Are they really that sneaky? Literally every economist who's not trying to give Trump a handy says this is the obvious outcome of tariffs (heck, the entire way that tariffs protect native jobs is by making foreign goods more expensive so native goods, which are more expensive to produce due to higher labor costs/lower productivity, are competitive).
Saying stuff like "China will pay the tariffs" was always bloviating fantasy to anyone who can stitch 2 brain cells together to make a coherent thought.
The Obama folks were correct about demographics being destiny: https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2012/07/demographi.... Mass immigration killed the Mccain/Romney GOP. What they overlooked is that, the vacuum would be filled by a right wing party that looks more like the right wing parties you see in the rest of the world.
Trump, with his lying and outright vote buying (No Taxes on Tips) is the kind of right wing candidate that can win enough immigrants to be nationally viable. Blue Rose research estimates Trump tied with naturalized citizens. Little Bangladesh in Queens swung 50 points to the right from 2020. Populist rhetoric unrooted in facts is really popular among third world voters.
>> Trump, with his lying and outright vote buying (No Taxes on Tips) is the kind of right wing candidate that can win enough immigrants to be nationally viable.
But the media wasn't interested in reporting on what Harris's positions were, only on whatever Trump said that week. The same as the media wasn't interested in reporting on all the many accomplishments of the Biden administration, despite the headwinds they had to push against.
So most people thought that "no taxes on tips" was a Trump position that differentiated him from Harris.
I don’t think that it was the coverage (or lack of it) that had people associate that policy more with Trump than Harris. I think it is far more likely that Trump announcing it in June and talking about it for two months before Harris announced she also supported the policy in August was what made it seem more a Trump policy than a shared policy. The Democrats were slow to react and so - even if they decided to get on board a couple of months before the election - they were always going to be depicted as playing catchup.
The democratic party has been operating on that principle for a lot longer, because low information immigrants are also a key part of their coalition (and have been since the irish and italian immigration of the 20th century).
A lot of Muslims voted for Trump as a protest against Biden’s support for Israel. They just didn’t realize that Trump’s solution to the Gaza conflict would be to turn Gaza into a resort without Gazans.
Some Muslims, mostly Arabs, voted based on that. But heavily hindu indian cities in NJ also swung heavily towards Trump: https://www.patrickruffini.com/p/do-republicans-have-a-shot-... (“Indian New Jersey, 3% of the statewide vote, swung 14 points to Trump—a striking shift against the first South Asian presidential nominee.”). Don’t forget that, while Indian Americans are one of the most Democrat-leaning groups, a plurality also support Modi: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/us-news/story/indian-america...
Blue Rose’s (the leading dem pollster) comprehensive retrospective of the 2024 election was telling: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden+27 voting bloc in 2020 to a Trump+1 group in 2024.”).
I don’t think Trump would have won Michigan without the Muslim vote. His perceived betrayal will also heavily affect the next couple of elections in that state.
As for the rest, I can’t imagine Indian Americans being happy with Trump’s treatment of India, but you probably know more about that than me.
My point is that Trump made across-the-board gains among immigrants, which is hard to explain by pointing to discrete issues like Gaza. Trump not only won heavily Muslim Dearborn but 69-percent asian Flushing. This is a consistent trend: Trump gained among immigrant groups from 2016 to 2020 as well, while losing ground with non-hispanic whites.
By contrast, Trump made zero gain among non-Hispanic whites from 2020 to 2024: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte.... His entire vote swing came from non-whites, mainly hispanics and asians, most of whom are either immigrants or children of immigrants. How do you explain a 27 point swing among naturalized citizens while non-hispanic whites didn’t move at all? That’s inconsistent with the popular theory that this election was about inflation, or group-specific issues like Gaza.
I think the explanation instead lies in the cultural differences between established Americans and immigrants and their children. If you look around at the world, small-government Anglo-American conservatism basically doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s unusual. But conservatism exists everywhere. And if you look at conservative leaders in Asia or Africa or Latin America, they look much more like Trump than they do Mitt Romney or George H.W. Bush. Conservatives elsewhere value order, aggressiveness against the opposition, patriarchal energy, loyalty to the clan, etc. And they don’t have the taboos that prevented gentile WASPs like Bush or Romney from aggressively attacking opponents, lying to reframe policy issues, etc. As more of the American electorate is comprised of people from these foreign cultures, the more any conservative candidate will target what these cultures value in a conservative leader.
The Trump GOP this is one manifestation of America’s long shift away from being a culturally Anglo country to being a multicultural country: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.... This is a process that started with the mass immigration of the early 20th century: the last real WASP Republican was Coolidge. Reagan talked the talk, but his substantive policies reflected shifts away from small-government conservatism necessary to get Irish and Italian Catholics to vote Republican (who had voted 80% Democrat before). And now with Trump Anglos make such a small portion of the GOP the tip of the hat to Anglo conservatism is vestigial. He’s free to be a fully third world conservative.
Saying stuff like "China will pay the tariffs" was always bloviating fantasy to anyone who can stitch 2 brain cells together to make a coherent thought.