Are Non-White US Voters Moving Away from the Prison of Sectional Identity?
Prospects for the 2024 Presidential Election
It is axiomatic that the GOP is the party of white supremicism, while the Democrats enjoy the transhistorically edifying confidence of all right-thinking people. Sadly, it seems that some within the non-white population of the USA haven’t gotten the message, at least as far as the supreme expression of democratic citizenship goes – voting.
Voting patterns over the last three presidential electoral cycles belie the complacent assumptions of yesteryear, and instead presage a potential strategic realignment in US politics. Could it be that something other than the all-consuming vector of race has insinuated its way into the minds of voters?
Take a peek at these public national crosstabs on recent presidential elections. (These kinds of data sets are actually quite fascinating, so I have attached the full file for download beneath the cropped excerpt). Take particular note of the figures inside the red box, making sure to read from right to left (2012-2020)
Within the red box, you can see the percentage rate at which men/woman of different racial groups have voted for the Democratic candidate in the last three presidential elections (2012, 2016, 2020). The higher the number, the greater the percentage of that group who voted for Obama, Clinton, and Biden respectively. While there has been a slight increase in the percentage of white men and women that vote Democratic, there has been a clear decline (from historically high levels) in the number of Black/Latinos. Most striking is the fall from 96% to 87% among black men, and from 67% to 56% among latinos. Even latinas have seen a fall in their Democrat enthusiasm from 72% to 66%.
Perhaps most crucially, this trend began before Trump.
Aside from the ‘racecraft’ that lies behind these kinds of statistical formulations (see this interesting book by Karen and Barabara Fields on the concept), this means that the gawdy rhetoric of Donald snr cannot be solely to blame. Instead, could it be that non-white voters are beginning to see how categories other than race might correspond more accurately to their declining material and immaterial living conditions? In other words, are they coming round to the idea that their being working-class might more effectively account for their declining prospects? Could it imply that their being American might matter more to them than the color of their skin? Could they have reached the point at which race rhetoric no longer seems to make sense, at least not enough to outweigh the assessments of their own eyes?
A process has been underway for at least a decade, and the watershed of 2016 was just a lurch in the direction of travel. The prospect of this direction for the Democratic Party must be unnerving, to say the least. Decades of feeding off a racialized demographic base has provided the second pillar of electoral success for the party since Clinton 1 abandoned the bottom two-thirds of the income pyramid. Its first pillar – the oligarchy and its metropolitan MPC auxiliaries – is not numerically large enough (obviously) to return Democratic majorities, leaving the party with an increasingly acute need to racialize everything. If this messaging fails to convince an adequate proportion of the non-white bits of America, the game will be up.
The question then is simple. Are the percentage changes we see in the red box an indication of even further and deeper changes to come, or are they an historical anomaly about to be put back on their normal trajectory? November 5th, 2024 will answer the question.
The Team D response appears to be "we can abuse non-whites all we want, because they have nowhere else to go!"
It is clearly a trend showing growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party. I think that is largely because Democrats have formed a coalition with the illiberal Marxist left. The Marxist left opposes classically liberal values and promotes totalitarian ideas. That does not sit well with the vast majority of the American public.