Since before election day 2020, some Democrats were sounding the alarm and trying to convince their colleagues of something unthinkable: Demographics are not destiny.
On November 3, those same colleagues were shocked to see Trump—the racist demagogue many liberals viewed as an ideal opponent in a browning America—actually increase his share of votes amongst non-whites. As exit polls have trickled in over the past few weeks, reading tweets and headlines about voter demographics has been a rollercoaster ride, with warnings of impending doom at the hands of Latino Republicans and conservative Black men.
“I think the coverage of the marginal gains that we saw with Donald Trump in communities of color, I think in some ways has been overblown,” Andra Gillespie, a political science professor and director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University, told Blue Tent.
Election demographic data is still being gathered and analyzed across the country, but the reality of 2020 appears much more banal and vexing than expected: According to early exit polls, besides a bigger turnout among every measurable group of voters, not a whole lot else changed in 2020.
GOP and Democratic vote share changes aren’t out of the ordinary
While some stats are eye-catching, such as Trump’s huge turnarounds in the Texas border towns that Democrats are used to winning by double digits, the aggregate is less noteworthy. In 2020, Trump slightly increased his share of the Latino vote from 29% in 2016 to 32% this year.
“One of my colleagues, he specializes in Latino politics, we were talking about this before the election and he asked ‘Should I be shocked that 30% of Latinos voted for Trump in 2016?’ No! Because 30% of Latinos are Republicans!” Gillespie said. “They voted their party. We have to sort of expect that, right?”
As Gillespie points out, that bump is hardly irregular, especially for an incumbent president. In 2000, George W. Bush received 35% of the Latino vote, which jumped to 40% in 2004. Presidents Clinton, Reagan and Obama also all saw bumps in their Latino support when running for re-election. Likewise, Trump’s vote share isn’t breaking any records on the high or low end for Republican presidential candidates, who have received as much as Bush’s 40% in 2004, and as little as 21% in 1996.
Polls show similar results for Black voters, upwards of 90% of whom voted for Biden. Depending on which exit polls you cite, Democrats saw anything from a small drop from 2016 (Clinton won 88% of Black voters; some exit polls have Biden at 87%) to a three-point increase. Margins in 2016 and 2020 both show a decrease in support for Democrats compared to the Obama years, but again, there’s little indication of long-term change happening here.
“That’s fairly constant over the last 40 to 50 years,” said Harwood McClerking, a professor of political science at Augustana College, where he specializes in Black politics. “You expect the Democratic candidate to get somewhere between 80 and 90%, except for extreme variations, like what Barack Obama got.”
Since 1964, Democratic share of Black voters has never dropped below 80%, and has more recently hovered around 90%.
One group that possibly did see a serious jump in support for Trump was American Muslims. Polling on Muslim voters is less reliable or consistent compared to Black or Latino voters, but according to exit polls, more than 65% of Muslims voted for Biden, compared to 78% for Clinton in 2016. The polls are less clear on Muslims who voted for Trump; a poll conducted by CAIR found that only 17% of Muslims voted for Trump, while AP VoteCast put the number much higher, at 35%. In 2016, depending on the poll, Muslims voted for Trump at a rate as low as 8% to as high as 13%; either way, it seems to be an increase in support for Trump.
“I am still trying to understand this myself,” said Dalia Mogahed, director of research at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, who cited the 35% figure in an email exchange with Blue Tent. Mogahed noted that Muslim Trump voters are more likely to be white, more concerned with the economy, more opposed to building interfaith coalitions with other groups, and more likely to endorse anti-Muslim beliefs.
But even if the biggest increases in support for Trump are accurate, Muslim voters made up less than 1% of all voters, and still broke overwhelmingly for Biden.
A matter of expectations
So where did all of this panic come from?
One explanation is a failure of appropriate expectations. Without prior polling data on hand, numbers like 30% of Latinos, 35% of Muslims and 20% of Black men voting for Trump—the man who campaigned on calling Mexicans rapists and banning Muslims—may sound a bit shocking. But those numbers simply aren’t gigantic leaps from previous elections.
One other explanation connected to the area of expectation setting is that people may be applying the same expectations around Black voters to other demographics. The political science explanation for Black voters backing Democrats to such a high degree on a consistent basis is called the Black Utility Heuristic.
“The way Michael Dawson thought of it 25 years ago was just the idea that because of Black experiences, that African Americans who felt a connection to the group would use their perceptions of what was good or bad for the group as a guide to make their way through political decisions,” McClerking explained.
For a number of reasons, but perhaps most significantly because of the Democratic Party’s association with passing major civil rights legislation in the 1960s, Democrats are widely seen as the political party more likely to serve the interests of African Americans as a group. This does not mean that 90% of Black voters are necessarily liberal. Rather, Democrats are so clearly seen as the superior party with regard to racism that even most Black conservatives still vote Democratic. In fact, as Gillespie pointed out, with upward of 40% of African Americans identifying as conservatives but most still voting Democratic, they may actually have moderating influence on primaries.
The varied experiences and histories of other ethnic, racial, or even religious groups simply don’t add up in the same way.
“The difference is, many other groups in American society have been fighting to define and redefine what it means to be a member of their community,” said McClerking. “Groups that might have seemed more monolithic 50 years ago seem less so today, and I think it’s because they’re likely to have competing visions of how to express that particular identity politically, so there’s more variation in how people understand how that could be done.”
The longtime Democratic claim that “demographics are destiny” probably should have been put to bed years ago. But as the data shows, the Democratic Party’s demise at the hands of nonwhite Republican voters has likewise been greatly exaggerated.
