For Democrats, few questions may be more consequential than whether they can recover ground among the Black and Hispanic voters who moved sharply toward President Donald Trump in 2024.
Now, a new Democratic National Committee analysis shared exclusively with CNN has found that economic concerns overwhelmingly propelled the party’s recovery among minority voters in last year’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections — but many voters who turned to the party in 2025 might not do so again in 2026 and 2028 if they continue feeling financial strain.
“Democratic support is not automatic or locked in going forward” for minority voters, the study concludes. “Voters want concrete results they can see in their bank accounts and feel in their quality of life. If Democrats fail to act or cannot prove that the government can be used to improve people’s lives, there likely will be backlash — erasing the gains earned in the 2025 (campaigns).”
Trump’s historically strong 2024 performance with Black and Latino voters sent shock waves through the Democratic Party. The new DNC analysis — based on pre- and post-election polling and focus groups among Black and Latino voters in New Jersey and Virginia — is unequivocal in concluding that the party can lastingly reverse that shift only if it restores its own credibility on delivering tangible economic improvements for average families.
“It’s not that economic concerns and affordability was the number one or most important issue; it was the only issue,” said veteran Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, who helped lead the research project. “There was a palpable sense of financial dread, anxiety. People were literally telling us that they felt they were financially drowning … their lives were being totally upended by unaffordability.”
The new research is certain to reinforce the solidifying belief among Democrats that persistent concern about the cost of living is the greatest vulnerability for Trump and the GOP in 2026. Whatever their other ideological differences, all the high-profile Democratic winners last year — including newly elected governors Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City — stressed “affordability” and offered extensive plans to ease the financial squeeze on average families.
But Democratic pollster Anthony Williams, who also participated in the research, said the party should not interpret those victories as evidence it has settled voter doubts about the party’s own economic record, which contributed so much to Trump’s 2024 advances with minority voters.
“The party has an opportunity here, but just as we shouldn’t be overly pessimistic based on what happened in ‘24, we shouldn’t be overly optimistic about what happened in ’25,” Williams said.
Affordability explains Trump’s advance — and retreat
The solid gains that Trump posted in 2024 in communities across the country with large minority populations, from rural South Texas to New York and Chicago, were the most notable part of his stunning electoral resurrection.
According to the exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations including CNN, Trump in 2024 attracted more support among Latinos (46%) than any GOP nominee in modern times. Trump ran especially well with Latino men, becoming the first GOP nominee ever to carry most of them in exit polls; he also displayed formidable strength among Latinos who were younger and/or lacked a four-year college degree. But he improved in virtually every segment of the Latino community.
And while the shift wasn’t as large, Trump in 2024 also ran better than in 2020 or 2016 with some segments of the Black community, particularly younger voters and men, the exit polls found.
After those dramatic losses, the 2025 results in New Jersey and Virginia allowed Democrats to exhale. In both states, Sherrill and Spanberger ran much better than Kamala Harris in 2024 — and in most cases the Democratic gubernatorial nominees in 2021 — in communities with large Black and/or Latino populations, including Newark, Camden, Passaic and Patterson in New Jersey, and the cities of Richmond, Petersburg and Portsmouth and Prince William County in Virginia.
The exit polls conducted by SRSS for media organizations including CNN filled out the picture: They showed both Sherrill and Spanberger winning about two-thirds of Latinos and over 9 in 10 Black voters, much better than Harris’ national showing just a year earlier. Each nominee recorded very strong numbers even among the groups where Trump had made his greatest inroads in 2024: Spanberger, for instance, carried over 9 in 10 Black voters younger than 30, while Sherrill won over three-fifths of Latino men.
The DNC research sought to identify the key factors in that recovery — and, as important, whether other Democrats could replicate them in 2026 and 2028. The study closely examined both the messages the campaigns delivered to Black and Latino audiences, and the mechanisms they used to communicate them.
The first broad conclusion from the research was that the campaign tactics and messages succeeded in expanding the Democrats’ support in these communities. While many Black and Latino voters decided early, the analysts concluded from their pre- and post-election polling that Spanberger and Sherrill each won most of the voters who were initially undecided; they also concluded that direct contact from the campaigns had notably increased the number of Black and Latino voters in each state who showed up to vote. “Post election polling showed the campaigns worked in terms of contacting these cohorts and gaining support, generating enthusiasm and building confidence in their candidates,” the memo concludes.
The report identifies one factor above all in driving that outcome: the success of Sherrill and Spanberger at convincing minority voters they understood, and were determined to address, the strains on their living standards.
“Affordability was the dominant issue,” the study concludes. “The 2025 governor’s races in both states were shaped overwhelmingly by one defining reality: the increasingly higher cost of living has become THE lens through which voters judge politics, candidates, and their own futures.”
In all the polling and focus groups the party conducted, the memo continues, “pocketbook concerns, consistently and without prompting, rose to the top of what voters are concerned about and what drove their vote choice in 2025.”
