Four Big Myths about the Election (Part I)

These wrong assumptions about the electorate distort our understanding of American politics.

(adamkaz via Getty Images.)

With the presidential election one month and one day away, the media is awash in horse race analysis. Legacy newspapers cover the latest poll with baited breath. Pundits share the latest change in the betting markets or in Nate Silver’s prediction model as breaking news. But despite the enormous number of words expended on predicting the outcome, a few wrong assumptions about the American election—and the American electorate—continue to shape much of the debate. This not only makes it hard to predict what is likely to happen on November 5th; it also distorts the trajectory on which American politics is likely to find itself well beyond 2024, whether the winner turns out to be Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. 

I am not the first to have debunked any of these four myths. And yet, I hear all four being repeated all the time—not only on radio and television, but also in conversation with otherwise sophisticated readers, academics, and political strategists. Strikingly, even people who have realized that one of these myths is wrong tend to give credence to the others. So, for this series of articles, I undertook to tackle all four myths in one place (something that, to my knowledge, nobody has done so far) and to see what image of America emerges when we try to put the changed puzzle pieces back together.

Myth 1: The Inevitable Demographic Majority

The Myth:

The demographic makeup of the United States is rapidly shifting. By 2046, the country will be “majority minority.” This is sure to have major political implications. Most white people vote for the Republican Party. People of color overwhelmingly support Democrats. This will eventually give Democrats an inbuilt “demographic majority.” This looming dominance of the left helps to explain why Republicans are so scared of immigration and so open to sabotaging the democratic institutions that will eventually shut them out of power. 

The Reality:

Whites continue to favor the Republican party. Non-white groups, especially African-Americans, continue to favor the Democratic party. More broadly, it is true that America’s demographic make-up is shifting. If we apply the “one drop rule,” counting every person who has any non-white ancestry or whose forefathers ever stepped foot in Latin America as part of the homogeneous block of “people of color,” the country will indeed become “majority minority” sometime in the 2040s. But this tells us little about how Americans live, socialize, and think about themselves—and virtually nothing about the future of electoral politics.

---

Möchten Sie meine Artikel und Gespräche auf Deutsch direkt in Ihre Mailbox bekommen? Klicken Sie diesen Link und schalten Sie unter Notifications “auf deutsch” an! 🇩🇪

---

Whites without any Hispanic ancestry will, by far and away, remain the biggest demographic group for the foreseeable future; they are still projected to constitute 48 percent of the population in 2050. Though their share of the population will fall below fifty percent around that date, this does not mean that America will become a “majority minority” nation.

Hispanics, who at 25 percent are projected to be the second largest demographic group at that point, are highly heterogeneous. While the U.S. Census Bureau implicitly counts them as part of the non-white block when it predicts that the country will turn majority minority by the end of the 2040s, many Hispanics consider themselves white; shown a chart with ten different gradations in skin colors in a recent poll by Pew, 80 percent of Hispanic respondents selected one of the lightest four hues to represent themselves. If Hispanics who stipulate their race as white on the census are counted as such, 70 percent of Americans will continue to be white in 2050.

It is equally unclear that other groups will think of themselves as part of a broad category of “people of color.” Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing demographic group, which is projected to make up 9 percent of the population by 2050, are much more socio-economically successful than other minority groups, such as African-Americans; they are also marrying whites at much higher rates, with nearly 3 in 10 married to someone of a different race (the figure is even higher for Asian-Americans who were born in the United States). Another 5 percent of the American population is projected to be mixed-race, a group that is considered non-white in projections by the census bureau even though most of its members have extensive white ancestry. Finally, even among the small minority of Americans who will have no white ancestry at all, many will have close relatives, from in-laws to children, who are at least partially white. For all these reasons, it is absurd to reduce America’s complex racial mosaic to the oft-repeated slogan of a country that is majority minority—one in which the block of “whites” is implicitly or explicitly juxtaposed with, and assumed to be politically opposed to, the block of “people of color.”

Making electoral predictions based on this demographic distortion is even more perilous. Take recent polling for NBC. According to the network’s past polling, Hispanics favored the Democratic presidential candidate over the Republican competitor by 50 points in 2016. The Democratic advantage fell to 36 points by 2020. Now, it is down to 14 points, with 54 percent of registered Latinos favoring Harris, and 40 percent supporting Trump. This polling is consistent with other major studies of Latino voting behavior. A Catalist report, for example, found that, even though Biden got a bigger share of the vote in 2020 than Hillary Clinton had in 2016, “Biden’s share of votes by Latinos decreased by 8 percentage points” over the course of these four years alone. And while progressives often ascribe this change to the influx of conservative voters from countries with socialist governments like Cuba or Venezuela, the shift away from Democrats has also been stark in overwhelmingly Mexican-American districts, for example in the south of Texas.

