Russell Contreras, the Justice and Race reporter at Axios (and before that on a similar beat at AP for many years) looks at a number of polling trends to analyze “Democrats’ big vulnerability: Why they’re losing Black, Hispanic voters.“
The topline result will be familiar to OTB readers, as we’ve been discussing this for a few years now:
New data shows that Democrats’ longtime advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years — creating a massive vulnerability for President Biden and congressional Democrats.
Why it matters: One of the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition is suddenly in danger. Black and Hispanic men could vote Republican in numbers not seen since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in the 1950s.
The big picture: Latinos, the nation’s largest non-white group, still lean Democratic. But they’ve been shifting Republican over the last two decades, and are no longer the slam-dunk Democrats they were in 1960 when JFK ran for president.
By the numbers: Democrats’ advantage among Black, Latino and Asian voters is at its lowest since 1960, Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch found by analyzing a massive set of polling data.
- A New York Times/Siena College poll out March 2 found that President Biden led former President Trump by just 56 points to 44 among non-white Americans.
- That’s a group Biden won by almost 50 points when the two men last fought it out for the White House in 2020, Burn-Murdoch points out.
The intrigue: The drop-off comes even after Trump made several racist and bigoted comments about immigrants and people of color.
- It also comes after some Democratic talking heads predicted for years that racial and ethnic demographic shifts would give Democrats a political majority for decades.
To be sure, the drop-off can be overstated: Blacks remain overwhelmingly Democratic and Hispanics are still more Democratic than Republican. Still, the trends are real and persist over a number of polls. The topline graphic Contreras uses is built on a quarter century of Gallup polling:
Last month’s Gallup takeaway on this matter (“Democrats Lose Ground With Black and Hispanic Adults“) noted:
- The Democratic Party’s wide lead over Republicans in Black Americans’ party preferences has shrunk by nearly 20 points over the past three years.
- Democrats’ leads among Hispanic adults and adults aged 18 to 29 have slid nearly as much, resulting in Democrats’ holding only a modest edge among both groups.
- Whereas Democrats were at parity with Republicans among men as recently as 2009, and among non-college-educated adults as recently as 2019, they are now in the red with both groups.
We’ve been speculating for quite some time 1) whether this is somehow a false reading, owing to skewed polling (I highly doubt it) and 2) how this could possibly be the case, given the Trump/MAGA explicit appeal to White nationalists. Contreras offers this:
Between the lines: “Part of this is due to fading memories and weakening ties. Black Americans who lived through the civil rights era still support the party at very high levels, but younger generations are wavering,” Burn-Murdoch writes.
- Many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest, he said.
Reality check: Not all people of color have deep ties to the Civil Rights Movement. Many of their families arrived in the U.S. after the 1960s, said Republican consultant Mike Madrid, who’s based in Sacramento.
- Madrid said the Latino population was small during the Civil Rights era. Today, few children of immigrants who came after the 1960s know who civil rights leaders Gus Garcia, Héctor P. García or Dolores Huerta are.
- “Democrats cannot conceive that non-white voters are anything other than civil rights voters,” he said. “In their mind, all Latinos need to be taught to like farmworkers or the undocumented. Even though that’s less than 95% of us.”
“Hispanic” has always been an odd grouping for this purpose, as Mexicans fleeing poverty, Cubans fleeing Communism, and immigrants from Spain have little in common aside from linguistic heritage.* And it makes sense that, six decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Blacks would have moved beyond being united by old grievances. Indeed, that’s a very good thing, indeed, even though the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow are still with us.
I’m not seeing crosstabs on the above-linked Gallup poll. I’d be interested in seeing the relationship between race and sex here. My strong guess is that the Republican shift among Blacks and Hispanics is predominantly among men.
There has clearly been something of a small-r realignment of our parties that accelerated under but predates Trump. The GOP started a populist shift with the rise of the Tea Party in the 2010 cycle and the progressive wing of the Democrats started taking back power from the New Democrat wing as early as Barack Obama’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2008 but certainly with the ascendency of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders over the next three or four years.
The upshot was that Democrats became the party of the college-educated while Republicans gained a larger share of the “working class.” While this was predominantly a resorting of White voters, we’ve seen some of this with Black and Hispanic voters as well.
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*The Gallup polling at least has the advantage of separating non-Hispanic Whites and Blacks, creating three major racial categories rather than overlapping racial/ethnic ones.
