Stuff White People Like Part I

Democrats talk about how “the future is ours.” Their reasoning is that between their advantage with the 18-29 year old group and the increase in Hispanic population in the U.S. will give them a permanent majority.

I looked at the youth vote last week. Of course Democrats don’t have a permanent lock on Hispanics. We don’t know how they’ll vote in 20 or 30 years. What will matter for 2012, 2014, and 2016 is how the electorate is today. Today, Hispanics aren’t a group that you want for your core base. Because they don’t vote. Despite an increasing share of the population, the electorate was 8% Hispanic in 2010, the same share they had in 2006 and 2004. They were slightly higher in 2008, 9%, but even then they underindexed massively to their share of the population.

There are likely a number of reasons for this. Many Hispanics, whether documented or not, aren’t eligible to vote. Those that are may not be familiar with the process or not regard voting very highly. Whatever the reason is, it doesn’t appear that it’s going to change any time soon.

White people, on the other hand, like to vote. They overindexed Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians even in 2008. In the next few years white people will likely continue to make up around three quarters of the electorate. Right now this is the most desirable group.

Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic party largely with rural whites. As industrialization got bigger urban white working class people became a bigger share of the party. Rightly or wrongly these groups feel as if the Democratic Party has abandoned them with a focus on issues like global warming and gay rights. While it’s great to be a party of Blacks and Hispanics, you can’t win elections without the white vote. In 2006 and 2008 the Democrats got 48% and 46% of the white vote. This year they managed only 38%. This may be an anomaly, as white conservatives showed up at the polls and white liberals stayed home. If they continue to take Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and others by similar margins and those groups show up as they did in 2008, Democrats can take a majority of votes with around 41-42% of whites. That should be a doable number, as they got at least that share in the last five Presidential elections. Being just over 50% may not be good enough, however. Because Democrats are so concentrated in certain states/congressional districts they'll need to do better than that. A minimum of 51% of the vote will likely be necessary.

The problem, as I’ll show in the next post is that where the Democrats are doing well with whites largely doesn’t matter.