Hey wait a fricken minute. I'm a minority. That's right an oppressed Jew; a very influential wealthy one at that. Are you listening to me? And my brothers and sisters are clearly moving towards the left! Why...because we feel guilty about having too much gelt*.
*For you gentiles reading this, "gelt" meaning money.
A political misdiagnosis
By David Leonhardt, NY Times
Oct 14, 2024
The Democratic Party has spent years hoping that demography would equal destiny. As the country became more racially diverse, Democrats imagined that they would become the majority party thanks to support from Asian, Black and Hispanic voters. The politics of America, according to this vision, would start to resemble the liberal politics of California.
It’s not working out that way. Instead, Americans of color have moved to the right over the past decade.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll offers detailed evidence. The poll reached almost 1,500 Black and Hispanic Americans, far more than most surveys do. (Our poll didn’t focus on Asian voters, but they have shifted, too.)
A key fact is that the rightward drift is concentrated among working-class voters, defined as those without a four-year college degree:
On a chart, four red arrows show how Kamala Harris's margins of support from Hispanic and Black voters have shrunk compared with Hillary Clinton's margins.
By The New York Times | Sources: Catalist (2016 election) and New York Times/Siena College poll (Oct. 2024)
I know that many Democrats find this pattern to be maddening. They wonder how voters of color could have moved right during the era of Donald Trump, a man with a long history of racism. But the chart above points to a partial explanation: For most Americans, race is a less significant political force than many progressives believe it is — and economic class is more significant.
Most isn’t enough
The past four years have highlighted the ways that Democrats exaggerate the political importance of racial identity. Joe Biden, after all, promised to nominate the first Black female Supreme Court justice (which he did) and chose Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president — who has now succeeded him as the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris has less support from Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Biden also adopted the sort of welcoming immigration policies that Democrats have long believed Hispanic voters support. He loosened border rules early in his term, which helped millions of people enter the country. In spite of that change — or maybe partly because of it — Democrats have also lost Hispanic support.
Harris is still winning most voters of color. But the Democratic Party typically needs landslide margins among these groups to win elections. Today, a significant share of them view the Democratic Party with deep skepticism — roughly one in five Black voters, two in five Hispanic voters and one in three Asian voters, polls suggest.
Elite vibes
Their skepticism is linked to class in two main ways. First, most working-class voters are frustrated with the economy, having experienced sluggish income growth for decades. (Black men have especially struggled, Charles Coleman Jr. wrote in a Times Opinion essay, and Black men have shifted right more than Black women.)
The years just before the Covid pandemic — the end of Barack Obama’s presidency and the first three years of Trump’s — were a happy exception, when wages rose broadly. But the inflation during Biden’s presidency further angered many people. In our poll, only 21 percent of Hispanic working-class voters said that Biden’s policies helped them personally, compared with 38 percent who said Trump’s policies did.
More generally, many voters have come to see the Democratic Party as the party of the establishment. That may sound vague and vibesy, but it’s real. Trump’s disdain for the establishment appeals to dissatisfied voters of all races. As my colleague Nate Cohn points out, a sizable minority of Black and Hispanic voters think “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”
The Democrats’ second big problem is that they have wrongly imagined voters of colors to be classic progressives. In reality, the most left-wing segment of the population is heavily white, the Pew Research Center has found. While white Democrats have become even more liberal in recent decades, many working-class voters of color remain moderate to conservative.
These voters say crime is a major problem, for instance. They are uncomfortable with the speed of change on gender issues (which helps explain why Trump is running so many ads that mention high school trans athletes). On foreign policy, Black and Hispanic voters have isolationist instincts, with the Times poll showing that most believe the U.S. “should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.”
Immigration may be the clearest example. Many voters of color are unhappy about the high immigration of the last few years. They worry about the impact on their communities and worry that new arrivals are unfairly skipping the line. In our poll, more than 40 percent of Black and Hispanic voters support “deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries.” Support for a border wall was similar:
Red and blue charts show varying levels of support for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. By The New York Times | Source: New York Times/Siena College poll (Oct. 2024)
Multiracial similarities
The bad news for Democrats is that they adopted the wrong diagnosis of the American electorate. It is not divided neatly by race, in which people of color are overwhelmingly similar to one another and liberal. That misdiagnosis has been a gift to Republicans.
The good news for Democrats is that some of their weaknesses — with white, Hispanic, Black and Asian voters alike — overlap. If the party can find a way to stem its losses with voters of color, it may also win back a slice of white working-class voters. Remember: Americans without a bachelor’s degree still make up about 65 percent of U.S. adults. The share is even higher in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Comments