Donald Trump is back in the White House thanks in part to making large gains with Latina/o and Asian American voters in states like Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia. While the vast majority of Trump voters are still non-Latino whites, the jump in his support among Latina/os and Asian Americans has drawn significant attention and prompted hand-wringing among Democrats.
Another leg has been kicked out from under the narrative of “demographic destiny” — which posited that Democrats would thrive as the electorate got less white. The theory dates to An Emerging Democratic Majority, an influential 2002 book by political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira. It was reinforced by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, before the Trump years made clear its flaws.
Some pundits claim that this idea has proved false because the Democrats have lurched to the left, adopting a platform that some Latina/o community leaders in particular perceive as radical and out of touch. Yet, the truth is that the demographic destiny narrative was always flawed, because it falsely assumed that disparate groups of non-white Americans had the same politics.
Non-white voters are often grouped in one of two ways. First, different racial groups — “Latinos” and “Asian Americans” — get categorized together. Then they are all thrown together along with Black Americans in one group: people of color. Yet, these labels obscure more than they clarify.
The idea of one unified group of Asian Americans dates to the late 1960s. The term was originally popularized by the radical student-led group Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), which wanted it to signify support for “a political agenda of equality, anti-racism and anti-imperialism,” not a simple racial identity. Yet, the intent quickly got lost when in 1977, federal officials adopted “Asian or Pacific Islander” as a racial category that grouped together all Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander origins regardless of their beliefs.
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But this group was never a political monolith. The most populous Asian American groups in the 1970s were Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino Americans. Their distinct histories in the U.S. and varied relationships with the government had shaped three distinctly different political outlooks.
After racist assumptions about their supposed disloyalty prompted the U.S. government to incarcerate 125,000 people during World War II, Japanese Americans became determined to gain electoral power to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. The injustice galvanized Japanese Americans to vote and undertake civic participation — while also splitting them politically. Some embraced the Democratic Party’s civil rights platforms while others vowed never to support a Democrat in protest of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.
Chinese American politics were similarly complicated and became even more so after the 1949 Communist Revolution and creation of the People’s Republic of China prompted a wave of ethnic Chinese migrants to the U.S. from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. The experiences of these migrants shaped an acute consciousness of communism and drove many to the Republican Party, which they regarded as far more staunchly anti-communist than the Democratic Party. Yet, many U.S.-born Chinese Americans had a different set of experiences, and in the 1960s, some of them gravitated toward the civil rights platforms of Democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Filipina/o Americans had a very different perspective from either Japanese or Chinese Americans. The Philippines had been a U.S. colony until 1946, which meant that many Filipino immigrants had served in the U.S. military, and many came to the U.S. already speaking English. But this didn’t produce overwhelming political unity. During the 1970s and 1980s, a small number of Filipina/os like Gloria Ochoa won elected office in places like California, usually as Democrats. Yet, other Filipina/o Americans abstained from voting in the U.S. due to disillusionment with political corruption in the Philippines, and some voted for Republicans as well.
Immigration from additional countries has only increasingly muddied the waters of how “Asian Americans” might vote over time. Today “Asian American” encompasses over 40 distinct ethnic, linguistic, and other subgroups, and “Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander” more than 70.
As was the case for “Asian American,” official adoption of the term “Hispanic” dates to the 1970s. Before 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau classified Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans as whites. Community organizations, activists, bureaucrats, and Spanish-language media outlets successfully lobbied for the creation of a new cohesive category based on language: “Hispanic”, which first appeared on all U.S. census forms in 1980. (The term “Latino,” denoting a racial category, was added in 2000.)
Yet while some saw it as preferable to the old system, the term Hispanic still lumped together very different populations. While Puerto Rican voters (outside of Puerto Rico) leaned Democratic, Florida’s sizable and politically engaged Cuban population historically leaned hard to the right, shrinking from anyone they associated, however slightly, with communism. Meanwhile, Mexican Americans, who were the largest Latina/o group in most states, had vastly different politics depending on region and generation. Republican President Richard Nixon famously courted Hispanic voters; in 1972, he won one-third of the Hispanic vote, more than any previous GOP candidate, thanks to a system of government patronage that secured the support of high-profile community leaders. This success indicated how fluid and varied the community’s politics were.
