Positive Aspect of Trump Era

[ThorneStockton]

The racial polarization of the parties is narrowing. People of color are less and less, rock solid Democrats. Republicans aren't just whites. To me, that's a good thing, even if it may be for frustrating reasons, and bad news if you're dreading another Trump presidency. Politics are already extremely nasty, but at least it's less and less of an appearance of a "race war".

Sparked by today's morning newsletter:

Race and Politics​

We’re covering the rightward shift among voters of color.

After Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, many political scientists and pundits came forth with a simple explanation. Trump had won, they said, because of white Americans’ racial resentment.

These analysts looked at surveys and argued that the voters who had allowed Trump to win were distinguished not by social class, economic worries or any other factor but by their racial fears. “Another study shows Trump won because of racial anxieties — not economic distress,” as a typical headline, in The Intercept, put it.

I never found this argument to be persuasive. Yes, race played a meaningful role in Trump’s victory, given his long history of remarks demeaning people of color. But politics is rarely monocausal. And there were good reasons — including Barack Obama’s earlier success with Trump voters — to believe that the 2016 election was complex, too.

Eight years later, the “it’s all racial resentment” argument doesn’t look merely questionable. It looks wrong.

Skewed polls?​

Since Trump’s victory, a defining feature of American politics has been the rightward shift of voters of color. Asian, Black and Hispanic voters have all become less likely to support Democratic candidates and more likely to support Republicans, including Trump.
In each group, the trend is pronounced among working-class voters, defined as those without a four-year college degree. (The Democrats’ performance among nonwhite voters with a college degree has held fairly stable.)
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If anything, Democrats’ weakness among voters of colors appears to have intensified since 2022. Among white voters, President Biden has about as much support as he did four years ago, Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has pointed out. But Biden’s support among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters has plummeted. (My colleagues Jennifer Medina and Ruth Igielnik focused on the Latino shift in a recent article.)

This chart compares the 2020 results with the findings from the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll:
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Credit...By The New York Times | Sources: Catalist (2020) and New York Times/Siena College poll (2024)
As John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter at The Financial Times, wrote last week: “I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the U.S. today, and one of the most poorly understood.”
This newsletter is the first of a two-part series about the development. Today, I hope to convince you that the trend is real and not simply, as some Democrats hope, a reflection of inaccurate poll numbers. In part two, I’ll look more closely at the likely causes.

Young populists​

It’s true that polls are not the same as elections, and Biden may improve his standing by November. With far more campaign cash than Trump, Biden will have a chance to frame the election as a choice between the two, rather than a referendum on the country’s condition.
But the evidence for the trend is much stronger than the 2024 polls. A decade ago, many Democrats assumed that the extremely high levels of support they received from voters of color during Obama’s presidency would continue. They haven’t. In 2022, for instance, the party’s disappointing performance among nonwhite voters helped Republicans win the national popular vote in House elections. This year, Biden may need to improve on the party’s 2022 showing — which would be vastly different from what polls now show — to win re-election.
“There’s been a lot of whistling past the graveyard about this,” Nate Silver wrote in his newsletter about the trend. “Dems ought to invest more time in figuring out why this is happening instead of hoping that the polls are skewed.”

The most helpful frame is social class. In many ways, the rightward shift of voters of color is surprising, given this country’s history of racial politics. I certainly did not expect the Trump era to feature a narrowing of racial polarization.

But when viewed through a class lens, the shift makes more sense. In much of the world, working-class voters, across racial groups, have become attracted to a populism that leans right while sometimes including left-wing economic ideas, such as trade restrictions. This populism is skeptical of elites, political correctness, high levels of immigration and other forms of globalization.


Today’s populists “are more diverse than the stereotypical ‘angry old white men’ who, we are frequently told, will soon be replaced by a new generation of tolerant Millennials,” Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin, two British scholars of politics, have written. Indeed, Democrats today particularly struggle with young voters of color, Nate Cohn has explained.

The old racial-resentment story about Trump’s victory was alluring to many progressives because it absolved them of responsibility. If Trump’s appeal was all about racism, there was no honorable way for Democrats to win back their previous supporters.

The true story is both more challenging and more hopeful. The multiracial, predominantly working-class group of Americans who have soured on mainstream politics and modern liberalism are not all hateful and ignorant. They are frustrated, and their political loyalties are up for grabs.

