Even if he came up short in November of 2020, we all know where the majority of Donald Trump’s support came from, right? Angry, racist white men, predominantly evangelical Christians. (They’re the worst, aren’t they?) At least that was the tale being spun on cable news discussion panels all summer and right up until election day. It takes a while to parse through that much data, particularly given how long some of the states were counting and recounting everything, but now a progressive analytics firm has finished an in-depth audit of the numbers and those reliable white males didn’t perform nearly as well for Trump as had been projected. In reality, the majority of overall Trump voters came from a combination of women and minorities. And the percentage of his voters grew in every category except white males, which actually dropped. What are we to make of this? (The Federalist)

New data from progressive analytics firm Catalist shows the majority of Trump’s support in the 2020 election came from minorities and women. Trump’s support grew to 57.2 percent from 54.8 percent in 2016. Trump made inroads among all minorities in the election, except for white men. The data show a seven-point increase among non-white females, a four-point increase among non-white men, and a one-point loss among white men.

“Along with massive increases in turnout, Latino vote share as a whole swung towards Trump by 8 points in two-way vote share compared to 2016, though Biden-Harris still enjoyed solid majority (61%) support among this group,” the Catalist poll found.

Running through the numbers in this report, several surprising things begin to pop out. Perhaps none were more intriguing than what happened with the Hispanic vote. Biden and Harris carried that group overall with 61%, but the Latino vote share moved toward Trump by 8 points. Women and people of color accounted for 54.8% of Trump’s voters in 2016. In 2020 they made up 57.2%.

A separate breakout of the data looked at the relative shifts from 2016 to 2020 among Trump voters by a combination of gender and race. Trump lost one percent among white males, gained one percent with white females, gained four percent with non-white men, and picked up 7% with non-white women. Out of the entire electorate, Donald Trump pulled in 8% of the Black vote in 2016. In 2020 he drew eleven percent, which is pretty shocking for any Republican in this era.

So what does all of this mean? Not much in terms of who won and who lost, but quite a bit in terms of the ongoing narrative that the nation’s major newspapers and cable news channels continue to churn out. If Donald Trump was such a racist and misogynist as we were repeatedly told, why would his most significant shifts in vote share be negative with white men and positive in the rest of the groups?

We could be seeing some side-effects of the shifts that have been taking place in party affiliation. The latest Gallup numbers from April show that the GOP has definitely slid a bit against the Democrats overall. 26% of American voters are registered Republicans while 31% are Democrats. But both are still left in the dust by the 40% who are independents. When you look at the leaners, however, there isn’t such a stark divide. Republicans still trail, but by a 44/47 margin. That three-point difference really isn’t much of a gap at all.

One of the great hopes of the Democrats is that a flood of new Democratic voters will be coming their way via amnesty for illegal aliens and increased participation among women. But looking at this latest data, perhaps they should be careful what they wish for.