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Are non-white voters really (moving away from the Democratic Party? To partisan Democrats confronting this question on Twitter (sorry, X), it seems preposterous that the party of former President Donald Trump, whom they routinely call a racist, could be gaining support from blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
But the evidence for eroding non-white support for Democrats is strong. The New York Times' analyst Nate Cohn, who back in June 2016 was the first to identify Trump's appeal to previously Democratic-voting white non-college graduates, noted earlier this month that President Joe Biden was carrying just 53% of non-whites in 2022-23 New York Times/Siena College polls — far under the 70%-plus he was winning among these voters in November 2020.
The drop is pronounced among both blacks and Hispanics, men and women, college graduates and non-college graduates. It's concentrated among non-whites under age 45, suggesting a long-range problem for Democrats. That's in line with the thesis of Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini in his forthcoming book "Party of the People," which depicts an emerging "multiracial populist" Republican Party.
To the many liberals shrieking that such a trend is impossible, Cohn responded by pointing out that Biden is polling below other Democrats, and below his own 2020 numbers, at this point in the electoral cycle.
Evidently, as The Washington Post's libertarian-leaning columnist Megan McArdle writes, "many folks just can't emotionally grasp the possibility of a Democratic party that isn't mostly a coalition of working class/organized labor/nonwhite voters, with affluent liberals a small, if influential, sideshow." Similarly, my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney describes the resistance of "economic liberals" to recognize corporate executives' self-acknowledged trend toward Democrats.