 

[tarheelbybirth]

Stupidity doesn't have color boundaries.

 

[ThorneStockton]

Understandably not a popular topic. Today's newsletter is part two:

How Peer Pressure Affects Voting​

Why some voters of color no longer support the Democratic Party.

The political scientists Chryl Laird and Ismail White used a creative strategy several years ago to study the voting patterns of Black Americans. Laird and White took advantage of the fact that some surveys are conducted through in-person interviews — and keep track of the interviewer’s race — while other surveys are done online.

In the online surveys that Laird and White examined, about 85 percent of Black respondents identified as Democrats. The share was almost identical during in-person surveys done by non-Black interviewers. But when Black interviewers conducted in-person surveys, more than 95 percent of Black respondents identified as Democrats.

It is a fascinating pattern: Something about talking with a person of the same race makes Black Americans more likely to say they are Democrats. As Laird and White concluded, voting for Democrats has been a behavioral norm in Black communities. People feel social pressure from their neighbors, relatives and friends to support the Democratic Party.

Similar social pressure exists in other communities, of course. A liberal who attends a white evangelical Southern church — or a conservative who lives in an upscale Brooklyn neighborhood — knows the feeling. And Laird and White emphasized in their 2020 book, “Steadfast Democrats,” that Black Americans have behaved rationally by sticking together. It has allowed them to assert political influence despite being a minority group. Consider that President Biden’s vice president and his only Supreme Court pick are both Black.

Still, the political unity of Black Americans is surprising in some ways. “Although committed to the Democratic Party, African Americans are actually one of the most conservative blocs of Democratic supporters,” White and Laird wrote.

One important thing about behavioral norms, though, is that they can change. If voting Republican becomes more acceptable in Black communities, the number of moderate and conservative Black Americans who do so could rise quickly.

Ideology vs. identity​

This newsletter is the second in a two-part series on the recent rightward shift of Black, Asian and Hispanic voters. Today, I want to look at possible explanations.

The first is the social dynamic that White and Laird described. It also applies to Asian and Hispanic voters. Across minority groups, voting Republican recently seems to have become more acceptable.

“Nonwhite Americans who previously may have voted Democrat for identity-based reasons are increasingly likely to vote more sincerely according to their conservative ideology,” Emily West, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, told Thomas Edsall of Times Opinion.
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Credit...By The New York Times | Source: Gallup

The second explanation is that today’s Democratic Party is out of step with the views of many voters of color, especially working-class voters. On some issues, the problem fits a simple right-left framing: Democrats are to the left of most voters.
Even when elected Democrats are more moderate, the party’s image is shaped by highly educated progressives who have an outsize voice because they dominate higher education, the entertainment industry and parts of the media and nonprofit sectors. It’s worth remembering, as the Pew Research Center has reported, that the most liberal slice of Americans is disproportionately white:

Credit...By The New York Times | Source: Pew Research Center

Voters of color are often more moderate. They are more religious on average than progressive Democrats. Most voters of color favor tighter border security. Many support expansions of charter schools or vouchers. Many favor both police reform and more policing. Many support civil rights for trans Americans — but not allowing all athletes to choose whether they participate in female or male sports.
Racial minorities, as Marc Hetherington of the University of North Carolina told Thomas Edsall, “are much more tradition-minded and authority-minded” than white Democrats.

Other political issues are more nuanced than a right-left framing. Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, has suggested that voters of color may be frustrated with his party’s lack of a bold economic vision, and that’s plausible. Many working-class voters lean to the right on social issues and to the left on economic issues (but not so far left as to be intrigued by socialism). They favor a higher minimum wage, trade restrictions and expanded government health insurance.

Biden favors these policies, too. But Democrats have come to be seen as the party of the establishment, my colleague Nate Cohn notes. Many working-class voters see Democrats as socially liberal defenders of the status quo. Republicans, especially Donald Trump, increasingly seem to represent change, as ill-defined as that change may be.

Political diversity​

My list here isn’t exhaustive. (Here is Nate’s list.) Some voters of color, like white voters, also seem frustrated by recent price increases and worried about Biden’s age. And voters of color are obviously a politically diverse group, who include many liberals and who have a wide array of views.

But that’s the point. Many Democrats have imagined people of color to be a uniform, loyal, progressive group, defined by their race. They are not. The party will have a better chance to win their votes if it spends more time listening to what these voters believe.