Biden Pollster Warns of ‘Paradigm Shift’ After Survey Shows GOP Gains Among Black, Hispanic Voters

A voter arrives at a polling place in Minneapolis, Minn., on March 3, 2020. Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

A poll released Monday morning shows that the Republican Party is continuing to make inroads among black and Hispanic voters with just one day to go before the 2022 midterms.

Some 17 percent of black voters told a Wall Street Journal poll that they would pick a Republican candidate for Congress over a Democrat, which is larger than the 8 percent of black voters who voted in favor of President Donald Trump, a Republican, in 2020. During the 2018 midterm elections, 8 percent of black voters backed GOP candidates in House races.

For decades, black Americans have voted in favor of Democrats over Republicans by large margins.

Among Hispanic voters, Democrats have a mere 5 percent lead over Republicans overall, according to the WSJ poll. During the 2018 midterms, Democrats had a 31 percent lead over Republicans and a 28 percent lead in 2020, it noted.

When the WSJ carried out a similar poll in August, Democrats had an 11-point lead over Republicans in the choice of a congressional candidate.

“I think that this could be a paradigm-shift election, where Republicans are not only making inroads with the Latino vote, but they’re now making inroads with the African-American vote,” John Anzalone, who served as President Joe Biden’s top pollster in 2020, told the WSJ on Monday. Anzalone helped conduct the WSJ poll that was published Monday.

And Tony Fabrizio, former President Donald Trump’s lead pollster in 2020 who assisted in the WSJ Poll, told the paper acknowledged “it is wholly possible that Republicans reach a new high water mark among both African-Americans and Hispanic voters in this election.”

For most of 2022, Democrat candidates have said that black voters are not turning to Republicans in spite of polls saying otherwise.

“It’s a bit of a misconception that black men are shifting away,” Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for Georgia’s gubernatorial seat, said in August. However, in a weekend MSNBC interview, Abrams said that black men “have been a very targeted population for misinformation,” adding that it is “not misinformation about what they want but about why they want what they deserve.”

Abrams was referring to a recent Marist College poll that found 82 percent of black voters are planning to vote for Abrams, which would represent a decline in support. Abrams did not provide any evidence for her claims.

“Let’s be clear, the false narrative that voter turnout has felled the idea of voter suppression misunderstands the effectiveness of suppression,” Abrams alleged before she blamed ”white supremacist groups“ and ”hard-right groups.” “It has never been about stopping all voters. It is about clogging the arteries of the process and stopping certain voters. There is a precision to voter suppression.”

But Republicans said that they are able to make inroads at the Democrats’ edge with blacks and Hispanic voters due to a variety of reasons. One of them, said Republican congressional candidate Wesley Hunt to the WSJ, is due to the GOP’s success in organizing.

The poll surveyed 1,500 people between Oct. 22 and Oct. 26.