Aren’t voters white Really leaving the Democratic Party? It seems preposterous to partisan Democrats asking this question on Twitter (sorry, X) that the party of former President Donald Trump, whom they routinely call a racist, could gain the support of Blacks, Latinos and Asians.
But the evidence that non-white support for Democrats is weakening is mighty. New York Times analyst Nate Cohn, who first noted Trump’s appeal among white college graduates who had previously voted Democratic in June 2016, noted earlier this month that President Joe Biden transported just 53% of people of color other than white. 2022-2023 New York Times/Siena College Polls – well below the 70%-plus he scored among these voters in November 2020.
The decline is stark among both blacks and Latinos, men and women, college graduates and non-college graduates. It is concentrated among non-whites under the age of 45, suggesting this is a long-term problem for Democrats. This is consistent with the thesis of Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini in his forthcoming book “Party of the People,” which describes an emerging “multi-racial populist” Republican Party.
To many liberals shouting that such a trend is impossible, Cohn responded by pointing out that at this point in the election cycle, Biden is underperforming other Democrats and his own 2020 results.
Apparently, as The Washington Post’s libertarian columnist Megan McArdle writes, “many people simply cannot emotionally comprehend the possibility of a Democratic Party that was not a majority working class/organized labor/nonwhite voter coalition, with a small minority of wealthy liberals.” , though influential, addition.” Similarly, my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney describes the resistance of “economic liberals” to acknowledging the self-proclaimed Democratic lean of corporate management.
The image of wealthy businessmen on one side of the partisan divide and blistered workers on the other may be familiar to 1970s-born writers like McArdle and Carney, Michigan dominated by the Big Three and the UAW in the 1950s. Seeing yourself as a selfless supporter of the working masses warms many liberal hearts.1
But this economic division was only one of several stages, as I argued in my 2017 book How America’s Political Party Change (and How They Don’t) , most of which were based on demographics – geography , ethnicity, race, region, religion – more than economics.
A common pattern is that as one demographic group shifts toward one party, another group with opposing views shifts toward the other. What attracts one group repels another. Sometimes it takes some time. Historically, the question to begin this column might be: Are voters other than white? At last leaving the Democratic Party?
After all, it had been 59 years since Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when blacks began voting almost unanimously for Democrats. That’s a little less than 70 years after Abraham Lincoln’s passage of the 13th Amendment, when blacks almost unanimously supported the Republicans.
Members of demographic groups stop voting in near-unanimity as the aged issues that united them fade and fresh ones that divided them emerge. New issues that have been shifting white party loyalties for some time may also affect non-whites.
It is now common knowledge, as I wrote at the time, that white college graduates from outside the million-plus metro areas who voted for Barack Obama twice switched to Trump in sufficient numbers in 2016 to swing electoral votes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa.
As University of Virginia Policy Center analyst Kyle Kondik wrote this month, this movement of lower-tier voters is also evidenced by the widening divergence in partisan preferences between high- and low-population counties.
Kondik writes that similar widening disparities between vast and petite counties occurred in 2000, when white Scots-Irish Appalachians, who were trending Republican, enabled George W. Bush to take power in West Virginia, Tennessee and Arkansas, which twice voted for Clinton-Gore. Trump didn’t start a smaller-scale Republican trend; he sped it up.
It is essential to note that these withering trends were accompanied by Democratic Party swings among upper-class voters between 2006–2008 and 2018–2020. This process continues as racial/ethnic issues become less essential for some non-whites and shift toward Republicans for reasons similar to those for non-college whites.
All of this leaves us sharply divided between the two parties – with major polls showing the two unpopular presidents heading toward renomination, and current polls showing Trump running even with Biden.
That doesn’t guarantee him victory, Cohn argues, because a trend of nonwhites toward Republicans can only shrink Democratic margins in unthreatening Democratic states, while other trends leave Trump slightly behind in target states like in 2020. Maybe so. But a reliable Democratic (or Republican) majority seems out of reach, as it has been for most of the 169 years of competition.
