America Explained is a newsletter about U.S. politics, foreign policy and history - and how they all tie together. This is the first in a series about the issues facing Biden’s re-election campaign. This post is available for free, but subscribe to make sure you can access the rest.
The last few months have witnessed Democrats doing what Democrats do best: freaking out about their chances in forthcoming elections. We’ve had a spirited discourse about Biden’s age, plenty of thinkpieces questioning why the party elite is so firmly behind Biden when the base has such clear concerns, and a continuation of the storied tradition of people rending their hair over the fact that seemingly nothing Trump does, criminal or otherwise, seems to dent his support. All of these anxieties, based on solid concerns though they are, have been amplified by the Phoney War-like conditions which exist in off-year summers: a lack of real news and a steady drip of polls which tell us very little about what is going to happen but are fodder for nervous partisans.
There is, however, one long term trend which is still apparent in polls and which is worrying Democrats. This is the party’s continued decline in support among non-white voters, particularly Hispanics and African-Americans. This decline - which has been visible in every election since 2016 - poses an existential as well as a political problem to Democrats. The party has increasingly embraced an identity which centers around the protection of minority rights, and at the same time Republicans have decided to elevate an blatant racist to the status of their God-King. It is profoundly unsettling to liberals’ narrative of the past six years of American politics that they have actually lost ground with non-white voters while these tectonic shifts have been occurring.
A recent Sienna/New York Times poll serves as an example of the sort of data that has Democrats worried. It shows Biden polling only 72% to 11% against Trump among African-American voters, and only 47% to 35% among Hispanics. Given that Democrats typically win around 90% of the African-American vote and won about 70% of Hispanics in 2012 and 2016, the decline in support is large. And while it’s possible to quibble about exactly how much of the decline visible now will still be there on election day, there’s an already-established trend of these numbers going down in every election since 2016. If that trend continues - and polls suggest it will - then that spells bad news for Democrats, regardless of how steep the decline ultimately ends up being.
Yet the direct political impact of this, calculated in terms of cold, hard Electoral College math, may not be as severe as you might think. The reason for that is the dirty secret of politics in the Biden era, which is that Democrats actually owe their recent successes much more to their appeal to white voters than their strength among African-Americans or Hispanics. Biden eroded Trump’s edge among whites in 2020, and this was enough to hand him the Electoral College because there are just a lot more white voters in America than there are non-white voters, and swing states are disproportionately white. A swing of 10% among African-Americans is no doubt a big deal and helps to build up tallies in uncompetitive states, but a swing of just 2-3% among white voters can easily swing an entire national election. And despite all of his recent travails, Biden’s support among whites is more or less holding up, leaving his Electoral College advantage intact - for now at least.
We have to be careful in parsing the implications of all of this. When the Democratic primary electorate - including the African-American voters in South Carolina who saved his campaign - plumped for Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, the kind of logic laid out in my last paragraph was implicit - and even explicit. Biden was understood as an “electable” “moderate” who could appeal to whites in Midwestern swing states and hence beat Trump. Yet Biden’s age, style - and, yes, his race - mark him increasingly as an outlier among his party’s elite, which is getting younger, more impatient for rapid change, and more diverse. Other Democratic coalitions are possible - including less white ones - but the coalition which actually elected Biden is one that might be harder for a new generation of Democrats to appeal to.
It’s also an open question whether Biden himself can hang onto it. One of the things that allowed this coalition to come together in 2020 was undoubtedly the threat of Donald Trump, which drove many moderate white voters to cross over to the Democrats. Whether Trump provides the same kind of motivation when he’s not already in the White House is an open question. 2016 suggests he might not, but the 2022 midterms suggest he might. In politics, unfortunately you often just have to wait and see.
There are also difficult questions for Democrats in the future, ones which vary according to why exactly you think that non-white voters are deserting the party. This is a very complicated story, but at least part of it seems to be that the electorate is de-polarizing along racial lines because other factors such as income and education are becoming more salient. The “diploma gap” - whereby Democrats do much better among higher-educated voters, and Republicans the reverse - seems to be rooted in cultural and identity issues. This is hard for Democrats to do much about, both because of who their elites are and the fact that they need to keep highly-educated voters on board too. The fact that even Ol’ Amtrak Joe can’t stem the bleeding despite being one of the most homey figures the party has produced is particularly worrying. Income is in theory less problematic, but in practice still difficult. Many of the party’s policies are targeted towards helping people on low incomes, but Democrats seem to get little credit for it. They’re actually struggling more with the poorest non-white voters than with comparatively richer ones.
One explanation for all of this might just be thermostatic politics - the tendency of the party in power to grow ever more unpopular as it demonstrably fails to solve all of the problems that people perceive the country to have. Modern American politics, with its tendency towards extreme gridlock, produces this effect particularly strongly. But even if this is the case, it’s clear that the Democratic lock on a large part of the electorate is not as strong as it used to be - the number of base voters who have historically been immune to this sort of thermostatic effect is shrinking. They’ve been replaced, for now at least, by white swing voters who are by definition much more fickle. The task of forging a governing majority out of these various elements is getting harder and harder, for both Biden and his successors. It might just cost the party power in 2024, and it’s one storyline to keep following amid all the rest of the noise.