TRUMP HAS MADE ROMNEY’S GOP MORE DIVERSE. You’ve heard years of accusations that former President and now President-elect Donald Trump is a racist, sexist, homophobic bigot who is also a fascist and the new incarnation of Adolf Hitler. It has been said so many times in Resistance World that most Trump supporters just shrug and tune it out. But now we’ve had an election, and it turns out Trump assembled a broad and diverse group of supporters to win a second term and perhaps teach the Republican Party new lessons in coalition building.
How to see that? Compare the exit polls from Tuesday’s election with those from the last losing GOP campaign before Trump — Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to President Barack Obama. Do that and you will see changes in the makeup of the electorate that voted for a Republican candidate. The bottom line is that Trump has made Romney’s Republican Party more diverse and more inclusive than it was a dozen years ago.
Start with race. Trump has made the GOP a more racially inclusive party. Here are the numbers: In 2012, Romney won 59% of white voters. In 2024, Trump won 57% of white voters. In 2012, Romney won 6% of black voters. In 2024, Trump won 13% of them. In 2012, Romney won 27% of Latino voters. In 2024, Trump won 46% of them.
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Look at age. Trump has broadened the GOP’s appeal to younger voters. In 2012, Romney won 37% of voters aged 18 to 29. Trump won 43% of them. In 2012, Romney won 45% of voters aged 30 to 44. Trump won 48% of them. In 2012, Romney won 51% of voters 45 to 64. Trump won 54% of them. Only among voters over 65 did Romney outperform Trump, winning 56% of them in 2012 to Trump’s 49% in 2024.
Look at income. Exit pollsters divide the vote into three income categories: voters who make less than $50,000, who make between $50,000 and $100,000, and those who make more than $100,000. (The numbers are not adjusted for inflation.) In 2012, Romney won 38% of voters under $50,000. In 2024, Trump won 50% of them. In 2012, Romney won 52% of voters between $50,000 and $100,000. Trump won 51% of them. And in 2012, Romney won 54% of voters over $100,000. Trump won 46% of them. Trump has made the Republican Party less a rich person’s party and one that is spread more evenly along the income scale.
On ideology, the nation is of course quite polarized, now even more so than 2012. In this election, Trump made the party more reliant on conservative voters, like Democrats are with liberals, but he also maintained Romney’s appeal to moderate voters. In 2012, Romney won the support of 82% of voters who called themselves conservative, 41% of those who called themselves moderate, and 11% of those who called themselves liberal. In 2024, Trump won the support of 90% of voters who called themselves conservative, 40% of moderates, and 7% of liberals. What to make of that? One way to describe is that Trump made the GOP a little more conservative without losing Romney’s support among moderates.
On education, although the categories in the exit polls were not the same between 2012 and 2024, Trump famously won a great deal of support among voters who did not have a four-year college degree while losing to Vice President Kamala Harris among voters who did have a degree. In 2012, Obama won voters at the bottom of the educational scale, those who just had some high school, and those at the top, those who had postgraduate degrees, while Romney won those who had four-year degrees. It’s a different educational world now, and Trump’s support is more diverse than the party’s was a dozen years ago. And in one last category, Trump also won higher percentages than Romney of voters who were in a union household and voters who were not.
The overwhelming majority of Republicans support Trump, but there has always been a relatively small but vocal group that would prefer a return to the GOP of Romney, George W. Bush, and John McCain. Many people in that group truly believe Trump is unfit to be president, but it’s also true that they felt more comfortable in the older Republican Party. They would like to go back. Perhaps they hoped that a Trump defeat this week would spell the end of the Trump era in American politics. Instead, we saw an impressive victory and are heading toward a second Trump term. Now the question is not whether the GOP will return to Bush-Romney-McCain days — not gonna happen — but how much of a lasting change Trump has made in the Republican Party.