Democrats Can't Rely on Demographics Alone
It will take more than rising racial diversity to win elections. The party shouldn't take any group for granted.
By Ruy Teixeira
Rising racial diversity is an ongoing trend in the United States, as the latest Census Bureau data confirms. In fact, the figures suggest that over the past decade, the white population will have declined for the first time in the nation’s history.
This demographic change is generally understood to be beneficial to the Democrats’ electoral fortunes, as John Judis and I argued in our 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. That’s a reasonable viewpoint based on a very simple idea: If voter groups favorable to the Democrats (racial minorities) are growing while unfavorable groups (whites) are declining, that should be good news for the Democrats. This is called a “mix effect”: a change in electoral margins attributable to the changing mix of voters.
These mix effects are what people typically have in mind when they think of the pro-Democratic effects of rising diversity. But mix effects, by definition, assume no shifts in voter preference: They are an all-else-equal concept, as we were careful to stress two decades ago. If voter preferences remain the same, then mix effects mean that the Democrats will come out ahead. That is a mathematical fact.
But voter preferences do not generally remain the same. Therein lies the reason why, in some cases, rising diversity has not produced the dividends for Democrats that many activists and advocates anticipated—and, in other cases, has little to do with gains that Democrats do make.
Consider these results from the 2016 election. Estimates from the nonpartisan States of Change project indicated that purely based on underlying demographic change, the Democrats’ Pennsylvania margin should have increased modestly between 2012 and 2016. Of course, that didn’t happen. Instead, Hillary Clinton actually lost the state by 0.7 points.
A simple way to unpack this result is to look at contributions to the Democratic margin, or CDM, which can be calculated by multiplying an election’s proportion of voters in a given demographic by their Democratic margin in that election. The result can be compared across elections to see how demographic groups change in their contribution to the overall Democratic margin.
Doing this for Pennsylvania in 2016 shows that shifts among white voters, driven by white non-college voters, produced a large negative contribution to Democrats’ margin in the state. That shift simply overwhelmed the modest positive CDM from rising diversity. This pushed the Democratic margin in the state toward the unexpected result of a Trump victory. The same pattern applied to Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016.
But, of course, these states are slow-growing and hardly at the forefront of demographic change in the country. Perhaps the story would be different in states, like Texas and Arizona, that had fairly sharp moves toward the Democrats in 2016 relative to 2012. Estimates by States of Change indicated that rising diversity alone would move these states one to two percentage points in the Democrats’ direction in 2016. But the actual shift in the election was far greater. That’s because the actual shift was driven, above all, by an increase in white support—chiefly white college-educated support—for Democrats in both states. Indeed, the shift in white voter preference in Texas was enough, by itself, to account for the Democrats’ improved margin in the state.
The 2020 election illustrates these points further. Take Arizona again, and Georgia, the Democrats’ two big breakthrough states in the election. In Arizona, a burgeoning Hispanic electorate was set to boost Democratic fortunes by about the same amount as in 2016. However, Arizona did not escape the nationwide pattern of Hispanic voters moving toward Trump. As a result, despite the underlying trend toward more eligible Latino voters and excellent turnout performance, the overall CDM of Arizona Hispanic voters actually went down by a little less than a point in 2020.1 On the other hand, the CDM of white voters, driven especially by white college-educated voters, improved by around 5 points—more than enough to account for the shift in Arizona to a Democratic advantage in 2020. In other words, it was educated whites, not Hispanics, who won Arizona for Biden.
In Georgia, rising diversity was also set to improve Democratic fortunes. However, the most important part of the nonwhite vote, black voters, had a somewhat lower CDM in 2020, as well as slightly reduced voter share due to declining relative turnout. As a result, the CDM of black voters in 2020 probably declined slightly in the state. As in Arizona, the Democratic shift from a deficit in 2016 to an advantage in 2020 can be accounted for almost entirely by a sharp shift toward the Democrats among white voters, especially white college-educated voters. This shift was the major factor behind Democrats carrying the state.
There are four lessons here. First, while the effects of rising diversity do indeed favor the Democrats, these effects are fairly modest in any given election and can easily be overwhelmed by shifts in voter preference against the Democrats among unfavorable demographic groups, such as white non-college voters.
Second, even among favorable demographic groups, the electoral benefit to the Democrats can be completely neutralized by shifts against the Democrats within a demographic group. This was the case with the Hispanic vote in Arizona and many other states in 2020.
Third, in states where demographic change is rapid, it is easy to mistake shifts toward the Democrats in a given election as indicators of these underlying demographic changes. But as we saw for Arizona and Texas in 2016 and Arizona and Georgia in 2020 (there are many other examples), their pro-Democrat shifts were, in fact, driven by white voters.
Finally, the long-range effects of rising diversity are also an all-else-equal proposition. While cycle-by-cycle voter preference shifts can be volatile and even out over time, sometimes they result in a long-term shift against a party like the Democrats—think of the move of white non-college voters toward the Republicans in the 2000s. This can cancel or even swamp the pro-Democratic effects of demographic change over a lengthy period.
In short, demographics set the playing field, but they are not destiny unless all else remains equal. And all else almost never remains equal. Therein lies a challenge for the Democrats that the simple fact of rising racial diversity cannot solve.
Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and co-editor of the Substack newsletter The Liberal Patriot. His most recent book is The Optimistic Leftist.
Estimates for 2020 developed by synthesizing data from States of Change, 2016 and 2020 exit polls, AP/NORC 2020 VoteCast, and Catalist 2020 analysis.
First, thanks, Ruy Teixeira, for your long history of thinking about these questions. Second, and at the risk of harping, I'd like to point out that lots of scholars outside the discipline of politics aren't just failing to take this information into account. Rather, believing that "demographics = (progressive} destiny" and that members of disfavored groups share the values of radical white scholars (or, rather, vice versa) is a sign of motivated reasoning. Considering religious beliefs and other factors would undermine these convictions. Not incidentally, it would also call the identifications--therefore identity--of radical white scholars into question. We all tend to resist the destabilizing of our most cherished identities. But the "brand" of radical intellectuals in bound up with their pedagogy about the radical, virtuous essence of BIPOC, AAPIDA, and queer "folx." Any data that complicate this reading of alterity (yeah, jargon) are anathema.
There is a fifth lesson: Religious votes change with immigration. Many if not all Hispanic Immigrants are Catholic and Catholics do tend to vote Republican at this point. The Catholic Church is still pretty clear about gender, euthanasia and abortion. Hispanics are still, I believe, the largest group of immigrants too. Trump was an atheistic anomaly for a Republican; so he did not rally Catholic voters the way most post Reagan Republicans have. I suspect he would have won if he had catered a bit more the the Catholic Hispanic voter. Still he shockingly pulled in tremendous numbers of Hispanic votes despite his rather Draconian immigration policies. Bush understood the immigrant Catholic vote and catered to the Hispanic voter. He was willing to say he looked to God for guidance, enlightenment and purification. He admitted he was a humble recovering sinner, Catholics like that. I like that. That got him two terms.