Understanding demographic changes in the electorate

February 17th, 2024

Thanks for tuning in this Saturday morning.

Today we’re exploring a phenomenon that polling suggests may be in full swing, but that we can’t really be sure about until after it happens: party realignment.

We’ll get right to it.

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First, some basic political science. Who constitutes each party’s coalition impacts everything from what policies elected officials support to how campaign dollars are deployed.

Trying to untangle the drivers of party alignment would be like trying to untangle the drivers of the stock market. Many factors – too many to measure – go into determining which groups of people broadly align with which political party.

But it’s undeniable that alignments change over time, and that change results from each party fighting to persuade certain groups of voters to join their coalition each election cycle.

To entice new groups to join a party’s coalition, candidates will support certain policies they believe will help them secure those groups. Candidates and elected officials will also support certain policies to maintain the loyalty of groups already in their coalition. 

For example, the Democratic Party isn’t pro-labor because of sincerely held principles. That may be part of it, but the core rationale is that unions help Democrats win. Some would say the same is true for Republicans and evangelicals or Republicans and gun owners.

Which groups parties try to persuade depends in part on the strengths of their candidates, the weaknesses of the other candidates, and historical voter trends. That’s why it’s possible for astute political consultants to look at a particular district and conclude, “We’re not going to win it this time or next time. But in 2028, with the right candidate, we can probably pull it off.”

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With that context in mind, let’s look at 21^st century voter trends.

There seems to be mounting evidence that a party shift is underway, even if a cause might prove hard to identify. The fault line that defines this shift looks to be educational attainment. Over the past quarter-century, the educated class has flocked to the Democratic Party while the working class has turned toward Republicans.

In 1999, voters without a college degree leaned toward Democrats by 14 points. Today, they favor Republicans by 14 points, a 28-point swing. The numbers are similarly pronounced for other education groups:

Source: Gallup

Racial shifts look to be tracking the educational shifts. Between 1999 and 2023, the net advantage black voters give Democrats fell from 72 percentage points to 47 percentage points. A similar, though less pronounced, trend holds for Hispanics.

The data invites two questions: Why is this happening, and what impact does it have on policymaking?

The why is conjecture, though reasonable cases can be made. Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira wrote about the Hispanic trend in late 2021: “Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.”

Generally, Teixeira argues, the Democratic Party’s increasingly far-left bent turns off Hispanics, who are more traditional on average.

As has been broadly observed, the Black voter trend may also have to do with some of the far-left social positions the Democratic Party has embraced. Further, a familiar public refrain among disaffected Black leaders is something along the lines of, “We’ve been loyal Democrats for three generations now, and what do we have to show for it?”

Again, whether that or something else is behind the shift would require intensive data collection and analysis – these attributions are not concrete, though widely reported.

Perhaps more interesting is the impact. Politicians are not fools: They make decisions that they think will improve their prospects for reelection, and some recent decisions make far more sense when viewed in the context of shifting voter patterns.

Take, for example, former President Donald Trump’s hard push to secure endorsements from the United Auto Workers and International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Trump even delivered a campaign speech to a group of auto workers on strike.

A likely Republican nominee soliciting political support from unions would have seemed very odd just a few election cycles ago. But with blue collar support shifting so dramatically to Republicans, Trump may now view unions as a legitimate source of potential strength. A more pro-union policy platform from Trump would not be far-fetched.

Take also the Democratic Party’s softening stance on voter ID. For nearly 20 years, the party fought vigorously against such policies, arguing they suppressed voter turnout. It was also true that the Democratic Party’s lower-income and less-educated coalition included infrequent voters.

But that coalition has changed. According to a recent study published in American Politics Research, “increases in turnout greatly benefit[ed] the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed … [C]ontinued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout.”

Long-held party positions on unions, voting laws, and other policies are sticky. They take a long time to change. But it’s clear that some changes may be underway, and they’re likely driven by changing party alignments.

Only time will tell whether these trends are temporary or part of something permanent. Each election provides another data point, so stay tuned.