The Democratic Party Is Losing Its Hold on Minority Voters

John Burn-Murdoch writes a data analysis column for the Financial Times and what he’s found in recent polling is evidence that the Democratic Party is losing its hold on minority voters. He calls it a “racial realignment” and the numbers seem to back that up.

Last week, a New York Times poll showed President Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by just 56 points to 44 among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points when the two men last fought it out for the White House in 2020. As things stand, the Democrats are going backwards faster with voters of colour than any other demographic.

This chart shows how the partisan leanings of non-white voters have changed over time. As you can see, there’s a big swing toward parity over the last 4 years.

NEW 🧵:

American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.

I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood. pic.twitter.com/QeRsuMSKaL

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

Democrats continue to gain among white college grads while minority voters are moving away from them.

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

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

And that leads to this rather startling graph showing that among black Americans, it’s older voters who are most committed to Democrats while younger voters are less committed to the party.

The oldest Black Americans, whose political allegiances were formed in the 1960s and ’70s, identify as Dems over Reps by a margin of 82%.

Among the youngest Black voters, who have grown up in a very different socio-political environment, the Democrat advantage is just 33% pic.twitter.com/QpmBOk7MUE

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

Something similar is happening with regard to the class divide. The wealthiest Americans now side with Democrats while the poorest are moving toward the center.

But fading memories and increased competition for working class votes are fixable problems.

As long as these voters’ values remain fundamentally aligned with those of the Democratic party, the right person, policy, or rhetoric can win them back.

However…

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

As he says, some of these problems are fixable from the Democrats’ point of view but not all:

More ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic: many of America’s non-white voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest. The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party…

History, culture and community have long overridden this misalignment between non-white conservatives’ policy positions and party choice. As recently as 2012, three in four Black self-identified conservatives were Democrats, but that has fallen to less than half. These voters won’t be won back by a bold environmental policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is likely as it corrects.

In other words, some of these conservative minorities probably aren’t coming back. Burn-Murdoch also cites a book titled “Steadfast Democrats” which found that many black Americans hold views usually associated with the Republican Party.

Take deeply conservative positions like support for gun rights, opposition to abortion or the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives.

Very few white voters with these views identify as Dems, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do. pic.twitter.com/VHQZx9Z97L

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

And the point is that this commitment to the Democratic Party despite holding conservative views seems to be eroding now. And once these voters go, they probably won’t be coming back. On the contrary (and this is just my own speculation) I suspect once it becomes more common for conservative black and Latino Americans to break from the Democratic Party, more black and Latino voters will think about doing likewise.

Once you realise this, the Dem -> Rep migration among non-white voters that we’ve seen in recent years becomes not so much a case of natural Democrats drifting away because they’ve become disillusioned, but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

You can actually see minority conservatives breaking away from the Democratic Party in this series of graphs going back to 2012. Note that the X axis here is ideology so you would expect the graph to look something like an S-shape if people are voting according to their actual beliefs. That’s how the graph for white voters looks and over time Latino and black voters have been approaching that same pattern.

But just look at the realignment since then:

Latino conservatives are now a very solidly Republican group, and Black conservatives favoured Republicans over Democrats for the first time in 2022.

All groups are increasingly matching vote choice to ideology. pic.twitter.com/7YSmmBdwm1

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

Finally, there’s this really interesting graph that explains why this happens gradually (and why it’s happening now). It turns out that there is a kind of group pressure to vote for the Democratic Party which is enforced so long as most of your friends are part of the same race/ethnicity. But once people have friends outside that race/ethnicity their commitment to the party drops off. I guess you could say that a kind of self-imposed segregation is propping up the Democratic Party.

I’ve extended their analysis and I find the same thing, with a similar effect among Latinos.

When people have more diverse social groups, there’s less social pressure to vote for the dominant party in the community, so non-white conservatives feel they can vote Republican. pic.twitter.com/0TNPowqbuK

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

The author’s conclusion is that while nothing is guaranteed, the minority drift away from Democrats isn’t something they can easily fix with new messaging.

But if you take one thing away from this thread:

The left’s challenge with non-white voters is much deeper than it first appears.

A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity. This is a big challenge for Dems.

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024

And I would just add that if the success of the Democratic Party is based on people voting their identity, it makes a lot of sense that identity politics has surged on the left at the same time. On the one hand this serves as a kind of demand that minorities continue to vote their identity over their beliefs. On the other hand it may actually be driving the realignment as more minority voters look at the stark claims of identity/woke politics and reject them outright.