by Nate Silver
Earlier this week, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times posted a thread that purported to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he termed a “racial realignment”. If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it’s been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here is the graphic that kicked it off:
It’s worth reading the whole thread. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are particularly bad for Democrats among working-class voters of color, and younger ones. 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.
The thread triggered its share of responses from the usual suspects, part of a recent pattern of poll denialism among Democrats that has crept its way into even the White House. And it’s true that there are some things you could critique. Burn-Murdoch is mixing and matching data from different polls, and the observation from 2024 is based solely on the recent New York Times / Siena College poll, which has a relatively small sample size; I’d rather that he’d have taken an average of different surveys.
If he’d done that, though, he’d likely have found the same thing. 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:
As you can see, Biden’s margin against Donald Trump has basically not moved an inch among white voters; he’s losing them by 12 percentage points, as he did in 2020. However, Biden is now only winning Hispanics by 7 percentage points — down from 24 points in 2020 — and Black voters by “only” 55 points, as compared with 83 points in 2020.
I’m not going to cover every possible difficulty when surveying non-white voters, who generally have lower response rates to polls than white voters do. I’m just saying this has been a consistent pattern; Carlson has been doing the same analysis for months now, and he’s been finding the same thing every time. So at the very least, Democrats can’t wish this problem away by complaining about small sample sizes, although that doesn’t mean they won’t try.
But polls, schmolls. Is it really plausible that there could be swings this large when it comes to actual votes?
Sure. It’s at least plausible. Let’s look at data from two places where non-white voters are plentiful. One is somewhere I’ve never been to, Starr County in South Texas, and the other is the place where I live, New York City.
Starr County is 98 percent Hispanic — the most of any county in the country outside of Puerto Rico — which makes it a uniquely valuable data point. There are no possible problems with ecological inference — misconstruing the behavior of individuals or particular subgroups from aggregate data — when basically everyone there is Hispanic. Starr County is also quite poor, in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, so it’s a particularly good place to look for patterns among working-class Hispanics. And what’s happening there ought to be frightening to Democrats. Here are the presidential election results in Starr County from 2008 through 2020:
I’ve charted these as the total number of votes rather than just the vote margin, because that’s really what tells the story. Biden received about as many votes in Starr County as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, or as Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012. But Trump surged from receiving 2218 votes in 2016 to 8247 votes, almost four times as many, in 2020. I’ve rarely seen anything like that, especially in the contemporary American political landscape where partisan preferences tend to be relatively stable. Turnout was much higher in Starr County in 2020 — but those new voters came out overwhelmingly for Trump, contradicting the longstanding belief that Democrats benefit from higher turnout among minority groups. The shift of the Hispanic vote in South Texas has undermined Democrats’ dreams of turning Texas blue, or at least purple, offsetting gains that Democrats have made in the Houston, Dallas and Austin metro areas.
Huh, close their rec centers flood area with criminal takers who would think they would ever want to vote differently?
What is hurting the most is the effect the Democrats’ hoped for “silver bullet” is having on those who, up till now, never felt the impact. Robin Ware/Robert L. Peters/JRB Ware/Pedo Peter/idiot Biden has imported so many illegal immigrants so rapidly and sent them (along with Abbott and DeSantis) into areas that hadn’t really had the Texas border experience, that it finally hit home with many how detrimental this is. While Democrats hope to turn the wetbacks into Democrat voters, it is turning formerly dependable voters away. They are experiencing the crime and health effects of tens of thousands illegal immigrants suddenly dumped upon them and these demographics are seeing their subsidies, the very thing Democrats have been buying votes with, shrinking and being given to illegal immigrants.
Not surprising. democrats purposely destroyed the black family. Their pro welfare policies convinced unwed black females to abandon marriage in favor of more money for each child. That is if they were allowed to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z5veg7xKde4
It is Democrat policy to destroy ALL family structure. Their agenda appeals to single people who only care about themselves and won’t put God or family before The State.
Recent reporting from Chicago by Ben Berquam of RAV TV tells of major movements by blacks in Chicago to the Trump camp. biden not only has lost the working people but now is in territory no democrat before him has been with the black vote.