Demographic changes won't bail out Democrats

Democrats think they have a secret weapon: the changing electorate. 

It isn't a secret and it is still under development. 

We hear it often by Democratic pundits. The electorate is changing: the gender gap, more blacks voting, more Latinos voting, more Asians voting, more young voters--all people inclined to vote Democratic. Republicans are the party of whites, the pundits say, or more harshly, they are the party of old white men and non-college men, and they are losing their power because they are losing their plurality. 

Demography is political destiny and Democrats are on the right side of the big historical trends. 

Not so fast.  A couple of things are wrong with this thinking, starting with the actual data.

Women. White women vote their race, not their gender. Exit polls showed that 75% of white women voted for Brian Kemp over Stacy Abrams in Georgia. In Texas, a 59% majority of white women voted for Ted Cruz, and 59% of people who cared one way or the other about the Kavanaugh nomination supported Ted Cruz. There is a gender gap in voting but the stark evidence is that "women's issues" cut both ways. The reproductive rights issue motivates anti-abortion voters as well as liberal feminists. White women derive social power from white supremacy just as do white men, and they benefit both from white ideals of beauty in skin tone and hair, as well as from criminalizing men of color. Donald Trump expressly spoke to women being the beneficiary of blocking those dark skinned caravan invaders. Trump said he would protect white women.

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White majorities still. There is a trend underway of growing black and Latino populations and whites being a smaller percentage of the total vote, but it shows up over decades rather than from year to year. Democrats need to integrate into their thinking the simple reality that 76% of the electorate is white. Democratic policies and messaging that appear less concerned about white people's problems than of the injustices to nonwhites in the past and present are likely to backfire politically.  Whites need not be racist in order to want representation.

In 2012 Obama told voters in the Upper Midwest that he saved the car industry while Mitt Romney had said to let them all go bankrupt. Obama had a message of jobs. Hillary did not. Obama won the states. Hillary did not.

White anxiety

White anxiety over displacement. Educated Americans, ones with the tools to thrive in a global economy, may see the trends in college admissions as a healthy sign of 


the arc of history trending toward justice, but many whites will see it in another way, as a threat and a report card on a bad trend. As evidence that affirmative action is working against them with blacks and Latinos, and that Asians are outworking or outsmarting whites and that whites are losing out.

Culture war messages of competition and rivalry between races hurt Democrats, which is why Trump intentionally provokes them. Messages of equality and color blindness work better for Democrats.

The youth vote. If only.
In the 2018 election 63% of the votes were cast by people 50 years of age or older. only 5% of the electorate was aged 18-24 and another 5% were aged 25-29. That 10% total compares with 15% in the 2016 election, but it is better than the 8% of the 2010 and 2014 midyear elections.  There is a youth vote, and one or two percent matter in a close election, but the simple reality in America is that young people aren't yet engaged in voting. The electorate consists primarily of older Americans. 

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The Latino vote. The vote is not monolithic, with different interests for Cuban-Americans in Florida, Puerto Rican Americans in New York and New Jersey, and Mexican Americans in Texas and Arizona. Even with Trump's hostile language, Democrats only get 65% of the Latino vote. And in any case, the Latino vote is not yet huge nationwide. Only 7% of the electorate is Latino in 2018, compared with 9% in 2016 and 6% in the midterm election of 2014. There is a noticeable trend, but the reality is that the numbers are small. A big majority in the fractured Latino segment still moves the needle only one or two percent.  Click

The College Education vote.  Bottom line, fewer people graduate from college than do not. White college graduates represent 14% of the electorate, but white non-college men (the group Democrats lose by big margins) represent 22% of the vote.  This helps tip the balance in those formerly-blue states in the upper midwest which voted for Trump in 2016.





The Democratic coalition has settled into being the opposite of the Nixon Southern Strategy and now Trump strategy. Democrats are a coalition of whites in the progressive left, plus their presumed allies among the growing people of color in America, plus those people in groups that have traditionally suffered from discrimination: women, the LGBTQ community, Jews. Trump's language toward immigrants, blacks, and women--plus his actions against transexuals--have hardened the opinions of Democrats. Trump is anathema. If Trump says it, it must be racist, xenophobic, and misogynist. 

Democrats leap to oppose Trump, but in doing so inadvertently communicate not that they oppose prejudice but that they are unconcerned about whites, especially white working class men. The result is that they lose elections. Democrats can fix this with clearer messaging on jobs and economic opportunity.

Democrats can win. A Democrat who can succeed needs to be able to re-assure white Americans that he or she understands and cares about their problems, too. Trump profits by making this either-or, a race war. Democrats need to reject that frame, and do so in a way that has real credibility for white Americans.