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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Racial Realignment

Andrew Stiles at the Washington Free Beacon draws attention to a notable trend among Democrat voters - many non-white Democrats no longer feel they belong in the Democrat party.

Stiles cites an article by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times (paywall) in which Burn-Murdoch "analyzed political polling data to explain why current trends among minority voters are 'bad news for Democrats,' " and notes that,
According to the numbers, the Democratic Party's historical advantage with non-white voters has declined significantly in recent years. A New York Times poll published earlier this month found that President Joe Biden led presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump by just 12 percentage points among non-white voters, a group he won by nearly 50 percentage points in 2020.
Democrats must be deeply alarmed by this statistic. Democrats need minority voters since according to a piece at Axios Democrats comprise only 38% of the white vote.

One reason for the shift...
...is that Democrats have become the party of the rich. They represent the policy views of Ivy League-educated professionals who use terms such as "Latinx" and "people of color," as opposed to the views of working-class voters who happen to be black or Latino.

These voters tend to be far more conservative politically but have supported Democrats in the past based on social pressures that are rapidly eroding, Burn-Murdoch argued.
This is an interesting point. The reason many minorities voted Democrat in in the past is not because the candidates aligned with the voter's own outlook on the world but because there was strong social pressure to do so. As Joe Biden infamously declared in a 2020 interview, if an African-American votes Republican then he or she "ain't black."

Stiles adds that,
In 2012, for example, roughly 80 percent of black voters who described themselves as "conservative" also identified as Democrats. That number is closer to 40 percent in 2024. Latinos and Asians who identify as conservative have also shifted away from the Democratic Party in recent election cycles as their votes become more aligned with their policy preferences.

"The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realising [sic] they’ve been voting for the wrong party," Burn-Murdoch wrote.
Democrats can't win presidential elections without the minority vote, and if more blacks and Latinos realize that their conservative worldview is not being reflected in the Democrat party, the political strength of that party is going to be substantially weakened.

There's more on this at the Axios article linked to above.

Whether the realignment of minority voters will proceed to the extent that it affects November's election is unknowable, but perhaps Trump's vice-presidential pick will have considerable bearing on that question.