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Demographic Destiny and the Presidential Elections
The demographic discussion in Charles Murray’s new book, which I finished a couple of weeks ago and posted about here earlier today, got me thinking about the effects of demographic change on American politics. I’ve known about the issue for quite a long time, mainly from the work of Mark Steyn and Ann Coulter about 15-20 years ago, and I’d shifted to a strongly anti-immigration position by 2008.
But it’s always useful to look at the facts, so I decided to look at the demographics of our Presidential elections. I found a good collection of exit polls from Roper, here, for the elections from 1976 to 2020. As I think that I’m the resident graph guy here at Ricochet, so I’ve prepared some graphs that I hope will prove helpful and informative.
My first task was to evaluate the voting trends of the major ethnic and racial groups. The exit polls report Presidential vote percentages for whites, blacks, and Hispanics all the way back to 1976. They include Asians from 1992, and an “other” category starting in 2004.
I constructed a PVI index of voting by race or ethnicity. I think that Charlie Cook came up with the idea, which is to evaluate the partisan lean of a state or district by comparing the margin of victory in such a state or district to the overall national margin of victory of the party in question. I applied this concept to vote margins by racial or ethnic group.
As a numeric convention, I adopted the Republican margin of victory as my variable, so a positive number PVI indicates a voting margin among a group favorable to the Republican, while a negative number indicates that the group favored the Democrat.
For example, in the 2020 election, Trump won white voters by 17 points, 58%-41%. Overall, he lost the election by 4 points, 47%-51%. So the white voter PVI in 2020 was 21 — the difference between Trump’s 17 point margin among whites and his -4 point margin overall. (Obviously, a negative margin means that he lost.) Similarly, in 1984, Reagan lost black voters by 82 points, 9%-91%, while winning the overall election by 18 points. So the black voter PVI in 1984 was a walloping -100 points.
Here’s a graph of this racial/ethnic PVI for the Presidential elections from 1976 to 2020:
As you can see, there is a pretty steady increase in the white PVI over this period, exceeding 20 points for every election since 2008. It is interesting that Trump actually did less well among whites than Romney had done, though the difference was minimal.
The Hispanic PVI bounces around a lot, but remains highly unfavorable at -27 points or more for every single year except 2004 (when it was -12). You can see that Trump’s performance among Hispanics was pretty good, and actually improved over Romney.
The black PVI is just a disaster for Republicans. Trump did better than any Republican had done since Dole in 1996. The apparent improvement in Republican performance in 1992 and 1996 is not because H.W. Bush and Dole did notably better, but because Perot picked up some of the black vote without substantially reducing the Republican share.
In fairness, Trump’s better performance in 2016 among black voters, compared to McCain and Romney, is probably due to Obama being on the ticket in 2008 and 2012. But Trump did do better, among blacks, than W had done in 2000 or 2004, and Trump deserves credit for his improvement in this demographic between 2016 and 2020.
What about the Asians? Here’s the graph limited to whites, Asians, and others. Note that this graph is for a shorter time period, 1992-2020.
These results are pretty bad for Republicans, and should be a cautionary lesson for any Republicans who think that Asian immigration is a good thing. There may be some other benefits, but politically, this demographic has been a disaster since 2000. Trump did turn things around a bit after Romney’s catastrophic -43 figure in 2012, but even in 2020, the Asian PVI was -23.
I’m not sure what to make of the “others,” except that they’re also an unfavorable demographic for Republicans. I suspect that this group is a combination of Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, and India-Indians.
The second issue is the changing demographics of the electorate. I have several graphs on this subject, showing the major decline in the percentage of white voters, especially after 2000. Here’s the first graph:
This graph shows the major decline in the white vote, from 89% in 1976 to 67% in 2020, but also illustrates that the white vote remains much, much larger than the other groups. The next graph is the same data but excluding whites, so that the changes in the other groups are easier to see.
