Both anecdotal and objective evidence show that there has been a pretty dramatic shift in attitudes among minority voters, and most especially among Hispanics and Black voters.
For generations, these voters have reflexively voted for Democrats, to the point that the correlation between their ideological commitments and their voting patterns hardly matched. Cultural affiliation, not ideological consistency, kept these voters in the “D” column, and it seemed nothing could shake that connection.
Nothing, except the rapid left-wing shift of the Democrats and the utter failure of Joe Biden’s presidency. And, of course, Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic political style runs counter to the old Republican way of behaving. Since 2016 I have joked that Donald Trump is a White rapper, and that finally seems to have been noticed in the Black community.
Earlier this week, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times posted a thread that purported to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he termed a “racial realignment”. If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it’s been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here is the graphic that kicked it off:
It’s worth reading the whole thread. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are particularly bad for Democrats among working-class voters of color, and younger ones. Many Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters have long identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, and Burn-Murdoch theorizes that Democrats’ tilt toward more liberal policies (though I’d prefer to call them “left” or “progressive” rather than “liberal”) is catching up with them, especially as memory of the Civil Rights Era fades.
The thread triggered its share of responses from the usual suspects, part of a recent pattern of poll denialism among Democrats that has crept its way into even the White House. And it’s true that there are some things you could critique. Burn-Murdoch is mixing and matching data from different polls, and the observation from 2024 is based solely on the recent New York Times / Siena College poll, which has a relatively small sample size; I’d rather that he’d have taken an average of different surveys.
But it turns out that using a broader range of polls doesn’t make much difference. If you believe the polls (and your own experience in the world) it sure seems like minority voters’ attachment to the Democrat Party has loosened a heck of a lot. Burn-Murdoch’s observation seems to hold, no matter how you look at the data.
People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.
High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years. pic.twitter.com/XsYGvHS7B9
This really shouldn’t surprise us, given the radical shift in cultural attitudes exhibited by Democrats, compounded by the fact that minorities benefited greatly from Donald Trump’s policies. Democrats fooled themselves into believing their own propaganda about Trump’s supposed racism, but Trump has spent decades doing business and socializing with Blacks and definitely doesn’t appear to pander to them.
Whatever else you can say about Trump, what you see is what you get, and that is not the feeling that most Blacks get with Democrats anymore.
The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor.
In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities pic.twitter.com/OAgWCI92uB
In any case, the shift itself is in many ways less interesting to me at the moment than how Democrats are responding to the evidence that it exists. Silver has taken a huge beating online because he concurs with Burn-Murdoch (few Americans know who he is, but everybody knows Silver), and Silver rightly sees in this a huge blind spot among Democrats.
They simply can’t wrap their heads around the fact that as the Party aligned itself with overeducated White liberals who are obsessed with virtue signaling more than being decent people, members of the working class would become alienated. This is not a natural coalition, especially because the driving force in the Democrat coalition is allegiance to a radical cultural ideology that is utterly alien to anybody who hasn’t marinated in Elite educational circles.
Silver expanded his analysis by answering a simple question, the answer to which the Democrats do not want to hear: is this plausible, or are we seeing bad polling data?
The answer is: it is more than plausible, because we have natural experiments that prove this out.
Starr County is 98 percent Hispanic — the most of any county in the country outside of Puerto Rico — which makes it a uniquely valuable data point. There are no possible problems with ecological inference — misconstruing the behavior of individuals or particular subgroups from aggregate data — when basically everyone there is Hispanic. Starr County is also quite poor, in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, so it’s a particularly good place to look for patterns among working-class Hispanics. And what’s happening there ought to be frightening to Democrats. Here are the presidential election results in Starr County from 2008 through 2020:
I’ve charted these as the total number of votes rather than just the vote margin, because that’s really what tells the story. Biden received about as many votes in Starr County as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, or as Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012. But Trump surged from receiving 2218 votes in 2016 to 8247 votes, almost four times as many, in 2020. I’ve rarely seen anything like that, especially in the contemporary American political landscape where partisan preferences tend to be relatively stable. Turnout was much higher in Starr County in 2020 — but those new voters came out overwhelmingly for Trump, contradicting the longstanding belief that Democrats benefit from higher turnout among minority groups. The shift of the Hispanic vote in South Texas has undermined Democrats’ dreams of turning Texas blue, or at least purple, offsetting gains that Democrats have made in the Houston, Dallas and Austin metro areas.
The Biden campaign’s theory is that the apparent shift in minority attitudes will not be duplicated on election day and that they can still count on rock-solid support from the core members of their electoral coalition. Silver thinks they are whistling in the dark.
This doesn’t mean that Silver thinks Biden is doomed–who can say at this point, or any other until the votes are counted? but as with Hillary Clinton, who bet her campaign on a Blue Wall that crumbled, Biden’s campaign is likely overconfident based on flawed assumptions.
Anybody who has followed politics is intimately familiar with being fooled by flawed assumptions and belief in poll skewing. I certainly have been more than once, so it is hardly implausible that even seasoned political pros could be taken in by a failure to recognize a seismic shift in culture and politics.
Again, Clinton was. And every single political observer was in 2016. Most of us were similarly shaken by the 2022 results, which didn’t play out as expected by most observers.
Democrat election victories, at least at the national level and in competitive races, have been driven by a savvy strategy of turning out reliable voting blocs and, more particularly, harvesting votes from non-likely voters. Most of those non-likely voters are minorities.
Even with exceptional performance, the Democrats lost in 2016 and barely won in 2020 in the electoral college. If some significant fraction of the people they turn out don’t vote for Democrats anymore, chances are that this strategy will be a bust for them in 2024.
There is a lot more to chew on in Silver’s analysis, and a host of other analysts who have detected this same trend. Ruy Teixeira, who in the 2000s predicted a permanent Democrat majority based on demographic trends now sees Democrats as alienating their natural base.
We’ll see. This is something that I personally believe, but perhaps that is confirmation bias.
