There’s been a slew of polling data and voting results over recent election cycles suggesting the Democratic Party is losing its hold with minority voters. The “voter of color firewall,” if you will, has been something Democrats have taken for granted for decades now.
Ever since Donald Trump entered the political arena in 2016, a shift began as more and more Latino and black voters started taking a second look at what the Democratic Party stands for. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t stand for practically anyone outside the elite class of college-educated white coastal liberals.
A few days back, John Burn-Murdoch, writer for the Financial Times, highlighted this realignment on X with a lengthy explanatory thread accompanied by a chart that’s driving Democrats insane:
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
The chart alone speaks volumes and is causing serious heartburn among Democratic Party strategists heading into 2024. The jig is up, essentially, with Democrats counting on non-white voters to vote as a bloc and blindly support whatever crap sandwich Democrats hand them.
In this case, it’s Bidennomics that is causing havoc for household budgets of all ethnicities. Black, white, brown, it doesn’t matter. Everyone buys milk, eggs, and gasoline and everyone outside of the New York Times editorial board knows their paycheck is getting crushed under Joe Biden’s economy.
Then, there’s this analysis of the Burn-Murdoch findings from Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight fame. Silver, in a lengthy truth bomb article for his fellow Democrats, sees the writing on the wall as well:
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.
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. However, the Adam Carlson1 has been performing an invaluable service by aggregating the results of different polls together, which at least solves the sample size problem. And he’s finding that Joe Biden’s share of the vote has dropped dramatically among Black and Hispanic voters as compared with an average reliable estimates of the 2020 vote.
Here’s a more in-depth aggregated chart Silver provides to bolster an argument for the seismic shift in voting trends for voters of color away from Democrats:
The greatest shift has taken place among black and Hispanic voters from 2020 up to last month. Both groups have massive swings toward voting for Republican candidates in 2024 from the president on down.
If Democrats go from winning 90% of the black vote to winning 50% or even less, their strange hold on certain areas and districts will vanish overnight.
Further analysis on all of this from the Washington Examiner finds the obvious culprit whether the White House wishes to admit it or not:
Biden’s performance in office is assuredly playing a large role in driving these numbers. Despite what Democrats and their media allies may claim, Bidenomics has not been good for minority voters. Sure, gross domestic product may be up, and the stock market is near all-time highs, but aggregate GDP numbers don’t put food on the table, and few working-class minority families own stocks.
What Bidenonmics has delivered to minority voters are the highest food prices in 30 years, unaffordable rents, let alone mortgages, and record-high credit card debt. Biden’s wealthy white college-educated voters may be sitting pretty in expensive homes with fat 401ks, but the reality of Bidenomics is much bleaker for the working class.
The economy is merely the starting point. Every other priority of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party has less to do with improving the lives of all Americans and more to do with pushing agendas concerning LGBTQ issues, demonizing traditional values, and inherently pushing the sexualization of children. This agenda is not shared by most people of traditional backgrounds, especially many black and Latino voters.
There’s the sense that Democrats want to take your money, indoctrinate your kids, reward illegal aliens, and expect you to say “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”
In short, Republicans have not done some remarkable strategizing to cause this shift. Instead, the change has happened organically from the ground up. People of all stripes remember life under the first term of Donald Trump. They remember affordable gasoline and reasonable grocery prices. They remember a growing economy and humming economic growth. They remember a President desiring to put the interests of American citizens first over illegal aliens.
This is a self-inflicted wound for Democrats and touting “Latinos con Biden-Harris” isn’t going to solve it with a bumper sticker slogan.
