It’s a problem that continues to worry Democrats. Just a decade ago it was widely believed that their lock on growing minority demographics meant that the Democratic party had a future so bright they needed to wear shades. But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. On the contrary, support for the Democratic Party seems to get weaker each election. It raises an obvious question this year: Is it Democrats that are losing support or is it just Joe Biden?
President Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump.
On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.
The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters. If he’s unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.
Here’s a graph created by the NY Times which shows the decline:
Nate Cohn, the author of the piece, doesn’t assume that soft support for Biden automatically translates to increased support for Trump (or whoever winds up facing Biden in the general election). But it almost doesn’t matter. People don’t have to flip sides to spoil Biden’s chances at reelection, they just have to decide to stay home. So what is it that will rile up these voters? Cohn says it may not be the issues Democrats are counting on.
Issues like abortion and threats to democracy may also do less to guard against additional losses among Black and Hispanic voters, who tend to be more conservative than white Biden voters.
The same series of polls that show Biden losing minority support show him gaining support from whites. That may seem counterintuitive given how openly hostile the Democratic Party is to whites these days, i.e. all the talk about white supremacy. But it makes sense if you think of the sort of woke, white progressives who make up 1/3 or 1/2 the Democratic Party these days. The more abuse the left heaps on woke white people, the more they like it.
There’s definitely an education gap as well, with minorities who attended college being much more likely to support Biden than those who did not. The Republican party is increasingly becoming the home of blue-collar workers and that’s true among minority groups as well.
One clear gap is generational. Minority voters over age 45 are ten points more likely to support Biden than those under 45. Among black voters that generational gap is more than 20 points.
Cohn doesn’t delve into why this is happening and there will no doubt be lots of explanations offered. The overall shift in minority support away from Democrats seems to have happened over the past 10 years, about the same time that what we now refer to as wokeness became more prominent on the left, especially among young people. And yet, as mentioned above, it’s minorities under 45 who are drifting away from the Democrats, not the older voters.
So one possibility is that younger minority voters are so much more progressive now than they were a decade ago that Joe Biden just looks far too moderate to gain their support.
On the other hand, I wonder if this isn’t a case of wokeness creating as many enemies as it does friends. It would make sense that younger minority voters would be the ones who’ve encountered woke politics personally, either at college or in the workplace with younger colleagues. And chances are that a lot of the people they encountered promoting these ideas were young, white progressives. I don’t think you can underestimate the ability of something like “Latinx” to turn people away from someone’s politics.
In other words, maybe younger minority voters are turning away from Democrats because they can see what the party is becoming and they don’t like it. That would also explain why we’re not seeing a significant jump in support for Republicans. Minority Democrats aren’t being won over by the GOP so much as they’re being repelled by the changes in the Democratic party.
Read the full article here