With regard to stuff like the Hispanic swing in places like Texas and Florida, it's always important to keep in mind that the label "Hispanic" contains multitudes.
I've done a lot of work in the parts of South Texas between Laredo and Presidio and have become fascinated with the area and the people (some of the friendliest I've met anywhere, for that matter). It's one of most ethnically homogenous regions in the whole country. *Everyone* (well, 95% of people) is/are of Mexican ancestry. Not only the working poor and middle classes but cops, border guards, city councilors and mayors, bureaucrats, local notables and landowners, etc. While it's certainly a poor area and people complain quite a bit about the neglect Austin shows it, talk about White Privilege, micro-aggressions, and other woke-isms fall flat for the simple reason that it doesn't make context within the sense of everyday life. They just seem more like more crazy ideas from Austin liberals. Combine that with the fact that a lot of the population is devoutly Catholic (or increasingly Evangelical) it's easy to see why the Republican party increasingly appeals.
It's a different story among Hispanics in Los Angeles, for instance, where a much more solid sense of non-white identity and more leftist political orientation prevail. (Hispanics in Texas and Florida are way more likely to consider themselves white than in California or Washington State. In Florida's case that makes some sense since so many Cubans are of very recent Spanish extraction/immigrant descent but I don't know what to make of Texas.)
It's true that violent coup attempts in the US are likely to end in failure. Relatedly, without a doubt the GOP is fortunate indeed the death toll last month wasn't higher. Can you imagine if dozens or several hundred had died, including members of Congress? The rebuke would have been swift and far more forceful than the milquetoast measures we've seen so far (perhaps Pence would have invoked the 25th; perhaps the Senate would have held conducted a shotgun impeachment trial, who knows?)
But I think the above glosses over the real danger: a political/legal coup. Already we're seeing reports of various state-level GOP organizations being purged of non-Trumpists. Liz Cheney has apparently been censored by her state party. That nutty Qanon representative from Georgia received a standing ovation from her Republican colleagues.
It's clear the Trump team didn't have enough help from state GOP officials in their efforts to steal the election. But who's comfortable assuming it will transpire this way next time? Moreover, a significant majority of Republicans in Congress voted against certifying Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Just imagine if both chambers were dominated by healthy Republican majorities. Is anyone really confident Biden will be *allowed* to secure a second term if that's the case in January of 2025?
Republican operatives were taking notes in November, December and January, and next time they'll be better prepared with coup-friendly laws and judges, and hard right MAGA loyalists in key positions in purple states. And yes, quite possibly they'll also be equipped with a majority in Congress unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic nominee's election victory.
I actually think GOP state parties in even remotely swing states purging non-Trumpists is a huge net negative for any GOP attempts to move the system in an authoritarian direction, because such purges directly impede the party's ability to take power in the first place. These purges have already cost the GOP four Senate seats since 2018 and pushed both AZ and GA into the D column. The TX GOP going full Q is the absolute worst possible thing that can happen for the national Republican Party, as TX, while still Likely R, is still demographically trending towards the Dems. Even with increases in the GOP share of the Hispanic vote in 2020, TX drifted another ~3-4 points leftward compared to 2016. If the TX GOP goes full fringe nut, as appears to be the case under West, it might actually put the state in play in 2024, which would be beyond disastrous for the GOP - there is really no plausible path to electoral victory for them in at least the next 2 cycles without Texas.
The more the GOP embraces fringe politics, the more noxious and repellent it becomes to the suburban voters who have already been deserting the party in droves.
This is exactly the point -- if Texas blue-shifts enough for Dems to actually win the presidency and the governor's seat, it's game-over for the GOP as it presently exists. We'll have at least a decade of solid Democratic rule (like has happened in California).
But it's also _possible_ that their voter suppression efforts, and their games with voting structures and allocation of powers, all ultimately upheld by their supermajority on the Supreme Court, will hold the shift off long enough for them to figure out a way to consolidate power.
We're going through a very dangerous period because the GOP _correctly_ believes that an actually-democratic country will never elect candidates that espouse the policies and attitudes that they do. Faced with the choice between adapting their platform to the electorate, and trying to crush democracy, they have chosen the latter. Anyone that cares about preserving the republic needs to see Biden's victory not as the end of the fight, but merely a significant victory in an ongoing campaign.
1. Hispanics on average tend to be more blue collar than the average White person. And blue collar (work with their hands) people are way more likely these days to be Republican. It didn’t used to be that way of course, but it is today.
2. I have talked to several people in real life who live in South Florida and they said the propaganda aimed at Cubans was absolutely insane during the election.
I would urge caution though at reading too much into this swing. Remember: AZ has 2 US senators now and despite white movement left that could not have happened without substantial Hispanic support.
I agree that multiple factors are likely at play (although that doesn't mean some of these factors won't continue to play a role):
1) The movement of Hispanics into socially conservative Evangelical churches;
2) BLM and Defund movements (Black/Hispanic political tension isn't exactly a secret, and the urban unrest we saw in 2020 might have re-opened old wounds; it's also not inconceivable that a lot of Hispanic voters oppose reductions in police budgets);
3) Candidate quality (it could be that an old white guy isn't a good a fit for the Hispanic cohort; John Kerry's Hispanic vote share was also weak);
4) Trump's positioning himself as the candidate who vowed to open up the economy; I think it's pretty widely understood that Hispanics in America have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic recession;
5) Assimilation drift (ie, similar to Irish/Italians);
6) The hardening of anti-Marxist sentiment among Hispanics in Florida flowing from an influx of Venezuelans.
None of these factors need be very large or decisive for them to be important as a whole.
I think even more so than usual, it's dangerous to try and infer demographic trends from the 2020 election.
Democrats were forced by circumstances to spend 2020 explicitly calling for policies that crashed the economy, kept kids out of school, and generally constrained personal freedom. Trump spent the year speaking out against those things and sending out checks with his name on them.
In light of the big polling miss (for which I defer to David Shor's theory that we had a distinct partisan non-response effect going on), I suspect this was all much less popular than we thought, especially amongst child-rearing aged working class people of all races who bore the worst brunt of the downsides while being at the least personal risk. Hispanic people (to the degree it's a useful analytical category) are younger and more working class than the rest of the population on average, so I think they're the most impacted by this?
This is definitely not the only thing going on, but 2020 was such a weird year I'm hesitant to make any extrapolation.
David Shor says that Hispanic turnout was way down in the 2020 primary, which he takes as a sign that a lot of Hispanics had already switched to the GOP by then. The 2020 primary, of course, mostly took place before Covid hit. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1343685995208839176
What is the mechanism that is going to stop the pro-coup people from controlling state Republican parties, and winning primaries?
A Jungle Primary, and non-partisan redistricting, like California has, theoretically ought to help -- and yet all the same our county Republican parties are increasingly bonkers. (Bear in mind that Orange County is the _origin point_ of a lot of GOP craziness, going back to the days of the Birchers.) You had CA Republicans last fall engaging in placement of illegal ballot collection boxes. Essentially their strategy appeared to be to engage in illegal activity related to mail ballots, and then when called on it, shout about how there's so much illegal activity around mail ballots!!!1!!one!!
