The U.S. presidential races in 2000 and 2004 went for Republicans. In 2008 and 2012 went for Democrats. In 2016, for Republicans. In 2020, for Democrats again.
Despite Democrats winning the presidential elections in 2008 and 2012, they saw historic losses in the midterms for 2010 and 2014.
If we want to understand how we got these different outcomes from cycle to cycle, we would not look at people who voted the same way across time; we would look at those whose voting behavior changed from one year to another.
This is a basic rule in statistics: variance must be explained in terms of other things that vary. One cannot explain variation by appeal to a constant.
However, many, many people have seemed really keen to do just this with respect to the racial dimensions of the U.S. elections.
For instance, two writers at Vox insist that we “talk about the white people who voted for Donald Trump.” Their argument? Sure, minorities might have drifted to the GOP over the last four years. However, Trump was only able to win in 2016, and be in striking distance of a win in 2020, because a majority of white people still voted for Trump in both cycles.
Similarly, because Trump won a majority of whites and men, a prominent New York Times columnist to declared that 2020 “exit polls point to the power of white patriarchy.”
In fact, exit polls, precinct-level voting and demographic data, pre-election polling, major scientific electoral surveys, and lots of other data all clearly show that women and minorities actually voted for the GOP at higher levels in 2020 than they did in 2016 — and that Biden was able to win because white men shifted towards the Democrats, overriding the preferences of these voters.
That is, were it not for the ‘white patriarchy’ voting the way they did this cycle, we’d be looking at another four years of Trump.
Yes, the GOP did win a majority of the white vote this cycle. However, this has absolutely nothing to do with Trump per se. Republicans have won the lion’s share of the white vote for literally every presidential election going back to 1972.
It’d be one thing if Trump won some extraordinary share of the white vote, but he didn’t. He did worse than his predecessor with whites in 2016, and he continued to lose white voters over the course of his tenure, all the way through the 2020 race.
That is, if you want to look at the effect Trump had on Republican vote share among whites – looking at the votes that actually changed under Trump’s tenure — the reality is, he has had a consistent negative effect on Republican vote share for whites. He did not rally whites with his racialized policies and rhetoric. He alienated them.
Yet even as Trump’s approach pushed away many white Republican-leaning voters, it seemed to hold genuine appeal for many minorities. This has been a clear and consistent trend in polling and voting data over the last four years too.
But rather than trying to understand this phenomenon with nuance or depth, many prominent writers have instead insisted that – in virtue of casting their ballots for Trump — these voters of color must actually be white. Indeed, even before the election, Joe Biden himself made this mentality explicit, emphasizing in an interview that African Americans who were not sure who to vote for in November, “ain’t black.” There’s even absurd academic jargon to help scholars wave away the minority status of people of color who fail to stick to the script, such as ‘multiracial whiteness.’
That is, for many in the elite class, being a person of color is apparently contingent on having the ‘correct’ politics. In truth, this is nothing new. White social elites, and the elites of color who bolster their legitimacy, have long defined race and racism in ways that advance their own preferences and priorities.
For instance, the people who benefit the most from racialized inequality attempt to divert attention away from this reality by focusing on how other people seem to think, feel, believe or say the ‘wrong’ things on race. Charges of racism are deployed primarily against the political opponents of well-off white liberals. The values and interests of ordinary black and brown folks is a subordinate priority in these discussions, to the extent that it is a priority at all.
It therefore makes sense that if black and brown people don’t behave the way elites want them to, elites would therefore cease to be consider them to be ‘people of color’ at all. However, the banality of these maneuvers doesn’t render them any less abhorrent.
Others have attempted to neutralize minority voters acting ‘off script’ by suggesting that any words that could be used to describe this situation must actually be meaningless.
There has been column after column in publications over the last four years talking about Hispanics, Latinos, black people, Asians and ‘people of color’ writ large – overwhelmingly insisting that Trump, his rhetoric and his policies are anathema to these groups. However, confronted with the 2020 electoral results, many have suddenly, and quite conveniently, discovered that Hispanic and Latino people are ‘not a monolith.’ Indeed, we’ve instead seen a flood of arguments insisting it’s not even clear what ‘Latino’ means. Or emphasizing that ‘there’s no one Asian American vote.’
In short, it is apparently fine to talk about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and ‘people of color’ in a blunt way when it advances the preferred narrative. But the terms don’t seem to refer to anything ‘real’ if the facts point in an inconvenient direction.
Let me be clear: the ways academics and journalists talk about race and ethnicity is typically quite coarse, and does miss important subtlety and nuance. However, many seem to be concerned about this in a highly selective fashion.
Indeed, we can bet that had Democrats won a larger share of Asian and Hispanic voters, there would have been a flood of columns about how ‘Latinx’ voters tipped the election, about the growing importance of ‘Asian’ voters, about how ‘BIPOC’ are the future of U.S. politics, etc. Yet because these voters shifted towards Trump, we got take after take that ran, “Hispanic? Asian? People of color? What do those words even mean?”
Ultimately, however, this maneuver also fails to obscure the reality these writers seem so desperate to avoid. As I showed in a previous column for The Guardian, even when you break down the Hispanic and Latino vote into ancestry subgroups like South American, Central American, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican or Cuban – all of these populations actually shifted in the same direction this cycle, towards Trump. Yes, the margins vary from group to group, but the trend is the same across the board. And similar realities hold among Asian voters too: with the exception of Japanese Americans, virtually all Asian subgroups shifted towards Trump over the past four years. So did Muslims, Jews and other religious minorities for that matter.
That is, the trends within subpopulations generally matched the macro trends for ‘Hispanics,’ ‘Asians’ or ‘African Americans’ overall. Whether we talk about these populations in coarse terms or in a more fine-grained way – on this question, the result is mostly the same. They shifted towards the GOP.
It will not serve Democrats well to be obtuse about this. The party has been consistently bleeding minority voters for more than a decade – to the point where they barely have a viable coalition.
The party seems to be increasingly alienating people of color. Republicans have shown themselves capable of capturing those votes – even with Trump at the helm of the party. Those in the media and academia who purport to speak on behalf of people of color seem to be increasingly out of touch. These are serious problems that warrant a serious response.
However, distressing numbers of people on the left seem to be more concerned with protecting and advancing goofy narratives on race than, say, actually winning elections. Instead of trying to analyze shortcomings in Democrats’ messaging, platform or candidates, too many in academia and the media are focused on explaining what’s wrong with voters, growing numbers of whom are not casting their ballots the way they ‘should.’
As a result of these impulses, virtually nothing was learned from the 2016 election. Unfortunately, 2020 is shaping up to be more of the same.