The reality was that neither Latina/os, nor Asian Americans, were ever as reliably Democratic as Black voters have been since Lyndon B. Johnson signed the seminal civil rights legislation of the 1960s.
Over time, the adequacy of these labels has further eroded as Asian Americans and Latino/as have become even more heterogeneous.
When the use of “Asian American” took off in the 1970s, for example, most people in this category were born in the U.S. By 1980, however, migration from countries like China, India, Korea, and Vietnam had made the group majority foreign-born, which undermined any sense of shared racial politics and consciousness. Native-born citizens often saw race differently than did foreign-born Americans. New migration also changed the composition of the Asian American category, as Chinese Americans surpassed Japanese Americans as the largest Asian American subgroup, only to later be surpassed by Indian Americans.
As a result, voting trends have become muddled as each group has had its own distinct history of party affiliation and partisanship, with Indians, Filipina/os, and Koreans leaning the most Democratic (as of 2023), and Vietnamese Americans—many with ties to post-Vietnam war refugees—tilting furthest toward the GOP due to their antipathy to communism and anything remotely reminiscent of it.
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Yet the politics of these groups remains in flux, as evidenced by one of 2024 country’s most contested U.S. House races. California’s Derek Tran became only the second Vietnamese American Democrat elected to Congress, and Indian American Republicans like Vivek Ramaswamy vocally supported Trump.
In recent decades, new factors have further scrambled the politics of the two racial umbrella groups. As early as the 1990s, Christian Right groups aligned with the Republican Party sought to woo Latina/os with ties to evangelical and Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity. The influence of evangelical Christianity has likewise buttressed Republican support among Asian American voters; since 2000, some of the Asian Americans most likely to support Republican candidates identify as evangelical Christians.
Yet, even as religion was driving some non-whites to the GOP, unprecedented numbers of Latina/o and Asian American voters flocked to the Democratic Party to protest the GOP’s decision to pursue anti-immigrant, nativist policies such as California’s infamous Proposition 187 (1994) in a bid to increase its white support. The resulting “blue wave” was most apparent in states like California, where it mobilized a young generation of Latina/os, including California Senator Alex Padilla, and former Texas Representative and cabinet secretary Julian Castro, not only to vote Democratic but to run for elected office and engage partisan politics in a new way. Asian Americans also moved left; in 2000, a majority voted Democratic for the first time.
In the last decade, however, the benefit for Democrats of backlash politics over GOP nativism has waned as generational differences and other factors make some Latina/o and Asian American voters more open to the anti-immigrant policies espoused by Trump. Some, for example, have pointed to how they and their family members immigrated the “right way” and argue that others should do the same. In some cases, earlier immigrants have also expressed resentment at government support of recent asylum-seekers entering the country.
Yet, this may be where Trump’s gains among these two groups are the most fragile. In the two months since the election, some report regretting their choice, as debates over H-1B visas led to a spike in hate speech targeting South Asians. Some Trump voters also discovered with dismay that many in the MAGA movement want to restrict legal immigration — including H-1B visas — as well as undocumented migration. The details of Trump’s deportation plans have also alienated some Latina/os and Asian Americans who voted for the president.
Surprise over the fluidity of these voters’ politics stems from the failure to realize that they are, as historian Geraldo Cadava has argued, “fully human, complicated political actors.”
The Democratic Party suffered a devastating loss in November. If it is to regain influence, it won’t be because demographics are destiny. Instead, as the U.S. grows less white, Democrats will need to meet voters of color, like all voters, where they are.
Jane Hong is the author of Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) and associate professor of history at Occidental College. Her forthcoming book is a history of Asian American evangelicals since the 1970s.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