Me neither! And the fact that I can't imagine what arrests the doom-loop of crazy, where the crazies drive out sane people and that just gives them more consolidated control, makes me think that the GOP will continue to be crazy for the forseeable future. Which means we have three possibilities.
One is that California is a harbinger of what will happen in the nation -- enough states will blue-shift that we have an easier time winning the Senate, and the GOP is just locked out of the electoral college like they fear. (Degerrymandering would make a big difference here. There's some hope for the House because of a few key states where we have Dem governors this time, but didn't last time. Though I'm unclear whether the GOP may've managed to pass laws before those govs took power, taking away gubernatorial review of the maps.) The real debate ends up between moderate Dems and liberal/progressive Dems, until such time as the GOP _completely_ collapses, at which point the Dems can divide into two parties. Maybe the liberals split off and merge with the Greens and Peace and Freedom types, or maybe the moderates split off and take over the GOP brand (unlikely, IMHO, but not impossible), or establish some other new party (similar to how we've seen new centrist parties emerge and rapidly achieve success in a bunch of major European countries, e.g. France).
Two is that the GOP loses the ability to win presidential races, because they can't win a majority of _electoral votes_, but continues to hold the edge in the Senate (or Dems can't ever quite convince moderates like Manchin and Sinema to end the filibuster) and as a result the federal government basically becomes long-term paralyzed, and in effect, our federalist system simply devolves into independent states fending for themselves. The DeathGrip, forecast in this short story: https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/the-minnesota-diet-a-new-short-story-by-charlie-jane-anders.html
And three is that the GOP nominates "Trump but more competent", and we go the way of Turkey or Hungary.
Given the high level of religiosity in America compared to other modern countries, #2 and especially #3 are most likely, I'm sad to say (one could add Poland to the America, Turkey, Hungary comparison here).
I think #3 misses the point a bit, which is that the reason Turkey and Hungary went the way of Turkey and Hungary is that autocratic leaders who enjoyed broad-based support came to power & used that popularity and support to force through changes to the system. Trump leaves office the most unpopular President since Carter and the GOP is a minority party which has won the popular vote once in 30 years. Even if they're able to seize power through counter-majoritarian systems, gerrymanding, etc, they will be doing so on the back of relatively thin margins, and we've seen that there's enough GOP senators firmly outside of the Coup Caucus for the GOP to need a very large majority to pass any truly sweeping anti-democratic "reforms". In a world where the GOP, again already a minority party, has become a pro-coup, anti-democracy party, it is *extremely* difficult to see how they reach these necessary majorities. Being pro-coup is not a popular position!
Additionally, a huge part of Trump's appeal was his uniquely incompetent style. I am not concerned about the idea of a "Trump but competent" leader who could unite popular support for anti-democratic reforms, because Trump's entire appeal was his willingness to attack his fellow Americans as though they were citizens of a hostile foreign power. The divisiveness is the point, and anyone who engages in such behavior is never going to reach the kind of popular mandate necessary to break the system.
Lastly, it's important to consider the role of SCOTUS. While a 6-3 conservative majority, that is not the same as a 6-3 *Trumpist* majority. Indeed, we saw Trump's nominees unceremoniously toss his farcical legal coup attempt without any attempt whatsoever to lend a veneer of legitimacy to it. Trump didn't nominate Trumpist judges; he nominated McConnell judges. Now, Mitch McConnell may be a historic example of failure to lead by permitting Trumpism to co-opt the Republican Party, but as we've all seen, he is *not* a Trumpist - and there is no reason to presume that a conservative establishment SCOTUS would be any more so.
Trump came terrifyingly close to winning despite being historically unpopular, and if he had been capable of even the most minimal reflection and strategy, he could've just gotten out of the way of competent people in the Covid response, and he probably would've been enough more popular to win. A lot of governors, and foreign leaders, have seen high approval numbers during Covid while just doing the bare minimum.
I don't know that I think #3 is the most likely outcome, but dismissing it out of hand makes you sound like the folks in 2016 who thought it was impossible Trump could win, even though polling models like 538 were showing he had maybe a 20-30% chance, and things that "unlikely" happen all the time.
"Trump wins reelection" is not the same thing as "the US becomes anti-democratic like Hungary and Turkey". I think he'd have done a lot of damage in a 2nd term, absolutely, but there's no world in which Trump II turns him into an autocratic quasi-dictator like Orban or Erdogan. The existence of the filibuster alone would preclude the passage of any meaningful anti-democratic legislation by Congress, to say nothing of the (small) faction of moderate Rs who wouldn't stand for it, and there's zero reason to believe that the Roberts Court would facilitate Trump violating the Constitution to remain in power. He'd wreak a lot more havoc but he'd still be out of the White House at the end of his term without any meaningfully autocratic changes to the fundamental structure of US government.
To be clear, I'm not at all saying Trump II wouldn't be bad or inflict potentially significant damage, just that I think it's a mistake to characterize it in the same frame as broad-based authoritarian populist movements in countries with less robust institutions - those are very different situations.
You seriously think the filibuster would have stopped the Senate from passing _anything_ the GOP majority really wanted to pass, and had 51 votes for?
The only reason McConnell didn't kill the legislative filibuster is that nothing like that came up. Point to a case where there was some law that the Dems filibustered in the past four years, and I'll point you to the GOP Senators who would've defected on a vote, same as McCain killed their attempt to repeal Obamacare under reconciliation.
Yes, our institutions have not _completely_ collapsed, and Roberts is obviously not a fan of the authoritarian wing. But nonetheless the Court accommodated some really ugly things, and in some cases they only stopped Trump because, again, he was so unwilling to do what authoritarians have done in Europe -- mimic the forms of democracy while hollowing out its core. The attempt to intimidate Hispanics out of answering the Census was only blocked because of that kind of dumb reason. If they have the chance next time, they know they need to write up some specious whitepapers first.
You seem far too sanguine about the remaining strength of US institutions. I don't believe that if Trump had won, it would've necessarily would've been "the last election". But on the other hand, I'm not _sure_ about that, and we can see in the wake of the election, lots of state parties are continuing to push anti-democratic policies to entrench their rule. Plenty of authoritarians have ruled for extended periods based on having a zealous minority and a paramilitary wing that suppresses opposition. If you're generally supported by 35% or 40% of the people, and even 2% are willing to go out and beat up protestors, and occasionally shoot opposition politicians (and then you talk about "bad actors on both sides", or blame antifa false flag attacks), that can be enough.
Interesting, and #3 is utterly terrifying. Thank god my kids are already learning Norwegian and getting all their ducks in a row to immigrate there for eventual citizenship. My husband and I will still be stuck here, but maybe they'll be able to get us over there, too, somehow? Who knows...
I would LOVE for a centrist party to emerge, where Clinton, Bush, and Romney can be their leaders, and the MAGA freaks can just have the GOP.
