In an article out today in the New Republic, John B. Judis argues that the “demographics is destiny” argument has some fatal flaws:
Who?
I think a lot of the late 1990s population projections assumed high fertility rates among “minority” racial groups, which turned out not to be the case. Women all across Latin America are converging on European/North American fertility norms (Mexican women for example have gone from having 7.2 children apiece in 1965 to around 2.25 today, and the fertility rate continues to drop), and that has included Latina women in the US as well. Puerto Rican fertility rates are now lower than non-Hispanic white rates, both on the mainland and especially on the island. Native American fertility is below the white rate too, and African American fertility is about tied with whites. That’s going to have a big effect on pushing the “majority minority” tipping point farther into the future, if it ever happens.
Did Judis take into account expanding rates of mixed-race marriages and children? IIRC, such marriages and children are expanding pretty quickly in the US, and that may make up for at least some of the missed projections based on lower birth rates.
Of course, there’s white and then, there’s white! Willie Nelson is white, Mitt Romney is white! Of course, it must be admitted that the Texas peckerwood is widely admired for intelligence, sophistication and progressive thinking.
Give it up, iiandyii. We’re doomed, nothing but blue skies and sunshine ahead for the Republican Party!
From the article:
This doesn’t seem to address my point, except very indirectly, ISTM.
I read the book over a decade ago.
I really don’t think the author is wrong for the reason the author lists.
Yes we can’t predict future demographics. Maybe blacks will be 90% republican in 2060, who knows. Maybe latinos will all identify as white and vote GOP 60% of the time (in the last election they voted GOP about 28% I think).
But the fundamental argument was that demographic trends would make things favorable to the democrats. A growth in minorities, women (especially single women), millennials and educated professionals would move the political balance to the left.
That happened. The % of the electorate who are minorities, single women, millennials and educated professionals grew. Meanwhile the % who are typical GOP voters (white evangelicals for example) shrank.
Minorities were about 22% of the electorate in 2004, they were 29% in 2016. Also they voted democrat about 80% of the time. Millennials probably went from 10% to 20% in the same time period.
What the authors didn’t predict was how much the white working class (whites w/o a college diploma) would move to the right. In the 1990s, they were evenly split I think. By 2008, they preferred the GOP by 14 points, by 2012 about 28 points, in 2016 around 39 points.
Hillary won about 48 to 46. Had Trump only won the white working class by 14 points like the GOP did in 2008, Hillary would’ve won the popular vote 52 to 42.
So the problem isn’t that the demographic trends aren’t happening. Non-whites, millennials, educated professional, single women, etc. are all growing as a % of the electorate and they are further to the left than the people they are replacing.
The issue is the white working class moved to the right enough to negate a lot of this, and the fact that these demographics are not evenly spread in the country.
California has a supermajority of the democrats, but the midwest is moving to the right. Demographic trends seem to be resulting in one party rule in regional areas and rule by the other party in other areas, not one party rule on the national level.
Also Texas is a majority-minority state, they are still pretty red. Less so than in the past, but still pretty reliably red. So being minority-majority isn’t important if the voter turnout isn’t minority-majority and if the whites vote 80% for one party.
Any argument that starts off with the proposition that the Democratic Party can’t get its act together and produce a coherent strategy or national image has a lot going for it. The ineptitude of the party on the local level has been catastrophic for them, the complacency shown in the 2016 election was as inexplicable as the inability of the party to produce a generation of younger stars in an era where the future is all-important.
But that’s not a numerical argument. More importantly, it’s an argument that looks at only one side of the equation. Where are the Republicans in his article? What is their future likely to be?
Three points are critical. One is that Republicans are busily antagonizing the very voters that Judis is saying may eventually swing to vote for them. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic; nothing he writes indicates any reason for that to change. Hispanics are a much more varied group, but saying that Cuban-Americans tend to be Republican ignores something like 97% of Hispanics. Republican immigration policy affects that group strongly and negatively. Pardoning Joe Arpaio will not be forgotten. People vote against very easily. Right now voting against Republicans is easier to justify than voting for.
Republican demographics are carefully ignored in that article, presumably for the reason that they look very bad. Republican voters tend to be white, rural, older, and evangelical, all groups that are either shrinking in proportion or absolute numbers.
This has not hurt Republicans in the past because they have based their success on the simple bit of math that their voters vote in larger percentages than Democratic demographics. (Democrats will of course argue that Republicans have systemically made it increasingly difficult for those demographics to vote at all, but that’s for another thread.) As I have pointed out elsewhere, the seven percentage point decrease in black voting in 2016 accounts all by itself for Clinton’s margin of loss, both nationally and in the states she was expected to win. Getting those voters back will be difficult, but they’re not going Republican.
