Except for all of the exceptions

 In a recent post, I mentioned a claim that the Republicans had their best performance among minority voters since 1960.  I said it seemed to be "either misleading or simply wrong."  I would probably have forgotten about it, but this morning I saw a column from Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post saying "Trump appears to have won a larger share of the minority vote than any Republican since 1960." (It was dated Nov 5, so I was a few days late).  It included a link to the source (and he deserves credit for that), which was an article in the National Review, which quoted a tweet by someone who I think was described as a Republican strategist, but the original tweet was deleted.  When I looked back this afternoon, the link was no longer there, but there was an "Editor's note":  "An earlier version of this article and headline incorrectly stated that Trump won the largest share of non-white voters of any Republican presidential candidate since 1960. In fact, George W. Bush won a larger share of Hispanic and black voters, and Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Dole matched or eclipsed Trump’s support among blacks." That led me to wonder about the actual changes of the "minority" vote.  Here is a figure, using election polls since 1972:

For Asian-Americans, there is a downward trend in the Republican vote.  (There has been a lot of immigration from Asia, so perhaps it's because the composition of that population has changed).   For blacks and Latino/Latina, no trend.  The Republican vote among blacks was over 15% in 1972 and 1976, and has bounced around between 9% and 12% since then, except when Obama was running.  The Hispanic vote has tracked the non-Hispanic white vote pretty well (correlation of .59), although it has varied more (perhaps because of a smaller sample).  Overall, the general picture is stability in racial/ethnic differences, except for the shift of Asian-Americans.  

As far as the 2020 election, you might regard it as interesting that Trump didn't lose ground among blacks and Latinos, but his performance was not especially good--it was about average for a Republican.  For me, the most interesting thing is why this "fact" got out there so quickly--not just the general point that Trump did better among minority voters in 2020 than in 2016, but the precise but ridiculous claim that it was the best performance since 1960.  

Note (Nov 15):  The figure with the original scale--