I wouldn't worry about #3 too much. Orban and Erdogan were able to do what they did because they enjoyed broad-based popular support which permitted them to foist anti-democratic "reforms" onto a more liberal-minded minority. By contrast, the GOP is a minority party in the US and will only become more so, not less, if it trends more extremist.
From what I've seen, a lot of young Americans are making similar plans to move to Japan. Probably going to be a mass youth exodus once people can travel again (along with ojisan like Noah 😅😅😅).
I have a theory that a Romney-style GOP moderate would have been the best fit for a pandemic-fighting America in 2020. On balance I suspect Hillary Clinton would have done a better job than Trump, but she, too, would have suffered from the same kind of crazed animus we saw aimed at Democratic governors. But someone like Romney might have given us the best of both worlds: science-based leadership AND the ability -- because of the "R" next to his name -- to co-opt a lot of the right wing craziness.
I just wrote a very long comment explaining why "ranked choice", at least if tabulated with the "instant runoff" method, is problematic. Most of the time it's better than plurality, but it also has a particular failure mode that's actually _worse_ than what happens with plurality tabulation.
There are creditable arguments that Ranked ballots are better than Approval ballots (they're more information-rich), but if that's your reason for liking rankings, then you should like Range/Score ballots _even more_, because a Range ballot lets you express the difference between "A=10, B=9, C=0" and "A=10, B=1, C=0", whereas on a ranked ballot, both of those are identical. I generally prefer Approval because there are reasons based in theoretical modeling to believe that "correct strategy" for range ballots reduces to figuring out how you would've voted under Approval, plus it's incredibly cheap to implement and trivial to explain to voters. ("Vote yes/no on each candidate. Do you like Alice? Do you like Bob? Etc.")
I've been interested in this issue ever since the 2000 Florida debacle, and I was part of a group of CA Dem activists that worked with at-the-time Secretary of State Debra Bowen to get a California law adopted that allowed cities to try out different voting methods. Unfortunately, so far the only thing anyone's done is instant runoff. :-/
What most people mean by "Ranked Choice Voting" is Instant Runoff for single-winner districts, and that system actually has pretty big problems. For starters, if you look at places that use a mix of races that use a strictly-ranked method (you must list 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and the system can't deal with something like "1st, 1st, 3rd"), and old-style "vote for N" type races, you find something like 5x as many spoiled ballots in the ranked races, and this effect disproportionately affects people who are poorer and less English fluent.
You can ameliorate this problem by "sliding up" ranks that have gaps, and when you're scoring a round based on the current top choices, if you have N equal choices, they each count as 1/N points for those candidates. But this does mean more complexity in your voting equipment.
The bigger problem with instant runoff is just that it promises you that you can "vote your true first choice", but that promise is only true as long as your first choice is _irrevelant_. If your first choice becomes _competitive_, the "spoiler problem" comes back, with a vengeance. This problem is known among election experts as the Center Squeeze. The toy example looks like this: You have a town with 100 voters. On election day, so far 98 of them have voted, like this:
35 Right > Center > Left
16 C > R > L
16 C > L > R
31 L > C > R
So, if you tally things up right now, Left loses to Center 31-32. Then Center wins over Right, 63-35.
But now the last two voters show up. They vote with the Left bloc. Now Center loses to Left, 33-32. And then Right wins over Left, 51-49.
Not only is this dumb because Center is preferred by two-thirds of voters over either alternative -- it's dumb because the voters who changed the outcome would have been happier with the result if they had just stayed home. This is no way for an election method to behave.
This failure mode is expected to be somewhat common in practice. Most famously, perhaps, this is _exactly_ what happened in the two-round runoff process in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election -- the crook Edwards, and the klansman Duke, managed to both edge out the sane candidate Roemer. We also had a very near miss with the worst version of the squeeze in San Francisco this year: The more-lefty candidate Nguyen came very close to edging out the center-lefty candidate Melgar, but we know from the records of the ballots that if Melgar had been knocked out, the more-conservative candidate Engardio would've actually won.
Personally I am very concerned that if some state adopts IRV, and then experiences a Center Squeeze style race, that will poison the well for reformers more generally.
You can fix this problem problem by converting to a Condorcet method. Instead of knocking out whoever has the least top votes, you instead take the TWO candidates with the least top votes, and compare preferences on them across all ballots, and eliminate whoever loses that head-to-head race. That type of method still can have some weird edge cases where it's questionable who should've won, but only if there are actual preference cycles (the voters collectively have said A > B > C > A). This kind of situation is expected to be very rare in practice.
Alternately, you could move to STV-PR -- Single Transferable Vote for Proportional Representation. This only has the weird squeeze behavior in the selection of the final candidate, and if you're doing the whole legislature, or multi-member districts with 4-6 members, at that point you're talking about small margins either way, anyhow; it's just not a big deal. But I doubt we're going to go full parliamentary, and do away with electing individual executive officers.
In any case, there are sound reasons in both theory and practice to prefer using either a Range method (where you rate each candidate 0-10, or 0-5 stars, or whatever), or the most-simplified version of Range, known as Approval Voting, where you just say 0 or 1, i.e. vote up/down on each candidate like a ballot measure. Approval is literally free to implement on any existing voting equipment, and barely requires voter education. The Center for Election Science ( https://electionscience.org/ ) has successfully worked with local activists in Fargo and Saint Louis to get it adopted, and has more campaigns in the works. On the Range front, the county around Portland, OR is looking at adopting STAR Voting ("Score, Then Automatic Runoff"), where you narrow down to two candidates based on the Range results, and then do a head-to-head comparison between those two based on who scores higher on each ballot.
(Also, there is a very good proportional tabulation method that works with both Approval and Range, which was invented by Thomas Jefferson, and used for the initial allocation of House seats. The original Jefferson method looks more like Party List Approval, but the concept is trivially adaptable to directly voting on candidates. CES formally favors AV-PR as the best method for electing legislative bodies.)
In any case, both AV and STAR mostly-eliminate the spoilage problem (there are still more opportunities to mess up a marking, but messing up your vote on one candidate has no effect on any other), and they drastically lower the cost of deployment (both actual equipment, and the cost of adequate voter education to make the system work).
Interesting, and thanks for sharing. I'm a IRV advocate in my city, and I'm going to run this all by my fellow advocates to see what they think. We actually passed IRV in my city, but the local election commission is run out of the state's central government, and it's a red state, so it was never implemented. So we might need to take that as an opportunity to consider something different.
There is, frustratingly, a fairly well-funded national group that is committed to IRV; usually they simply don't acknowledge that other reforms exist, and when they do, they make arguments about the issue that are at-best statements of opinion or values, on which reasonable people can differ, but presented as if they were logically determinative. Worse, they also seem committed to repeating stuff that's just false, and pretending that events like the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election, or the 2001 French Presidential election, just don't exist. There's a real "I've made up my mind, don't bother me with the facts" vibe. I invested a lot of effort in this area between about 2001 and 2007, and then largely gave up, because it seemed like the only reform with any momentum was IRV, and I think it's an actively bad idea to enact that on large scale because it will lead to some high-profile failure, followed by repeal in some places, and refusal to try reforms in more places. I was really heartened to learn about CES in a Vox piece a couple years ago, when they were running the Fargo campaign.
