The Trend is Real – Democrats Are Losing Support Among Minority Voters
“The trend is real in polls, and in at least some election results.”
You don’t have to take my word for it.
Pollster Nate Silver writes at Substack:
Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color
Earlier this week, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times posted a thread that purported to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he termed a “racial realignment”. If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it’s been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here is the graphic that kicked it off:
It’s worth reading the whole thread. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are particularly bad for Democrats among working-class voters of color, and younger ones. Many Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters have long identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, and Burn-Murdoch theorizes that Democrats’ tilt toward more liberal policies (though I’d prefer to call them “left” or “progressive” rather than “liberal”) is catching up with them, especially as memory of the Civil Rights Era fades.
The thread triggered its share of responses from the usual suspects, part of a recent pattern of poll denialism among Democrats that has crept its way into even the White House. And it’s true that there are some things you could critique. Burn-Murdoch is mixing and matching data from different polls, and the observation from 2024 is based solely on the recent New York Times / Siena College poll, which has a relatively small sample size; I’d rather that he’d have taken an average of different surveys.
If he’d done that, though, he’d likely have found the same thing. As you may know, I’m not much of a fan of digging into poll crosstabs. Because of the small sample sizes and difficulties in reaching certain underrepresented groups, you can always find something “wrong” with them and use that to dismiss polling results you don’t like.
This is the graphic Silver refers to above.
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
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Comments
I can just hear “concerned” Democrats (my mother was one of them) commenting about this trend. “They don’t know what is good for them; they’ve been talked into [insert whatever idea here]”.
In short, “those people” can’t think for themselves; they need Nice White Ladies to guide them.