Amandi said the level of financial distress expressed by minority voters in the study’s surveys and focus groups was the most intense he has heard in three decades of polling. “People said they were financially drowning; they were barely making ends meet,” he said. “They were redefining for us … the American dream. You and I growing up, we were taught the American dream was being able to own your own home, put your kids through college, maybe save a little money go on vacation, retire at 65. For these people, the American dream and financial freedom was being able to pay all your bills that month and the next.”
The research made clear that while many minority voters were disappointed in Trump’s record on delivering a more affordable cost of living, they remained skeptical that Democrats could do better. “There’s an opportunity here, but there is still work to be done,” Williams said. “We need to prove to some of these voters that not only do we care, but we are going to proactively do something about these issues.”
The memo argues that Democrats needed to take several steps to restore their credibility with financially squeezed voters. The indispensable first step, the report argues, is for candidates to signal to voters that they are more focused on their daily economic struggles than any other issue — advice the authors distill into: “Keep the main thing the main thing.”
So great was the public concern about affordability “that voters were really not interested in hearing about a laundry list of other important but not immediately resonant issues,” the memo declares. “The research clearly revealed that talking about anything other than the cost of living left the impression with voters that candidates ‘didn’t get it.’”
The sole exception to that pattern was concern about Trump and his impact on American democracy, Amandi said. “That was certainly viewed differently,” he said. “There were a lot of voters in both (groups) in both states who cited their concerns about threats to democracy and/or their opposition to Trump as the main motivator for their vote.”
But even critiques of Trump, the memo concluded, landed most effectively when they could be connected “into the affordability frame by showing how his policies are directly contributing to the higher costs of living.”
The DNC’s conclusions largely paralleled the results of the SRSS exit polls, which found that voters across racial lines in both states identified economic issues as the most important to their vote. But in those exit surveys, a significant number of Latinos also identified other issues, including immigration, as their top concern.
Rafael Collazo, executive director of UnidosUS Action Fund, which mobilized Latino voters for the Democratic candidates in both states, said the DNC’s conclusions mostly tracked the group’s own experience with voters. “These findings are consistent with what we found,” he said.
The exception, he said, is that, like the exit polls, his group’s outreach found concern about Trump’s deportation agenda to be more of a motivating factor for Latinos than the DNC research did. But even on immigration, Collazo agreed, Latinos tended to see Trump’s focus on deportation as another indication of him slighting their top priority. Latino voters, Collazo said, would often say “not only that we don’t agree with their enforcement policy, but it’s another thing that is taking away from what they should be focused on, which is affordability.”
Beyond the admonition to keep affordability at the center of their agenda, the DNC report also encouraged candidates to describe voters’ financial squeeze in terms that connect to daily life in the most concrete language possible. When these voters talk about their economic challenges, “It’s not your mortgage, it’s your rent. It’s not groceries; it’s food. It’s not utilities; it’s heat. It’s not health care; it’s ‘I can’t pay for my pills,’” said Jill Alper, a Democratic media consultant who worked on the project.
Those findings shaped the language of Democrats in both states. In New Jersey, they influenced the way Democrats — from door-to-door canvassers to Sherrill herself — described the economy, said David Parano, the voter contact director for the party’s coordinated get out the vote campaign. “Making sure we were able to communicate messages in terms that were appropriate … was the most invaluable thing,” he said.
Finally, the report said candidates must offer responses that are as concrete as the anxieties voters feel. The research, Amandi said, signals that laundry-list plans to address affordability are much less likely to land with voters than a small number of very tangible pledges — such as Sherrill’s highly visible promise to freeze utility rates if elected, or Spanberger’s pushback against energy-gobbling artificial intelligence facilities.
“What emerged from this (research) was a formula,” Amandi said. “It wasn’t just you can say: ‘Republicans bad (or) affordability.’ It had to also offer practical solutions to one or two things that people would understand and see how if they voted for this person, it could have an impact on their main concern, which was making life more affordable.”
The DNC plans to encourage candidates around the country to employ these approaches in their campaigns this year. House Democrats are already moving in a similar direction and are likely before November, leadership sources say, to propose a short list of priorities that they will pledge to pass if they regain the majority, just as Democrats did in 2006 (“Six for 06”) and Republicans did in 1994 (the “Contract with America.”)
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in a plan he’s tentatively titled the “You Deserve Better” agenda, has already previewed that the eventual party blueprint will center on affordability, health care and corruption. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has signaled his intent to craft a similar pledge. “Democrats are going to make health care and other high costs — the high cost of living — the number one issue for all of 2026,” Schumer declared last week.
The challenge for Democrats is that the surge of inflation under former President Joe Biden severely damaged the public’s confidence in the party’s ability to manage the economy. Diminishing public confidence in Trump’s performance has allowed Democrats to erase the large advantage the GOP enjoyed on handling the economy when he regained office last January.
But even among the minority voters who have traditionally been a cornerstone of the party’s electoral base, the DNC’s new research indicates Democrats have only started to restore their own economic credibility. Until more minority families feel greater economic security, neither party may feel very secure about their hold on these growing, and increasingly contested, voter groups.