Racial polarization is going down, not up

Racial polarization is going down, not up

It’s a big deal, but it always has been

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

SEP 19, 2023

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I try not to pick too much on headlines because there is some inevitable loss of nuance in these things, and trying to get people to click on the articles is a part of life. But I was really struck by the headline of a recent Dan Balz article in The Washington Post: “What divides political parties? More than ever, it’s race and ethnicity.”

I was struck by two things about it. One is that the headline is contrary to my understanding of recent political trends, so I was surprised that a new American Political Science Association report would say that racial polarization is at an all-time high. The other is how many people responded to the headline with complaints about “both sides” framing or, as in this David Roberts thread, about the need to take an increasingly uncompromising stance in the face of these divisions.

It turns out that if you actually read the article, the text does not back up the claim that the parties are more divided than ever by race and ethnicity. Instead, Balz, citing Zoltan Hajnal’s chapter in the APSA report, confirms that racial polarization has declined slightly in recent years:

Another way to look at this is in the composition of the Republican and Democratic vote in presidential elections. In 2008, 2012 and 2016, about 90 percent of the votes received by the Republican presidential nominees John McCain, Mitt Romney and Trump, respectively, came from White people. That shifted a bit in 2020, as 82 percent of Trump’s votes came from Whites, according to Hajnal’s chapter. Meanwhile, almost half of the votes for Democratic nominees come from people of color.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, the decline in racial polarization in 2020 was relatively small. It’s obviously true that race is a big factor in American politics. On the other hand, race was a big factor in American partisanship in 2004 and 1998 and 1984 as well. Reading the responses on Twitter to Balz’s column, a lot of people on the left seemed to be putting a lot of analytical weight on the direction of the trend. They would look at the kind of things we’ve written in “The Rise of the liberal Democrat,” “Democrats have changed a lot since 2012,” “Democrats’ college degree divide,” and “Polarization is a choice” and say all this talk of policy positions is irrelevant. We can see that what’s really going on in the electorate is polarization on race and an epic struggle against white supremacy in which no compromise is possible or acceptable.

And within that framework, I think it’s important to note that the headline’s claim is not true. Politics is becoming more issue-oriented (though of course not exclusively so) and less polarized on the basis of race and ethnicity.

American politics is getting less racially polarized

If you look at Catalist’s report on the past three presidential elections, you can see pretty clearly that racial polarization was higher during Barack Obama’s re-election and has been falling since Donald Trump’s two races. It seems to me that “racial polarization peaked when a Black guy was president” is something of a dog bites man story, but it’s important to remember that when a lot of people are claiming the opposite.

If it were true that the Trump/Biden election produced an electorate that was more divided by race than the Obama/Romney election, that would be a really striking fact about American politics. If I believed that were true, I would be writing different things. But one reason that people aren’t convinced by the stuff I write is that they believe it is true — after all, there was a headline in The Washington Post telling them that it’s true.

But it is not true.

Trump did meaningfully better with Black and Hispanic voters in 2020 than he did in 2016 or than Romney did in 2012, and Biden compensated for that by doing better with white voters — especially with white college graduates. Going back further in time, the data isn’t precisely comparable. But Roper’s exit polls say that Michael Dukakis got 89% of the Black vote in 1988 and only 40% of the white vote. That is a smaller racial gap than 2012 but a larger one than 2020. I think the actual historical peak in the Roper data comes from 1984 when Walter Mondale got 34% of the white vote and 91% of the Black vote.

These are all relatively small shifts, and given the vagaries of statistical sampling and everything else, I would not put a ton of weight on the idea that Mondale did better than Dukakis with Black voters. What I would put a lot of weight on is the point that racial polarization in the electorate is not new. Al Gore got 90 % of the Black vote and 42% of the white vote. Strikingly, 3% of whites but only 1% of African Americans voted for Ralph Nader. So if you translate the Roper data into two-party vote shares to compare with Catalist, you get the result that Biden did slightly worse than Al Gore with Black voters.

Again, I would not make mountains out of these molehills. But we do need to understand the historical pattern. Racial polarization has been at a high level for about as long as we’ve had exit polling, and as far as we can tell, the peak came in 2012. That Obama rolling off the ballot reduced racial polarization is perhaps unsurprising. What’s more interesting is that four years of watching Trump in office led to further depolarization. And according to the best surveys available, we have seen Biden’s white support hold up better than his non-white support with the result that Trump’s electoral college edge is fading because the electoral college underweights Black and (especially) Hispanic voters.