This scale shows the enormous increase in the Hispanic vote, from 1% in 1976 to 13% in 2020. The black vote has increased also, but only modestly. The Asian and other categories remain small, but are growing.
I have one more graph on this issue, again using the same data, but this time displaying it as a stacked area graph:
I find this to be the most helpful illustration. (Sorry that the top of the graph is a bit ragged. Due to rounding, the percentages of voters in the various demographic groups don’t always add up to precisely 100%.)
None of this is good for Republicans.
I think that this information should be directly relevant to your views on immigration. I worry that many pro-immigration conservatives base their views on sentimentality and virtue-signaling. Please, stop having visions of the Statute of Liberty. Stop thinking of some second-rate poem written by a socialist.
Do what President Washington told us to do. Evaluate issues in the light of our interests. We have a right to decide whether or not to allow foreigners to become members of our polity. We should not be bringing in millions of foreigners who are going to cause a continued, and disastrous, drift to the political Left in our country.
I have one final pair of graphs. It illustrates that this demographic change has already caused a major shift to the political Left.
To prepare these graphs, I calculated what the Republican Presidential margin of victory (or loss) would have been in the elections since 1988, assuming the same racial and ethnic demographics that existed in 1980. The next graph shows the difference between these hypothetical results and the actual election results:
The green bars show the hypothetical Republican margin of victory, assuming 1980 demographics. The orange bars are the actual margin (there’s no orange bar in 2000 because it was a popular vote tie, at least when rounded to the nearest percent).
As you can see, in this hypothetical, the Republican candidate would have won every single election since 1988. Even McCain would have won the popular vote over Obama, narrowly, in 2008. Romney would have been a big winner, and Trump would have won bigly, twice.
My final graph is based on the same hypothetical and the same data, instead of showing the actual and hypothetical margins, it shows the difference between the hypothetical margin (with 1980 demographics) and the actual margin of victory (or loss) in the Presidential elections between 1988 and 2020.
In the past 3 Presidential elections, demographic change since 1980 has resulted in a swing of 11-12% in favor of the Democrats.
All of this has been quite obvious for at least 20 years. In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, two Democrats, wrote a book titled The Emerging Democratic Majority making precisely this point. Though, unlike me, I think that they were gloating rather than lamenting.
And what have we Republicans and conservatives done about it? Just about nothing. We had control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency from 2001-2006, and again from 2017-2018. No immigration restrictions were passed.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for your attention, and I look forward to your thoughts and reactions.
Published in Elections
Just a feeling.
I personally think that while the Dems, especially the National Extortion Association branch of it, have overplayed their hand, especially for the near term, the real solution in America, Britain and Canada will have to be a revival of religious faith, which I don’t see happening any time soon. So long story short, I wouldn’t give up all hope, but I think our work is cut out for us.
I think it will happen eventually. I wrote an essay called Wokism cannot make a thing like Christmas. I stand by it. Leftist religion is nothing but guilt and victimhood without redemption. People need redemption. Christianity will eventually make a comeback because Wokism makes people miserable.
Maybe it’s more of a prediction than a theory.
You are amazing with your charts and graphs @arizonapatriot. Thanks for your effort even though I know you must love doing this. Without having read any of the esteemed comments, your conclusion is the same one the Democrats reached years ago. They know new immigrants mean Democrat votes. It’s the only reason they fight so hard to remove any impediments to breaching our borders. The stupid Party also knows this and, yet, doesn’t care. Go put that in a chart.
I thought that before. We were not.
Yeah, I’m with you, Bryan. Expecting that we’re at the high water mark now looks like the triumph of hope over experience.
It’s my turn to be an optimist.
Huh. What are you even talking about?
Haven’t you heard of the 1619 Project? It was in all the papers?
There’s this border wall controversy.
I think Asia is the fastest-growing place for new immigrants.
I think the only country “North of the Mediterranean” to send legal immigrants to the United States would be the United Kingdom, and that’s only about 1% of US immigrants, falling from 1.3% in 2013 to 1.2% in 2015.