Increasing defections are puncturing the voters of color myth

The Democrats’ eroding support among Hispanic, Black, and Asian American voters is making progressive heads explode. Aren’t voters of color supposed to be a solid pillar of the party’s base? 

Evidently not. Democrats, says 538 statistician Nate Silver, are “hemorrhaging” support among nonwhite voters. That’s the main reason President Biden is trailing Donald Trump in many presidential polls. 

This development has triggered much speculation among political scientists and journalists about whether the United States is undergoing a “racial realignment.” There’s no denying Biden’s sagging support among nonwhite voters, but it seems to have more to do with class than race. 

According to aggregate polling results, the president’s advantage among Hispanic voters has fallen from 24 points in the 2020 election to just seven points. Among Black voters, it’s slipped from 83 points to 55.  

Of course, polls aren’t election results. With favorable tailwinds from a vibrant economy, and Trump facing all kinds of legal jeopardy in civil and criminal trials, Biden could yet get his numbers among these voters, especially Black voters, back up closer to his 2020 level.  

Hispanic voters, however, are a different story. They lean Democratic but have shown sizeable swings to Republicans. In 2004, for example, President George W. Bush garnered 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.  

Asian Americans are the smallest (7 percent) and fastest-growing category of nonwhite voters. Biden won them handily in 2020, by 63-31 percent. But in elections since then, Democratic candidates across the country have lost ground with Asian American voters too.  

These untoward trends are debunking the progressive myth that people of color think and vote alike.  

Over the past two decades, young activists and wishful thinkers in the leftish academic-nonprofit-media complex have predicted that generational change and America’s growing ethnic diversity would combine to produce a new progressive majority.  

According to this theory, Democrats could stop worrying about the mass defection of blue-collar whites because they were being replaced by progressive millennials and Gen Zers and by nonwhite voters supposedly fused by the shared experience of discrimination. 

So Democrats waved goodbye to working-class voters who had been their historical mainstay and cultural touchstone. The progressive realignment, however, is nowhere in sight.  

Instead, the party has shrunk, and Democrats now find themselves uncompetitive across broad swaths of non-metro America.   

They are doing better with college graduates, but worse among voters without degrees — roughly two-thirds of the electorate. 

As white college grads have pushed the party leftwards, nonwhite Democrats haven’t followed. While about half of Democrats now identify as liberal, only 26 of Blacks and 28 percent of Hispanics say they’re liberal.  

Strikingly, among working-class Blacks and Hispanics, less than a quarter call themselves liberal.   

Moderate to conservative in outlook, these noncollege voters don’t share white progressives’ blasé attitudes toward illegal immigration, crime and prosecutors who decline to prosecute.  

Like all noncollege voters, they are leery of a hasty clean energy transition that could raise fuel bills, kill good production jobs in oil and gas, and turn energy abundance into scarcity.  

Although inflation has fallen, noncollege voters still feel the bite of high living costs, describe economic conditions as poor and give Biden little credit for managing the economy. By contrast, only 38 percent of white college grads say the economy is in bad shape. 

In short, the polarization that bedevils Democrats today is educational, not racial. Highly educated and affluent whites impose an ideological agenda that’s out of touch with the economic and moral concerns of many non-white Democrats without college degrees. 

And despite efforts by progressive activists to lump them together in an intersectional fellowship of victimhood, people of color often have sharply divergent views and interests. 

Asian Americans, for example, overwhelmingly say race and ethnicity shouldn’t be considered in college admissions. They also join Hispanics in solid opposition to racial reparations.  

As political scholars Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have argued in a report for my organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, it’s a mistake to equate the African American experience with that of Hispanics, who arrived here voluntarily as immigrants.  

Working-class Hispanics, they note, are far less likely than Blacks to view abusive policing as evidence of systemic racism, to give high priority to criminal justice reform, or to support critical race theory in schools.  

They also tend to be more hawkish on foreign policy, resistant to socialism (many fled socialist countries like Cuba and Venezuela) and for stronger border controls to stem the influx of illegal migrants. 

Crucially, Hispanic voters are entrepreneurial and seem more interested in upward mobility than redistribution in the name of equity.   

“Democrats must consider the possibility that Hispanics will turn out to be the Italians of the 21st century — family-oriented, religious, patriotic, striving to succeed in their adopted country, and supportive of public policies that expand economic opportunity without dictating results,” Galston and Kamarck say. 

All this points to the futility of trying to pigeonhole voters by race, ethnicity and continent of origin. As the voters of color myth crumbles, Democrats should shift their focus from identity to class.   

The nonwhite working class is frustrated with Democrats for essentially the same reasons that many white working-class voters have decamped to the Republican Party.  

Both groups are put off by cultural leftism, big spending programs that don’t seem to improve their lives, and elite “luxury beliefs” that are far removed from their everyday struggles. 

This is actually good news for Democrats. It shows that race is not an insuperable barrier to reaching white working-class voters. By reorienting their policies around the economic priorities and cultural moderation of working-class voters, Democrats can win them across race and ethnic lines. 

Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.