The voting behavior of other demographic groups has shifted more slowly. But they, too, are hardly the demographic monolith that analysts long expected. In 2020, Joe Biden won because he significantly increased his party’s share of the white vote compared to 2016. Donald Trump came close to eking out a victory because he significantly boosted his share of the vote among non-white voters. More broadly, knowing the color of a voter’s skin gives you much less information about who they are likely to vote for in 2024 than it did in 2016. Unless things go perilously wrong in America, it will give you even less information in 2032 or 2040.¹

Myth 2: Republicans Are the Party of the Rich

The Myth: 

Democrats stand up for working Americans. Republicans favor the rich and big corporations. As a result, the Democratic base continues to be concentrated among working-class Americans, such as those who are members of trade unions, and is especially strong in poorer parts of the country. By contrast, Republicans are the party of the affluent or the rich, from big industrialists to members of country clubs, and are especially strong in some of the most prosperous parts of the country. 

The Reality:

Given America’s two-party system, the coalitions assembled by both parties have always been heterogeneous, in economic as well as in ideological terms. There is nothing new about the college professor who votes Democrat or the construction worker who votes Republican. But zoom out, and you see that the socio-economic change in voting behavior has been enormous.

Until a few decades ago, more affluent voters and more affluent districts tended to prefer the Republican Party. Now, education has come to be a much better predictor of voting behavior than income. The results are surprising: As college graduates are trending towards the Democratic Party and voters who do not have a higher education degree move towards the Republican Party, the class polarity in American politics is slowly—but seemingly inexorably—reversing. 

The speed of this change is remarkable. In 1996, Bill Clinton won the poorest segment of the electorate by 31 points. Bob Dole, his Republican opponent, won the most affluent Americans by 16 points. Back then, it really was broadly true that Republicans were the party of the rich, and Democrats the party of the little man. Today, by contrast, a voter’s income tells you virtually nothing about who they are likely to vote for. In the 2020 election, “working-class Joe” won the poorest segment of the electorate by a mere 8 points. Among the most affluent segment, the Republican advantage had completely disappeared: they voted for Biden and Trump in equal numbers.

This trend is even more pronounced when you compare rich to poor districts. Democrats now hold nearly two thirds of all House seats whose median income exceeds that of the country as a whole. Conversely, Republicans now hold nearly two thirds of all House seats whose median income is lower than that of the country as a whole.

---

Souhaitez-vous—ou quelqu’un que vous connaissez—avoir accès à tous ces articles et conversations en français? Cliquez sur ce lien et activez “en français” sous Notifications! 🇫🇷

---

Across North American and Western Europe, the white-working class has historically been the core electoral base for left-leaning parties. But it has long been clear that this is changing, with white working-class voters becoming a core constituency for the parties of the populist right from Greece to Sweden. Over the past decade, Trump’s rise has demonstrated that America is no exception. According to an analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten, for example, graduates of trade schools and vocational courses supported Bill Clinton by a seven point margin as recently as 1992; according to the latest polls, Trump will, in a month’s time, win this group by a staggering 31 point margin. 

Progressives usually dismiss these trends; after all, as they rightly point out, the policies Trump actually pursued while in office usually favored the rich and large corporations over the economic interests of working-class voters. But the fact that the Republican Party has, at best, been deeply inconsistent in advocating for the interests of the working-class only makes it all the more striking that they have made significant gains with this group. And if the class realignment in American politics is driven by more fundamental cultural and sociological factors—an interpretation that is given additional plausibility by the fact that similar changes have taken place in most democracies in Western Europe—then the change in policies may be a lagging, not a lead, indicator. Republicans won’t transform themselves into the party of the multi-racial working class by adopting policies that favor that segment of the electorate (though doing so in a consistent matter would certainly speed up the current realignment); they may end up adopting those policies because factors outside of their control are conspiring to turn them into that party.

---

Two of the most widely held demographic assumptions about the American electorate turn out to be wrong. There’s more: Next week, I will take on the myths that there are no longer any swing voters and that the United States is one of the most deeply polarized countries in the world. Once we clear up all four myths, I will argue, a very different view of American politics emerges: one in which there is a much better chance for one of the major parties to win a big victory, and overcome this era of deep partisan animosity, than most analysts now assume.

If you are already a subscriber to my weekly column, thanks for reading. If you aren’t, please sign up now to get the second installment of this article straight into your inbox next week!

1. If you had made predictions about today’s politics based on the voting behavior of various ethnic groups in the 1960s, you would have assumed that Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans would now be some of the most reliable vote-getters for the Democratic Party; instead, these groups now reliably favor the Republican Party. There is good reason to think that the many analysts who predict future Democratic strength on the basis of the current voting behavior of Hispanics or Asian-Americans are going to prove similarly mistaken.