts would seem exceedingly strange today. While Utah remains dominated by the GOP , Vermont now has sent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VA) to the Senate for decades. It hasn’t voted for the Republican presidential candidate since 1988 and will certainly go overwhelmingly for Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 5.
This history helps us understand a recently released New York Times-Siena College poll . Black voters, driven mostly by shifts in men, are poised to give former President Donald Trump the highest percentage of black votes for a Republican since then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960. Other polling points toward Trump doing as well among Hispanic and Latino voters as then-President George W. Bush in 2004.
How does 1912 help explain these shifts, changes that were unthinkable over the past generation or more and are still unthinkable to many political observers right now?
Remembering Vermont in 1912, in particular, helps us recall that political parties are coalitional, composed of distinct groups of voters with overlapping and distinct principles, priorities, and dispositions. These coalitions do not remain stagnant forever, meaning parties evolve to gain and consequently lose certain voting blocs. These changes then put certain new states into play and remove others long thought to be toss-ups.
Our own times have involved significant shifts in party preferences outside racial minority voters. Rural voters, who had been trending toward the GOP, now vote overwhelmingly for that party. Voters without college degrees now also cast their ballots mostly for Republicans. At the same time, suburban voters and those with college degrees have fled the GOP in droves, now voting decidedly for Democrats.
These and other shifts have changed the map from what we used to expect. Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania will now decide who the next president of the United States will be. Ohio, for a long time the bellwether state, now votes comfortably Republican.
We should not be surprised, then, that minority voters might not continue to vote in the same patterns they once did. A majority still will cast their votes for Democrats, including Harris, come November. But increasing support for the GOP and Trump, in particular, partakes of the broader shifts we have seen since 2016.
People have come to understand better the shifts in white working-class and white suburban voters. Yet many cannot believe that Trump and the present iteration of the GOP would make substantial gains with racial minority voters. They cannot for two reasons. First, they believe that the current GOP is inherently racist and, thus, that these voters could not possibly see their interests better served by that party. Second, many have come to assume that black and Hispanic voters always must identify with the Democratic Party out of tradition and some kind of moral obligation.
Regardless of what these people think of the current GOP, it seems a significant slice of minority voters do not see Republicans as racist, or perhaps they don’t care. This shows that some of the racial accusations made against the Republican Party are overwrought and unpersuasive to the very people who are supposed to be most affected.
But it also shows that minority voters are more complex than many, including progressives, perceive them to be.
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Minority voters, it should go without saying, should not be defined merely by the color of their skin, either by racists or racial panderers. They are college-educated and working-class. They are men and women. The differences we see among their evolving voting patterns largely break down along the broader electoral shifts in those areas.
What this means is that both parties must relearn how to appeal to these voters and think about how to do so to others they have long neglected. Coalitions change and will continue to. The result in the short term might be confusing and messy. In the long term, the change might be a better rethinking of our principles and priorities.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor at Ashland University.
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