The #1 leader of the pro IRV movement in my city is a law professor at the city university. He's on Fox and MSNBC, etc a lot. He's a VERY open-minded guy who values skepticism and critical thinking, so there is no zealotry in our group. :) That well-funded national group won't be a problem for us. We're calling IRV "ranked choice voting" now. We've also toyed with "single transferable vote" wording ("One man, one vote!" was the main complaint of those who genuinely opposed IRV here.) But they're all the same thing. I do *believe* (for now, but I'm open minded) IRV is right for my particular city. These are non-partisan elections, tho you can tell who is "liberal/left" and who is conservative.
I haven't heard of the "CES in a Vox piece a couple years ago, when they were running the Fargo campaign." but I'll look into that!
Regarding the way local elections can be formally non-partisan, but everyone knows roughly what the ideological alignment: San Francisco is like that too. The big divide in the city is between a "progressive" coalition that spans from Berniecrats, to DSA-ers who consider the Dems too conservative and corporate and don't register as party members; and a "moderate" coalition that would be seen as fairly liberal Democrats in almost any other place in the country. Fortunately there are at least some areas where the issues cross-cut those coalitions. (Trump's "suburban lifestyle dream" rhetoric has _started_ to polarize the question of land use and housing production, but there is still a pretty wide range of attitudes at all points along the spectrum.)
A) scaring Hispanics about socialism, Democratic mismanagement of the economy (i.e., endless lockdowns)
B) activitating racial tension between Hispanics and African Americans by demonizing Black Lives Matter/antifa/the George Floyd protests
C) appealing to male Hispanics' masculinity by portraying Trump as tough and unafraid of the virus
A gets talked get some, but not so much B and C, because it challenges white liberal priors or simply flies under their radar. But the evidence is clearly there if you look at how the Trump campain actually reached out to Hispanics.
Democrats should keep in mind that their multiracial coalition may be hard to keep together. They will need to provide everyone a seat at the table and a higher standard of living, otherwise they could bleed support. And when it's time for Kamala to run, she should probably pick a male Hispanic running mate.
TLDR: The Latino swing towards Trump in ‘20 was driven by small rural counties. The exit poll data is dicey at best, and the precinct analysis you cited is poorly done and ignores confounders.
I would not state this as gospel, but I do think you should note that the evidence for a general Latino swing is weaker than it looks.
Lets also not forget BLM and the stupid "Defund the Police" message. Politics at the top is increasingly seen as a battle of elites and only seen in Black and White. Mexican-Americans, many of whom would suffer from such idealistic policies, will naturally start aligning themselves with the party of colorblindness and universal messaging. Which, sadly, is primarily (only?) coming from the right these days.
First let me start by saying I'm Puerto Rican so I have some personal knowledge of the subject.
I think there are several factors at play and more than one apply to other non-white groups in addition to Hispanics.
First and most important the economy. The fact that the US was getting close to full employment was very good for people with low incomes but did not affect professionals or people with higher education as much.
The stimulus that occurred in 2020 meant that some people's income increased in the midst of the pandemic.
The state of the economy is related to the observation that Hispanics reward incumbents. This is true provided the economy is doing well. This used to be true of the entire electorate but is less true now because of increased partisanship.
Second observation. There is a growing number of Hispanics who are evangelical Christians and evangelicals vote GOP. This is a trend that has been going on for a while and to the degree that it continues it will benefit the GOP.
Outreach. The GOP was just better at it in 2020 than the Democrats. Outreach and persuasion is really important with Hispanics because unlike many voting groups they really can swing from one party to another. Most voters consistently vote GOP or Democrat put depending on get out the vote, ads, social media and other factors Hispanics will vote for one party or another.
So the economy and outreach can vary from election to election and both parties can do something about it. The trend of more Hispanic evangelicals is something that will benefit only the GOP.
To keep in mind though that GWB did far better among Hispanics than Trump and then Obama ran and got the level of Hispanic support for Democrats to historic heights.
Good points! I think the outreach one is very important to highlight, as the Dems basically ceded the grassroots field to the GOP throughout most of the 2020 campaign season due to the pandemic. I expect GOP gains with Hispanic voters will hold or improve as it reflects a broader realignment of the parties, but there will certainly be more on-the-ground engagement from the Dems in the next cycle.
I'm going to keep banging this drum: the election results gave us one more reason to prefer high-skilled immigrants (in the US, these come predominantly from Asia) to low-skilled immigrants (coming predominantly from Latin America).
It's important to remember that racism is only one element of the Trumpian electoral strategy. Another, possibly more important one is what Steve Bannon called "flooding the zone with shit": creating enough confusion among low-information voters that they can't consistently vote for their class interests (or simply for basic competence in governing).
There's no reason this strategy can't work on poorly educated voters of any ethnic background, and it's been shortsighted of Democrats to assume that just because some working-class immigrants have dark skin they'll be permanently immune to it.
This is an iceberg story, the most salient change is happening slowly under the surface.
According to Pew, the Republican Party has steadily gotten 1% less white every year for a few decades now. The headline always focuses on how much slower that is than the Democrats or baseline, but across decades, the direction matters more than the magnitude.
In a country that is changing its composition so decisively, no open public institution can remain unchanged forever. Strategy operates at the margins. Demographic inevitability is coming regardless.
The second/third order implications of a diverse Republican party are a lot stranger than most people expect.
It would be interesting to see how that 1% has varies over the years, especially with vis-a-vis the Democratic Party (I imagine the gap was vast in the 80s) and independents/apoliticals.
I suspect it's not necessarily "a lot stranger" but more something recent that not a lot of people have thought about. And it may not be much of a new trend - maybe we're returning to the world of the early 2000s, when Hispanics and Asians voted for Republicans more because white panic and xenophobia weren't as salient, and the party could appeal to minority voters with conservative views on social and economic issues more easily. (I seem to recall that GWB pretty handily won the non-African American Muslim vote in 2000, which makes complete sense to me).
With regard to stuff like the Hispanic swing in places like Texas and Florida, it's always important to keep in mind that the label "Hispanic" contains multitudes.
I've done a lot of work in the parts of South Texas between Laredo and Presidio and have become fascinated with the area and the people (some of the friendliest I've met anywhere, for that matter). It's one of most ethnically homogenous regions in the whole country. *Everyone* (well, 95% of people) is/are of Mexican ancestry. Not only the working poor and middle classes but cops, border guards, city councilors and mayors, bureaucrats, local notables and landowners, etc. While it's certainly a poor area and people complain quite a bit about the neglect Austin shows it, talk about White Privilege, micro-aggressions, and other woke-isms fall flat for the simple reason that it doesn't make context within the sense of everyday life. They just seem more like more crazy ideas from Austin liberals. Combine that with the fact that a lot of the population is devoutly Catholic (or increasingly Evangelical) it's easy to see why the Republican party increasingly appeals.