Judis ends his article by writing:
Which is basically what most other commentators have been saying. Don’t expect elections to fall into your laps. Get out there and give people a positive reason to vote for you. On an even playing field, the demographics will work to the Democrats’ favor. They just have to stop being stupid. That’s a harder goal than most liberals would like, but it’s eminently doable.
There is nothing wrong with the Democratic Party that a likable candidate with a clear and convincing message wouldn’t cure. Hillary made the mistake of treating the campaign like a legal case or a geometry proof. Voters don’t want seventeen point plans that spell out in exhausting detail what Republicans are going to block in Congress. What voters want are simple answers. They don’t seem to mind if you lie your ass off, just tell them the jobs will magically come back. At the very least make the working class voters feel that you understand their needs. That doesn’t mean cater to racists and white nationalists. Most working class voters aren’t racist and would respond to a hopeful message that doesn’t look like it came out of a think tank. Biden can do this and he would have won easily last year.
I can only imagine that people of Jewish decent are relieved to be considered “white” after Charlottesville. Effectively “white” and mainstream are diverging.
That brings up an interesting point. As was described up-thread, some groups that would have been expected to check the “Asian” or “Latino” box in the past, are moving in the direction of checking the “White” box. This could be for cultural or aspirational reasons, more study would be needed on that. However, I wonder if the recent troubles will impact those individuals who are identifying as “White” in spite of their ethnic heritage? Might there be a backlash, pride identity trend? If “White” becomes associated more strongly with “White Supremacy” might people move away from using that identifier?
Not that difficult. They just need to run a black candidate. Obama was the exception in black turnout and Clinton was a return to the norm. The Democratic party never had these 7% of black voters, Obama did.
Presidential elections are mostly about turnout. There’s a relatively small number of true swing voters and it’s very hard to beat your opponent by a significant margin. The same was true in 2016. True, a significant portion of WWC voters switched from Obama to Trump, but that number was smaller than the number that simply didn’t vote or voted 3rd party. These two cites have good numbers:
I think too much emphasis is placed on race, especially for hispanics. There’s far too many fault lines in the hispanic population, most notably native born Americans vs immigrants. Obviously immigrants are going to be happy about the democrats policies, but native born hispanics are not that much less likely to be a “they took mah job!” type of voter.
In 2004, Latinos were 8% of the electorate and they voted for the GOP candidate by 44%. In 2016 they were 11% of the electorate and they voted for the GOP candidate by 28%.
2004 was an aberration, latinos generally prefer the GOP candidate by around ~25-35%. Bush made some outreaches to them and did better than most GOP candidates because of it, but going back decades latinos have hovered around this margin of 25-35% GOP and normally about 60-70% democrat.
Could that change? Yes it could. But for now, with the xenophobic white nationalist base of the GOP taking on a bigger and bigger role in the GOP’s politics, I don’t forsee a mass influx of latinos into the GOP for the time being.
Indeed, the whole method of collecting EEO identifier is a dog’s breakfast, and always has been. Is it race (White, African American)? Or geography (Asian/Pacific Islander - there’s broad brush - is a blond blue-eyed Russian considered Asian)? Heritage (American Indian/Alaskan Native)? The whole Latino/Hispanic identifier… It’s a mess.
I’ve been told by political statisticians that the biggest fault line in the Latino population (well, not including the divisions by country: Dominicans are the most D, Cubans the most R) is by religion. Catholic and nonreligious Latinos tend Democratic, Protestant Latinos are about 50/50. (Some people are unaware of Protestant conversion, but it’s a big trend both in Latin America and in Latinos in the USA).
That may be true, and it may be a good tactic in 2020. It doesn’t say anything about the long term trends of the party as whole. People tend to be reductionistic about presidential elections. The Democrats need to start winning Congressional, gubernatorial, state, and local elections in the redder states as well. Their only tactic can’t merely be running black candidates.
This all seems somewhat circular in the context of the OP and linked article. The whole point of the claim is that fewer and fewer people of Hispanic descent are thinking of themselves as “Hispanic” and more are thinking of themselves as “white”. But the polls you’re quoting are showing percentages of those people who do think of themselves as “Hispanic”. So pointing to the relative percentages within that category misses the point of the argument - essentially amounts to assuming that it’s incorrect.
Of course, as you note, the percentage of people in the US who do identify as “Hispanic” has increased over time as a share of the vote. But that’s over a time period which has had enormous Hispanic immigration to this country, so a relatively high percentage have not been here long enough to lose that identity. Question is whether that’s likely to continue.
Similar issue here.
The notion that a major base on the GOP is “xenophobic white nationalist” is your own assessment. I don’t agree, and many others similarly disagree. The key question here is how many people of Hispanic origin are likely to agree. And here again the key issue is what percentage of these people see themselves primarily as “Hispanic”. To the extent that some of these people begin to think of themselves as white Americans, then their attitudes - including their attitudes about what you call “xenophobic white nationalist” - might resemble those of other white Americans.