Voting is becoming more policy-oriented

I talked last fall to a Latina taqueria owner in Texas who told me she’d been a Democrat her whole life (and so had her parents), but that she voted for Trump in 2020 and Greg Abbott in 2022. The way she explained her flip was that Republicans wanted to keep businesses like hers open during the pandemic and Democrats didn’t. But what’s interesting about this narrative is that the switch to the GOP was “sticky” in 2022, even though Beto O’Rourke obviously wasn’t proposing a new round of Covid closures that fall.

Zooming out, though, her restaurant has Christian imagery and slogans on the wall.

I don’t know exactly what she thinks about abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, or gender roles, but we know that in general, religiously observant people tend to be more conservative on these topics and gravitate toward conservative political parties in all kinds of countries. We also know that successful small business owners are the rock-solid pillar of the Republican Party for boring economic policy reasons. So the interesting question about this woman really isn’t why she voted Republican in 2022, it’s why she ever voted for Democrats. Well, her parents probably voted for JFK, the first Catholic president, and then for native son Lyndon B. Johnson. Lots of southern whites realigned after the Civil Rights Act, but there was no particular reason for Mexican Americans to join a white supremacist backlash. And then when she was a young adult, she wasn’t yet a successful small business owner.

Most people don’t pay super-close attention to politics or necessarily spend a lot of time revisiting their political commitments. But Covid was a big deal out of left field that she had strong opinions about and that shocked her out of her rut and into a whole new political and epistemic ecosystem. Now she’s a religiously observant, non-college small business owner who votes Republican. If Trump goes back to doing weird racist stuff about taco bowls she might re-revisit that, but he really has toned this down.

That’s one person, but I think it’s pretty typical of what happened in 2020.

Equis Research’s take on the Hispanic vote has a lot of nuance, but the less nuanced takeaway is that the Hispanics who flipped to Trump mostly self-identify as conservative. Similarly, in a new pre-print, Bernard Fraga, Yamil Velez, and Emily West “find evidence of an increasing alignment between issue positions and vote choice among Latinos.” People voting Republican because they agree with Republicans on policy issues is not exactly the most shocking development in the world. But it is literally the opposite of the Washington Post headline. American politics is still significantly stratified by racial and ethnic identity, but it is becoming less like that.

Identity still matters, of course. If you look at the Biden-era mayoral elections in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia with a purely ideological lens, you won’t be able to make heads or tails of the voting patterns. The fact that the Black neighborhoods voted for the Black candidate in all four cases was central to the outcomes. But it’s still true that municipal politics is becoming more issue-oriented and less racially stratified than it used to be — Brandon Johnson had lots of support from white progressives, and that support was central to lifting him into the Chicago runoff.

Boring conclusion: You have to contest all voters

I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about this other than that you shouldn’t think of the electorate as composed of ethnic blocs, you shouldn’t put headlines on articles that are directly contradicted by the text, and you shouldn’t spin out on Twitter based on inaccurate headlines.

But to be a little bit more specific, everyone should remember that even though the average behavior of voters varies enormously by ethnicity, there are marginal voters within each group.

At a fundraiser over the summer, Joe Biden said “I’m a practicing Catholic, I’m not big on abortion,” but the Supreme Court “got it right” with Roe v. Wade. That’s a line that most Catholic Democrats used to employ on abortion — that they agreed with the church that abortion is immoral, but saw it as a question of individual conscience that it would be inappropriate for the state to legislate on. Abortion rights groups started pressuring Democratic Party candidates for office to stop saying this, and Biden mostly doesn’t say it anymore. When he did say it, he got denounced by Moira Donegan as a “weak and lukewarm ally” of abortion rights. And I think that if you view American politics as a totalizing clash in which one side is “devoted to white men” and the other supports “women and minorities,” it’s easy to forget that there are lots of Black and Hispanic Democrats who’ve been voting for pro-choice politicians despite religious commitments that say abortion is immoral.

But obviously those people are out there, and letting them know that the president of the United States shares their opinion seems like a good way to try to retain their support.

I think everyone is fundamentally aware that the world is full of these kinds of cross-pressured voters in all racial and ethnic groups. But if you tell people, contrary to the facts, that we are living through some kind of relentless increase in racial polarization, they turn their brains off and stop making smart decisions in specific cases. The boring truth is that there’s no Racial Electoral College, there’s no ineluctable trend toward polarization, and if anything, the recent trend has been the opposite — more sorting on educational attainment.