It's a different story among Hispanics in Los Angeles, for instance, where a much more solid sense of non-white identity and more leftist political orientation prevail. (Hispanics in Texas and Florida are way more likely to consider themselves white than in California or Washington State. In Florida's case that makes some sense since so many Cubans are of very recent Spanish extraction/immigrant descent but I don't know what to make of Texas.)
It's true that violent coup attempts in the US are likely to end in failure. Relatedly, without a doubt the GOP is fortunate indeed the death toll last month wasn't higher. Can you imagine if dozens or several hundred had died, including members of Congress? The rebuke would have been swift and far more forceful than the milquetoast measures we've seen so far (perhaps Pence would have invoked the 25th; perhaps the Senate would have held conducted a shotgun impeachment trial, who knows?)
But I think the above glosses over the real danger: a political/legal coup. Already we're seeing reports of various state-level GOP organizations being purged of non-Trumpists. Liz Cheney has apparently been censored by her state party. That nutty Qanon representative from Georgia received a standing ovation from her Republican colleagues.
It's clear the Trump team didn't have enough help from state GOP officials in their efforts to steal the election. But who's comfortable assuming it will transpire this way next time? Moreover, a significant majority of Republicans in Congress voted against certifying Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Just imagine if both chambers were dominated by healthy Republican majorities. Is anyone really confident Biden will be *allowed* to secure a second term if that's the case in January of 2025?
Republican operatives were taking notes in November, December and January, and next time they'll be better prepared with coup-friendly laws and judges, and hard right MAGA loyalists in key positions in purple states. And yes, quite possibly they'll also be equipped with a majority in Congress unwilling to accept the legitimacy of a Democratic nominee's election victory.
It's definitely a worry!
I actually think GOP state parties in even remotely swing states purging non-Trumpists is a huge net negative for any GOP attempts to move the system in an authoritarian direction, because such purges directly impede the party's ability to take power in the first place. These purges have already cost the GOP four Senate seats since 2018 and pushed both AZ and GA into the D column. The TX GOP going full Q is the absolute worst possible thing that can happen for the national Republican Party, as TX, while still Likely R, is still demographically trending towards the Dems. Even with increases in the GOP share of the Hispanic vote in 2020, TX drifted another ~3-4 points leftward compared to 2016. If the TX GOP goes full fringe nut, as appears to be the case under West, it might actually put the state in play in 2024, which would be beyond disastrous for the GOP - there is really no plausible path to electoral victory for them in at least the next 2 cycles without Texas.
The more the GOP embraces fringe politics, the more noxious and repellent it becomes to the suburban voters who have already been deserting the party in droves.
This is exactly the point -- if Texas blue-shifts enough for Dems to actually win the presidency and the governor's seat, it's game-over for the GOP as it presently exists. We'll have at least a decade of solid Democratic rule (like has happened in California).
But it's also _possible_ that their voter suppression efforts, and their games with voting structures and allocation of powers, all ultimately upheld by their supermajority on the Supreme Court, will hold the shift off long enough for them to figure out a way to consolidate power.
We're going through a very dangerous period because the GOP _correctly_ believes that an actually-democratic country will never elect candidates that espouse the policies and attitudes that they do. Faced with the choice between adapting their platform to the electorate, and trying to crush democracy, they have chosen the latter. Anyone that cares about preserving the republic needs to see Biden's victory not as the end of the fight, but merely a significant victory in an ongoing campaign.
There are multiple factors at play here I think.
1. Hispanics on average tend to be more blue collar than the average White person. And blue collar (work with their hands) people are way more likely these days to be Republican. It didn’t used to be that way of course, but it is today.
2. I have talked to several people in real life who live in South Florida and they said the propaganda aimed at Cubans was absolutely insane during the election.
I would urge caution though at reading too much into this swing. Remember: AZ has 2 US senators now and despite white movement left that could not have happened without substantial Hispanic support.
AZ has two Democratic* US Senators.
I agree that multiple factors are likely at play (although that doesn't mean some of these factors won't continue to play a role):
1) The movement of Hispanics into socially conservative Evangelical churches;
2) BLM and Defund movements (Black/Hispanic political tension isn't exactly a secret, and the urban unrest we saw in 2020 might have re-opened old wounds; it's also not inconceivable that a lot of Hispanic voters oppose reductions in police budgets);
3) Candidate quality (it could be that an old white guy isn't a good a fit for the Hispanic cohort; John Kerry's Hispanic vote share was also weak);
4) Trump's positioning himself as the candidate who vowed to open up the economy; I think it's pretty widely understood that Hispanics in America have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic recession;
5) Assimilation drift (ie, similar to Irish/Italians);
6) The hardening of anti-Marxist sentiment among Hispanics in Florida flowing from an influx of Venezuelans.
None of these factors need be very large or decisive for them to be important as a whole.
Yep. You nailed it.
Here's an utterly fascinating article about MAGA in FL with Cuban immigrants, in case you haven't read it. . https://nacla.org/news/2020/10/31/cubans-4-trump
Noah mentioned this piece in the top post: https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/latinx-plaining-the-election
It's very much worth reading. (I subscribe to The Pull Request as well.)
I think even more so than usual, it's dangerous to try and infer demographic trends from the 2020 election.
Democrats were forced by circumstances to spend 2020 explicitly calling for policies that crashed the economy, kept kids out of school, and generally constrained personal freedom. Trump spent the year speaking out against those things and sending out checks with his name on them.
In light of the big polling miss (for which I defer to David Shor's theory that we had a distinct partisan non-response effect going on), I suspect this was all much less popular than we thought, especially amongst child-rearing aged working class people of all races who bore the worst brunt of the downsides while being at the least personal risk. Hispanic people (to the degree it's a useful analytical category) are younger and more working class than the rest of the population on average, so I think they're the most impacted by this?
This is definitely not the only thing going on, but 2020 was such a weird year I'm hesitant to make any extrapolation.
David Shor says that Hispanic turnout was way down in the 2020 primary, which he takes as a sign that a lot of Hispanics had already switched to the GOP by then. The 2020 primary, of course, mostly took place before Covid hit. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1343685995208839176
Interesting.
Perhaps!
I do wonder what the effect of the $1200 check with Trump's name and signature on it had.
I think it had a huge impact and it's exactly why Pelosi made the Republicans an offer on a second stimulus check that she knew they would refuse.
What is the mechanism that is going to stop the pro-coup people from controlling state Republican parties, and winning primaries?
A Jungle Primary, and non-partisan redistricting, like California has, theoretically ought to help -- and yet all the same our county Republican parties are increasingly bonkers. (Bear in mind that Orange County is the _origin point_ of a lot of GOP craziness, going back to the days of the Birchers.) You had CA Republicans last fall engaging in placement of illegal ballot collection boxes. Essentially their strategy appeared to be to engage in illegal activity related to mail ballots, and then when called on it, shout about how there's so much illegal activity around mail ballots!!!1!!one!!
