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.
Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
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.
And America’s gold-standard national election surveys show a similarly sharp decline, with non-white proximity to Democrats now at its lowest since the 1960s, before the civil rights movement and the 1964 election which aligned Black voters with the Dems and against the GOP
So the non-white shift away from Dems seems very real. But what’s driving it?
One factor is fading memories. The civil rights movement and 1964 realignment formed very strong political bonds for the people who lived through it, but this is less true for more recent generations.
The bond between young Black Americans and Democrats is far weaker than among older cohorts.
I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar "young favour Dems, old favour Republicans" gradient we see in the US population overall is *inverted* among the Black population.
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%
The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor.
In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities
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…
Much more ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic:
Large numbers of non-white Americans have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest.
Their values are very much *not* aligned with the party.
To show you what I mean by that, I will refer to the brilliant work of @IsmailWhitePhD and @ChrylLaird, whose 2020 book Steadfast Democrats explores why Black Americans historically voted Democrat in such large numbers *despite* often holding very conservative views.
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.
This anomaly has historically given Dems a huge boost, but it has begun to unwind.
In 2012, the vast majority of Black conservatives still identified as Democrats, but that has since fallen to less than half. Latino and Asian conservatives show similar but less sudden trends
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.
We can also use this chart, which I adapted from White & Laird and @PatrickRuffini’s excellent book Party of the People.
It shows people’s self-reported political views from left to right, and their Rep-Dem margin top to bottom
Except here’s how it actually looked in 2012: white voters were very well sorted, matching ideology to voting patterns
But Asian, Latino and especially Black voters were misaligned, with large numbers of non-white ideological conservatives voting Democrat in that year’s election
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.
So you can see the problem for the Dems.
The non-white voters they’re losing are conservatives.
They won’t be won back by a bold green policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is as likely as a reversal.
So this explains the big shifts we’re seeing, but why is the racial realignment happening *now*?
@IsmailWhitePhD & @ChrylLaird find that social pressure is key.
When everyone around you votes a certain way, you feel pressure to do the same. Political norms are hard to overcome
In a brilliant piece of research they found that when Black voters with very conservative views have almost exclusively Black social groups, they still vote Dem.
But if they have a more mixed social group, the weaker norm for voting Dem lets them vote in line with their beliefs.
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.
There are echoes of Britain’s Red Wall — the English communities identified by @JamesKanag which had conservative demographics and attitudes but had stopped short of voting Tory due to a long-held sense that the party was not for them. In 2019 that changed
Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column for decades, but those forces are weakening.
The surprise is not so much that these voters are shifting their support to align with their beliefs, but that it took so long.
So you have:
• Decline of church attendance (key source of political norm policing)
• The US becoming more racially mixed, less segregated, fewer people with no friends/family of other races
The friction preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican is diminishing.
And crucially, that weakening of political norms doesn’t only come from people of other races.
As the number of Black Republicans has risen from ~5% to 15% (the figure among young Black adults today), the Democrat-voting norm is eroded and the stigma of voting Republican reduced
This can happen very quickly in a “preference cascade”, where people who previously masked their true feelings to fit in, start discovering that other people actually share their beliefs, so suddenly lots of people shift their behaviour at once (screenshot from @PatrickRuffini)
And ‘a rapid shift in [voting] behaviour as people who were previously masking their [political] beliefs discover that others hold the same views as they do’ fits well with these charts.
Viewed in this light, the size of the shifts in current polling is entirely plausible.
To be clear, nothing in politics is guaranteed to last.
Some shifts are temporary, and many of those deserting the Democrats will become swing voters rather than solid Republicans.
These people can be won back and should absolutely not be written off.
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.
@SM_Kali1 And that in turn is related to young women now being much more likely to go to college than young men, with college having a liberalising effect on values.
In addition college grads are more likely to attend church, where political norms are strong.
@mopenshaw @mllichti Absent any major changes between now and election day (e.g Kamala as candidate), I think the current non-white polling average (64-36 Dem) will end up being about right (was 74-26 in 2020).
@H1Whe @mllichti @Beerbecue7 @mopenshaw But I presume your focus was more on the chart at the top of the thread. Here are two alt versions of that one, alongside the original:
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials.
Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
That data was for the UK, but it’s a similar story in the US. The gap between the richest and poorest Millennials is far wider than it was for Boomers. More debt at the bottom, and much more wealth at the top.
In both countries, inequality is overwhelmingly *within* generations, not between them.
And how have the richest millennials got so rich?
Mainly this: enormous wealth transfers from their parents, typically to help with buying their first home.
In the UK, among those who get parental help, the top 10% got *£170,000* towards their house (the average Millennial got zero).
The politics of America’s housing issues in one chart:
• People and politicians in blue states say they care deeply about the housing crisis and homelessness but keep blocking housing so both get worse
• Red states simply permit loads of new homes and have no housing crisis
And if you were wondering where London fits into this...
It builds even less than San Francisco, and its house prices have risen even faster.
That cities like London & SF (and the people who run them) are considered progressive while overseeing these situations is ... something
Those charts are from my latest column, in which I argue that we need to stop talking about the housing crisis, and start talking about the planning/permitting crisis, because it’s all downstream from that ft.com/content/de34df…
NEW: we often talk about an age divide in politics, with young people much less conservative than the old.
But this is much more a British phenomenon than a global one.
40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020. But only 10% of UK under-30s support the Conservatives. Why?
One factor is that another narrative often framed as universal turns out to be much worse in the UK: the sense that young generations are getting screwed.
Young people are struggling to get onto the housing ladder in many countries, but the crisis is especially deep in Britain:
It’s a similar story for incomes, where Millennials in the UK have not made any progress on Gen X, while young Americans are soaring to record highs.
Young Brits have had a much more visceral experience of failing to make economic progress.
NEW: we don’t reflect enough on how severe the housing crisis is, and how it has completely broken the promise society made to young adults.
The situation is especially severe in the UK, where the last time house prices were this unaffordable was in ... 1876.
My column this week is on the complete breakdown in one of the most powerful cultural beliefs of the English-speaking world: that if you work hard, you’ll earn enough to buy yourself a house and start a family.
The last time houses were this hard to afford, cars had not yet been invented, Queen Victoria was on the throne and home ownership was the preserve of a wealthy minority.
After ~80 years of homeownership being very achievable, that’s what we’ve gone back to.