Monday, October 17, 2022

White voter problem

 It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.



Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.


4 comments:

TimT said...

- The Republican Party is a craptacular mess.
- The USA is a huge craptacular mess.
- I don't believe the term 'white people' has been used meaningfully, in relation to US politics, for a very very long time; the definition is so flexible as to negate any possible meaning. The observation seems to boil down to nothing more than 'a majority of voters for the Republicans are Republican voters.'
- Politics there really is awfully and probably irretrievably tribalised; but can you imagine if *any* other group of people were treated in the same way in headlines/think pieces? 'Black people are the problem', 'Latinos are the problem'. Is it any wonder that voters who identify as 'white people' have fallen back on a corrupt party which they nevertheless see as 'theirs'?

Steve said...

I don't believe the term 'white people' has been used meaningfully, in relation to US politics, for a very very long time..

You might have to expand on that for me to understand what you think...

" can you imagine if *any* other group of people were treated in the same way in headlines/think pieces?"

Well, I don't know - Right wing media does it often, doesn't it? Every time they endorse Trumpian "illegal migrants are raping and killing us"? Or "gun violence mainly a problem in the black community in big Democrat cities." Maybe they are just more careful about the headlines...

TimT said...

Oh, there were umpteen Obama-era articles that talked about how 'white people' were losing demographic significance, but they all depended upon varying definitions of 'white people'. What on earth does the category mean? If no single media source can be consistent in their use of the term, it can't be said to be useful or meaningful; and in order to be consistent, they would have to define the term and agree on the definition - but they don't even get that far.

'White people' almost always includes 'Anglo-Saxon-Celtic' people, 'Germans/Prussians' and 'French'; sometimes actually includes people from Spain/Italy ('Latinos'?); sometimes includes and sometimes excludes Greeks, Russians and other Slavic peoples, and there is even debate about whether 'Asians are white', seriously! That's even before we get to the in-between cases: what about a person with a Latino dad and an American-Irish mother??

Steve said...

Well, I guess you could always look at self identification via the Census or other research. I mean, the article is based on Pew Research, and it seems they get a lot of their info from Census.

https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/data-sources-for-demographic-research/

I think you may be over complicating it. While self identification does have its own complications*, it's far from worthless.


* I have been identifying as "reincarnated Asian" to my kids for a long time. They love it when I say, "look, a story about my people" when something is on TV about anywhere in East Asia. :)