About this, I don't know!
Me neither! And the fact that I can't imagine what arrests the doom-loop of crazy, where the crazies drive out sane people and that just gives them more consolidated control, makes me think that the GOP will continue to be crazy for the forseeable future. Which means we have three possibilities.
One is that California is a harbinger of what will happen in the nation -- enough states will blue-shift that we have an easier time winning the Senate, and the GOP is just locked out of the electoral college like they fear. (Degerrymandering would make a big difference here. There's some hope for the House because of a few key states where we have Dem governors this time, but didn't last time. Though I'm unclear whether the GOP may've managed to pass laws before those govs took power, taking away gubernatorial review of the maps.) The real debate ends up between moderate Dems and liberal/progressive Dems, until such time as the GOP _completely_ collapses, at which point the Dems can divide into two parties. Maybe the liberals split off and merge with the Greens and Peace and Freedom types, or maybe the moderates split off and take over the GOP brand (unlikely, IMHO, but not impossible), or establish some other new party (similar to how we've seen new centrist parties emerge and rapidly achieve success in a bunch of major European countries, e.g. France).
Two is that the GOP loses the ability to win presidential races, because they can't win a majority of _electoral votes_, but continues to hold the edge in the Senate (or Dems can't ever quite convince moderates like Manchin and Sinema to end the filibuster) and as a result the federal government basically becomes long-term paralyzed, and in effect, our federalist system simply devolves into independent states fending for themselves. The DeathGrip, forecast in this short story: https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/the-minnesota-diet-a-new-short-story-by-charlie-jane-anders.html
And three is that the GOP nominates "Trump but more competent", and we go the way of Turkey or Hungary.
Given the high level of religiosity in America compared to other modern countries, #2 and especially #3 are most likely, I'm sad to say (one could add Poland to the America, Turkey, Hungary comparison here).
I think #3 misses the point a bit, which is that the reason Turkey and Hungary went the way of Turkey and Hungary is that autocratic leaders who enjoyed broad-based support came to power & used that popularity and support to force through changes to the system. Trump leaves office the most unpopular President since Carter and the GOP is a minority party which has won the popular vote once in 30 years. Even if they're able to seize power through counter-majoritarian systems, gerrymanding, etc, they will be doing so on the back of relatively thin margins, and we've seen that there's enough GOP senators firmly outside of the Coup Caucus for the GOP to need a very large majority to pass any truly sweeping anti-democratic "reforms". In a world where the GOP, again already a minority party, has become a pro-coup, anti-democracy party, it is *extremely* difficult to see how they reach these necessary majorities. Being pro-coup is not a popular position!
Additionally, a huge part of Trump's appeal was his uniquely incompetent style. I am not concerned about the idea of a "Trump but competent" leader who could unite popular support for anti-democratic reforms, because Trump's entire appeal was his willingness to attack his fellow Americans as though they were citizens of a hostile foreign power. The divisiveness is the point, and anyone who engages in such behavior is never going to reach the kind of popular mandate necessary to break the system.
Lastly, it's important to consider the role of SCOTUS. While a 6-3 conservative majority, that is not the same as a 6-3 *Trumpist* majority. Indeed, we saw Trump's nominees unceremoniously toss his farcical legal coup attempt without any attempt whatsoever to lend a veneer of legitimacy to it. Trump didn't nominate Trumpist judges; he nominated McConnell judges. Now, Mitch McConnell may be a historic example of failure to lead by permitting Trumpism to co-opt the Republican Party, but as we've all seen, he is *not* a Trumpist - and there is no reason to presume that a conservative establishment SCOTUS would be any more so.
Trump came terrifyingly close to winning despite being historically unpopular, and if he had been capable of even the most minimal reflection and strategy, he could've just gotten out of the way of competent people in the Covid response, and he probably would've been enough more popular to win. A lot of governors, and foreign leaders, have seen high approval numbers during Covid while just doing the bare minimum.
I don't know that I think #3 is the most likely outcome, but dismissing it out of hand makes you sound like the folks in 2016 who thought it was impossible Trump could win, even though polling models like 538 were showing he had maybe a 20-30% chance, and things that "unlikely" happen all the time.
"Trump wins reelection" is not the same thing as "the US becomes anti-democratic like Hungary and Turkey". I think he'd have done a lot of damage in a 2nd term, absolutely, but there's no world in which Trump II turns him into an autocratic quasi-dictator like Orban or Erdogan. The existence of the filibuster alone would preclude the passage of any meaningful anti-democratic legislation by Congress, to say nothing of the (small) faction of moderate Rs who wouldn't stand for it, and there's zero reason to believe that the Roberts Court would facilitate Trump violating the Constitution to remain in power. He'd wreak a lot more havoc but he'd still be out of the White House at the end of his term without any meaningfully autocratic changes to the fundamental structure of US government.
To be clear, I'm not at all saying Trump II wouldn't be bad or inflict potentially significant damage, just that I think it's a mistake to characterize it in the same frame as broad-based authoritarian populist movements in countries with less robust institutions - those are very different situations.
You seriously think the filibuster would have stopped the Senate from passing _anything_ the GOP majority really wanted to pass, and had 51 votes for?
The only reason McConnell didn't kill the legislative filibuster is that nothing like that came up. Point to a case where there was some law that the Dems filibustered in the past four years, and I'll point you to the GOP Senators who would've defected on a vote, same as McCain killed their attempt to repeal Obamacare under reconciliation.
Yes, our institutions have not _completely_ collapsed, and Roberts is obviously not a fan of the authoritarian wing. But nonetheless the Court accommodated some really ugly things, and in some cases they only stopped Trump because, again, he was so unwilling to do what authoritarians have done in Europe -- mimic the forms of democracy while hollowing out its core. The attempt to intimidate Hispanics out of answering the Census was only blocked because of that kind of dumb reason. If they have the chance next time, they know they need to write up some specious whitepapers first.
You seem far too sanguine about the remaining strength of US institutions. I don't believe that if Trump had won, it would've necessarily would've been "the last election". But on the other hand, I'm not _sure_ about that, and we can see in the wake of the election, lots of state parties are continuing to push anti-democratic policies to entrench their rule. Plenty of authoritarians have ruled for extended periods based on having a zealous minority and a paramilitary wing that suppresses opposition. If you're generally supported by 35% or 40% of the people, and even 2% are willing to go out and beat up protestors, and occasionally shoot opposition politicians (and then you talk about "bad actors on both sides", or blame antifa false flag attacks), that can be enough.
Interesting, and #3 is utterly terrifying. Thank god my kids are already learning Norwegian and getting all their ducks in a row to immigrate there for eventual citizenship. My husband and I will still be stuck here, but maybe they'll be able to get us over there, too, somehow? Who knows...
I would LOVE for a centrist party to emerge, where Clinton, Bush, and Romney can be their leaders, and the MAGA freaks can just have the GOP.
