The first flutter of panic is beginning to grip the Harris-Walz presidential campaign and Team Trump is starting to believe that maybe their man might win after all.

The momentum is back with Donald Trump and the Kamala Harris campaign is an increasingly unhappy, floundering ship with less than three weeks to go.

But the Democrats are being forced to confront something even more existential than the possibility of defeat on November 5: that perhaps, for them, demography is not their party’s destiny after all.

It’s long been a comforting axiom of Democratic thinking that the more non-white America becomes, the more the Democrats are destined to be the natural party of government. After all, the Dems are backed by a comfortable majority of Hispanic and Asian voters plus an overwhelming majority of Black voters.

The more these minorities coalesce into a new American majority the more Democrats can expect to win elections. For the party’s progressive wing it promised the ultimate triumph of identity politics: make race the most important feature of what defines people and future Democratic victories are in the bag.

The first flutter of panic is beginning to grip the Harris-Walz presidential campaign and Team Trump is starting to believe that maybe their man might win after all

The momentum is back with Donald Trump and the Kamala Harris campaign is an increasingly unhappy, floundering ship with less than three weeks to go

Except for one thing that Democratic strategists never saw coming: Americans of color are moving steadily to the right.

It is ironic that this has only dawned on Democrats in the midst of their first presidential election with a non-white and female candidate leading the ticket, which many in the party thought would seal its demographic destiny.

That they never saw it coming is illustrated by how they are flailing around trying to deal with it.

That Harris has a problem with black male voters has become apparent the longer the campaign has gone on. Barack Obama was wheeled out last week in Pittsburgh (second biggest conurbation in that most crucial of swing states, Pennsylvania) to admonish black men for their lack of enthusiasm for Harris.

Too many black men, opined the former president, ‘aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president’ in a cack-handed intervention that did more harm than good.

When you’re out to win over people’s votes it’s probably not a good idea to depict them as sexist, even misogynist. To ignore what might really explain black male disillusion with Democrats — sluggish wage growth, high housing costs, crime-ridden streets — might even be regarded as insulting.

Harris hasn’t fared much better. She has rushed to be interviewed on a number of black-facing media outlets, brandishing so-called forgivable loans (the kind you likely won’t have to repay) for minority small businesses and the federal decriminalizing of cannabis.

This implied black male votes could be bought with a mixture of cash and weed, which was demeaning as well as offensive.

No wonder Jim Clyburn, the black veteran Democratic congressman from South Carolina who saved Joe Biden’s flailing primary campaign in 2020, said he remained seriously ‘concerned about black men staying at home or voting for Trump’ on November 5.

The problem is real — and growing. Remarkably, Harris has less support among black voters in this presidential election than Hillary Clinton when she lost to Trump in 2016.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll was stark in depicting the rightward drift among minority voters, especially men, above all men without college degrees.

Among non-college educated black voters in 2016, the Democrats won by a margin of almost 90 percentage points. This year, that’s down to 65 percent, according to the NYT survey.

The Democratic loss among Hispanic voters is even greater: eight years ago, Democrats had a 41 percentage point advantage over the GOP among non-college educated Hispanics; now it’s only projected to be 16 percent.

The Democratic loss among Hispanic voters is even greater: eight years ago, Democrats had a 41 percentage-point advantage over the GOP among non-college educated Hispanics; now that figure is only projected to be 16 percent. 

Of course, a majority of people of color will still vote Democrat come November 5. But not by the traditional landslide majorities Democrats have usually enjoyed — and needed to secure overall victory.

Polling shows one in five black voters, two in five Hispanics and one in three voters of Asian heritage are now seriously disillusioned with the Democrats. Four years ago, Biden could count on 89 percent of the black vote in the key swing states. Harris’s share in polls is currently 78 percent.

When less than one percentage point now separates the two presidential contenders in all seven swing states, that degree of minority defection from the Democrats could be crucial in securing a Trump victory.

Some will see in this a welcome comeuppance for Democrats and their obsession with identity politics. But the Democratic mistake was not so much an over reliance on identity as picking the wrong identity.

Turns out social class is more important than race among ordinary minority voters, contrary to recent fashionable academic theories and the airy prognostications of Democratic Party panjandrums.

Non-college educated minority voters share the same economic frustrations, even anger, as white working-class voters, which is why many are attracted to Trump.

Working class white and non-white voters think their wages rose faster under Trump than under Biden. Only 21 percent of Hispanic voters think Biden has helped them get on; but 38 percent think Trump did.

Minority disillusionment with Democrats is not helped by the growing perception that the party is in the grip of an affluent metropolitan elite that does not share the values of ordinary minority voters who, it turns out, have more class solidarity with working class whites than with the posh folk who now run the party they’ve hitherto voted for.

This points to perhaps the biggest mistake of all made by the Democratic elite: they proceeded to remold the party on the basis that voters of color were overwhelmingly progressive, like them. Whereas, in reality, minority voters are more likely to be moderate to conservative.

Working class white and non-white voters think their wages rose faster under Trump than under Biden. Only 21 percent of Hispanic voters think Biden has helped them get on; but 38 percent think Trump did

They are tough on crime because they are more likely to be its victims than affluent white folks.

They are not keen on transgender rights, especially when it involves allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports.

They tend to be isolationist in foreign policy, preferring money to be spent at home on their problems rather than on overseas military adventures in which minorities will do a disproportionate amount of the fighting and end up filling a high percentage of the body bags.

The Biden administration thought laxer controls on the southern border was what Hispanic voters wanted and duly obliged. It shows just how out of touch it was.

Working class Hispanics, along with other minority voters, want tough border controls because their jobs — not those of the metropolitan elite — are the ones in jeopardy from uncontrolled illegal immigration. Which explains why 40 percent of black and Hispanic voters think all illegal immigrants should be deported and support building a border wall.

It’s almost as if the Trump agenda was constructed with minority voters in mind.

It’s baffling that Democratic Party strategists did not see this coming. After all, it’s happened before. The backbone of the Democratic Party used be to blue-collar Americans of Irish, Italian and Polish descent. But over time, as they increased their stake in US society, they became more conservative.

Some even started to vote Republican. They were instrumental in Ronald Reagan’s two presidential victories in 1980 and 1984. As an ex-Democrat himself, he proudly called them the Reagan Democrats.

I remember sitting in a spit-and-sawdust bar in upstate New York during the 1980 campaign. The clientele was distinctly blue-collar. A picture of John F. Kennedy hung proudly behind the bar.

‘I guess folks here will be voting Democrat come the election,’ I said to the barman. 

‘Oh no,’ he replied. ‘I’m voting Republican. Most of us are.’ 

His customers nodded in approval. It was then, in what was a close fought election, that I realized Reagan was likely to win.

That same phenomenon is now underway, this time with minority voters. It might still not be enough to secure Trump victory, for the rightward drift of minority voters is a process in its early days. And Harris’s ‘man problem’ is matched by Trump’s ‘woman problem’.

But minority drift is causing Harris and her party no end of problems. Whatever the outcome of November 5, the Democrats can no longer take minority voters for granted — and their prospects of becoming the natural party of government are receding fast.