At first glance, it might seem surprising that Trump gained among voters of color, since he often demonized Asian Americans, Black Americans and Latinos and invoked racist tropes. I will admit that I did not expect Trump to make those gains before polls started showing them in the run-up to the election. But the data and research in the wake of the 2020 election suggests that many voters of color who backed Trump either already held GOP views on some racial issues or adopted those views to align with their decision to back Trump. So their views on racial issues are often closer to those of white Republicans than people of color who are Democrats. Meanwhile, white Democrats tend to have racial views much closer to people of color who are Democrats than white Republicans. When you put those two things together (white Democrats getting more racially liberal and many people of color who are Republicans not being liberal on racial issues), the results are that Republicans and Democrats are very divided about views on racial issues, even as they are becoming less divided in terms of racial identity (more white people are Democrats, more people of color are Republicans). For example, around 15 percent of Black adults and 38 percent of Latino adults either said they opposed the Black Lives Matter movement or were non-committal about it (they didn’t support or oppose it), according to polling conducted by Civiqs around last November’s election. That’s fairly similar to the percentage of those groups that voted for Trump in 2020.