I wouldn't worry about #3 too much. Orban and Erdogan were able to do what they did because they enjoyed broad-based popular support which permitted them to foist anti-democratic "reforms" onto a more liberal-minded minority. By contrast, the GOP is a minority party in the US and will only become more so, not less, if it trends more extremist.
From what I've seen, a lot of young Americans are making similar plans to move to Japan. Probably going to be a mass youth exodus once people can travel again (along with ojisan like Noah 😅😅😅).
I have a theory that a Romney-style GOP moderate would have been the best fit for a pandemic-fighting America in 2020. On balance I suspect Hillary Clinton would have done a better job than Trump, but she, too, would have suffered from the same kind of crazed animus we saw aimed at Democratic governors. But someone like Romney might have given us the best of both worlds: science-based leadership AND the ability -- because of the "R" next to his name -- to co-opt a lot of the right wing craziness.
Ranked choice voting like Murkowski just got in Alaska is the key.
I just wrote a very long comment explaining why "ranked choice", at least if tabulated with the "instant runoff" method, is problematic. Most of the time it's better than plurality, but it also has a particular failure mode that's actually _worse_ than what happens with plurality tabulation.
There are creditable arguments that Ranked ballots are better than Approval ballots (they're more information-rich), but if that's your reason for liking rankings, then you should like Range/Score ballots _even more_, because a Range ballot lets you express the difference between "A=10, B=9, C=0" and "A=10, B=1, C=0", whereas on a ranked ballot, both of those are identical. I generally prefer Approval because there are reasons based in theoretical modeling to believe that "correct strategy" for range ballots reduces to figuring out how you would've voted under Approval, plus it's incredibly cheap to implement and trivial to explain to voters. ("Vote yes/no on each candidate. Do you like Alice? Do you like Bob? Etc.")
The "jungle primary" is terrible. We need ranked-choice voting, which Gavin Newsom stymied last time he had the chance.
I've been interested in this issue ever since the 2000 Florida debacle, and I was part of a group of CA Dem activists that worked with at-the-time Secretary of State Debra Bowen to get a California law adopted that allowed cities to try out different voting methods. Unfortunately, so far the only thing anyone's done is instant runoff. :-/
What most people mean by "Ranked Choice Voting" is Instant Runoff for single-winner districts, and that system actually has pretty big problems. For starters, if you look at places that use a mix of races that use a strictly-ranked method (you must list 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and the system can't deal with something like "1st, 1st, 3rd"), and old-style "vote for N" type races, you find something like 5x as many spoiled ballots in the ranked races, and this effect disproportionately affects people who are poorer and less English fluent.
You can ameliorate this problem by "sliding up" ranks that have gaps, and when you're scoring a round based on the current top choices, if you have N equal choices, they each count as 1/N points for those candidates. But this does mean more complexity in your voting equipment.
The bigger problem with instant runoff is just that it promises you that you can "vote your true first choice", but that promise is only true as long as your first choice is _irrevelant_. If your first choice becomes _competitive_, the "spoiler problem" comes back, with a vengeance. This problem is known among election experts as the Center Squeeze. The toy example looks like this: You have a town with 100 voters. On election day, so far 98 of them have voted, like this:
35 Right > Center > Left
16 C > R > L
16 C > L > R
31 L > C > R
So, if you tally things up right now, Left loses to Center 31-32. Then Center wins over Right, 63-35.
But now the last two voters show up. They vote with the Left bloc. Now Center loses to Left, 33-32. And then Right wins over Left, 51-49.
Not only is this dumb because Center is preferred by two-thirds of voters over either alternative -- it's dumb because the voters who changed the outcome would have been happier with the result if they had just stayed home. This is no way for an election method to behave.
This failure mode is expected to be somewhat common in practice. Most famously, perhaps, this is _exactly_ what happened in the two-round runoff process in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election -- the crook Edwards, and the klansman Duke, managed to both edge out the sane candidate Roemer. We also had a very near miss with the worst version of the squeeze in San Francisco this year: The more-lefty candidate Nguyen came very close to edging out the center-lefty candidate Melgar, but we know from the records of the ballots that if Melgar had been knocked out, the more-conservative candidate Engardio would've actually won.
Personally I am very concerned that if some state adopts IRV, and then experiences a Center Squeeze style race, that will poison the well for reformers more generally.
You can fix this problem problem by converting to a Condorcet method. Instead of knocking out whoever has the least top votes, you instead take the TWO candidates with the least top votes, and compare preferences on them across all ballots, and eliminate whoever loses that head-to-head race. That type of method still can have some weird edge cases where it's questionable who should've won, but only if there are actual preference cycles (the voters collectively have said A > B > C > A). This kind of situation is expected to be very rare in practice.
Alternately, you could move to STV-PR -- Single Transferable Vote for Proportional Representation. This only has the weird squeeze behavior in the selection of the final candidate, and if you're doing the whole legislature, or multi-member districts with 4-6 members, at that point you're talking about small margins either way, anyhow; it's just not a big deal. But I doubt we're going to go full parliamentary, and do away with electing individual executive officers.
In any case, there are sound reasons in both theory and practice to prefer using either a Range method (where you rate each candidate 0-10, or 0-5 stars, or whatever), or the most-simplified version of Range, known as Approval Voting, where you just say 0 or 1, i.e. vote up/down on each candidate like a ballot measure. Approval is literally free to implement on any existing voting equipment, and barely requires voter education. The Center for Election Science ( https://electionscience.org/ ) has successfully worked with local activists in Fargo and Saint Louis to get it adopted, and has more campaigns in the works. On the Range front, the county around Portland, OR is looking at adopting STAR Voting ("Score, Then Automatic Runoff"), where you narrow down to two candidates based on the Range results, and then do a head-to-head comparison between those two based on who scores higher on each ballot.
(Also, there is a very good proportional tabulation method that works with both Approval and Range, which was invented by Thomas Jefferson, and used for the initial allocation of House seats. The original Jefferson method looks more like Party List Approval, but the concept is trivially adaptable to directly voting on candidates. CES formally favors AV-PR as the best method for electing legislative bodies.)
In any case, both AV and STAR mostly-eliminate the spoilage problem (there are still more opportunities to mess up a marking, but messing up your vote on one candidate has no effect on any other), and they drastically lower the cost of deployment (both actual equipment, and the cost of adequate voter education to make the system work).
Interesting, and thanks for sharing. I'm a IRV advocate in my city, and I'm going to run this all by my fellow advocates to see what they think. We actually passed IRV in my city, but the local election commission is run out of the state's central government, and it's a red state, so it was never implemented. So we might need to take that as an opportunity to consider something different.
There is, frustratingly, a fairly well-funded national group that is committed to IRV; usually they simply don't acknowledge that other reforms exist, and when they do, they make arguments about the issue that are at-best statements of opinion or values, on which reasonable people can differ, but presented as if they were logically determinative. Worse, they also seem committed to repeating stuff that's just false, and pretending that events like the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial election, or the 2001 French Presidential election, just don't exist. There's a real "I've made up my mind, don't bother me with the facts" vibe. I invested a lot of effort in this area between about 2001 and 2007, and then largely gave up, because it seemed like the only reform with any momentum was IRV, and I think it's an actively bad idea to enact that on large scale because it will lead to some high-profile failure, followed by repeal in some places, and refusal to try reforms in more places. I was really heartened to learn about CES in a Vox piece a couple years ago, when they were running the Fargo campaign.
The #1 leader of the pro IRV movement in my city is a law professor at the city university. He's on Fox and MSNBC, etc a lot. He's a VERY open-minded guy who values skepticism and critical thinking, so there is no zealotry in our group. :) That well-funded national group won't be a problem for us. We're calling IRV "ranked choice voting" now. We've also toyed with "single transferable vote" wording ("One man, one vote!" was the main complaint of those who genuinely opposed IRV here.) But they're all the same thing. I do *believe* (for now, but I'm open minded) IRV is right for my particular city. These are non-partisan elections, tho you can tell who is "liberal/left" and who is conservative.
I haven't heard of the "CES in a Vox piece a couple years ago, when they were running the Fargo campaign." but I'll look into that!
Regarding the way local elections can be formally non-partisan, but everyone knows roughly what the ideological alignment: San Francisco is like that too. The big divide in the city is between a "progressive" coalition that spans from Berniecrats, to DSA-ers who consider the Dems too conservative and corporate and don't register as party members; and a "moderate" coalition that would be seen as fairly liberal Democrats in almost any other place in the country. Fortunately there are at least some areas where the issues cross-cut those coalitions. (Trump's "suburban lifestyle dream" rhetoric has _started_ to polarize the question of land use and housing production, but there is still a pretty wide range of attitudes at all points along the spectrum.)
This is the article I mentioned:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/11/15/18092206/midterm-elections-vote-fargo-approval-voting-ranked-choice
Why did Trump do better with Hispanics?
The Trump campaign did a lot of work:
A) scaring Hispanics about socialism, Democratic mismanagement of the economy (i.e., endless lockdowns)
B) activitating racial tension between Hispanics and African Americans by demonizing Black Lives Matter/antifa/the George Floyd protests
C) appealing to male Hispanics' masculinity by portraying Trump as tough and unafraid of the virus
A gets talked get some, but not so much B and C, because it challenges white liberal priors or simply flies under their radar. But the evidence is clearly there if you look at how the Trump campain actually reached out to Hispanics.
Democrats should keep in mind that their multiracial coalition may be hard to keep together. They will need to provide everyone a seat at the table and a higher standard of living, otherwise they could bleed support. And when it's time for Kamala to run, she should probably pick a male Hispanic running mate.
It is not clear that Latinos swung to the GOP in 2020. We’ll have a more formal paper out soon, but our preliminary county level results are summarized here: https://noelmaurer.typepad.com/aab/2021/02/the-2020-horserace-regressions.html
TLDR: The Latino swing towards Trump in ‘20 was driven by small rural counties. The exit poll data is dicey at best, and the precinct analysis you cited is poorly done and ignores confounders.
I would not state this as gospel, but I do think you should note that the evidence for a general Latino swing is weaker than it looks.
I was actually going to ask about this analysis too, but I've only really skimmed it...
Which analysis? (I think Noah's moved on to his big backlog of posts.)
Lets also not forget BLM and the stupid "Defund the Police" message. Politics at the top is increasingly seen as a battle of elites and only seen in Black and White. Mexican-Americans, many of whom would suffer from such idealistic policies, will naturally start aligning themselves with the party of colorblindness and universal messaging. Which, sadly, is primarily (only?) coming from the right these days.
First let me start by saying I'm Puerto Rican so I have some personal knowledge of the subject.
I think there are several factors at play and more than one apply to other non-white groups in addition to Hispanics.
First and most important the economy. The fact that the US was getting close to full employment was very good for people with low incomes but did not affect professionals or people with higher education as much.
The stimulus that occurred in 2020 meant that some people's income increased in the midst of the pandemic.
The state of the economy is related to the observation that Hispanics reward incumbents. This is true provided the economy is doing well. This used to be true of the entire electorate but is less true now because of increased partisanship.
Second observation. There is a growing number of Hispanics who are evangelical Christians and evangelicals vote GOP. This is a trend that has been going on for a while and to the degree that it continues it will benefit the GOP.
Outreach. The GOP was just better at it in 2020 than the Democrats. Outreach and persuasion is really important with Hispanics because unlike many voting groups they really can swing from one party to another. Most voters consistently vote GOP or Democrat put depending on get out the vote, ads, social media and other factors Hispanics will vote for one party or another.
So the economy and outreach can vary from election to election and both parties can do something about it. The trend of more Hispanic evangelicals is something that will benefit only the GOP.
To keep in mind though that GWB did far better among Hispanics than Trump and then Obama ran and got the level of Hispanic support for Democrats to historic heights.
Good points! I think the outreach one is very important to highlight, as the Dems basically ceded the grassroots field to the GOP throughout most of the 2020 campaign season due to the pandemic. I expect GOP gains with Hispanic voters will hold or improve as it reflects a broader realignment of the parties, but there will certainly be more on-the-ground engagement from the Dems in the next cycle.
I'm going to keep banging this drum: the election results gave us one more reason to prefer high-skilled immigrants (in the US, these come predominantly from Asia) to low-skilled immigrants (coming predominantly from Latin America).
It's important to remember that racism is only one element of the Trumpian electoral strategy. Another, possibly more important one is what Steve Bannon called "flooding the zone with shit": creating enough confusion among low-information voters that they can't consistently vote for their class interests (or simply for basic competence in governing).
There's no reason this strategy can't work on poorly educated voters of any ethnic background, and it's been shortsighted of Democrats to assume that just because some working-class immigrants have dark skin they'll be permanently immune to it.
I stopped reading at "whites only". Do people really take this place seriously?
This is an iceberg story, the most salient change is happening slowly under the surface.
According to Pew, the Republican Party has steadily gotten 1% less white every year for a few decades now. The headline always focuses on how much slower that is than the Democrats or baseline, but across decades, the direction matters more than the magnitude.
In a country that is changing its composition so decisively, no open public institution can remain unchanged forever. Strategy operates at the margins. Demographic inevitability is coming regardless.
The second/third order implications of a diverse Republican party are a lot stranger than most people expect.
It would be interesting to see how that 1% has varies over the years, especially with vis-a-vis the Democratic Party (I imagine the gap was vast in the 80s) and independents/apoliticals.
I suspect it's not necessarily "a lot stranger" but more something recent that not a lot of people have thought about. And it may not be much of a new trend - maybe we're returning to the world of the early 2000s, when Hispanics and Asians voted for Republicans more because white panic and xenophobia weren't as salient, and the party could appeal to minority voters with conservative views on social and economic issues more easily. (I seem to recall that GWB pretty handily won the non-African American Muslim vote in 2000, which makes complete sense to me).