Religion is a Mental Illness

And finally, New Rule: now that we're all recovered from St Patrick's Day, let's make it the last one. You know, I never understood Irish Pride or any pride in anything other than what you've actually accomplished. And as holidays go, St Pattie's is kind of malarkey. You don't get presents like Christmas or candy like Easter or joyless appointment sex like Valentine's Day. You don't even get a Peanuts special.

There's just a parade. And what rights are we marching for? The right to drink in the day? Do we still need to take to the streets in a public expression of support for Irish migrants?

I think now more than ever we need to stop talking about the things that make Americans different from each other and start honoring the things that make us the same. So let my people, the Irish, lead the way because again, the Irish think I don't give a shit.

But, I do give a shit who wins the next election. And outdated racial pandering is one reason Democrats lose elections. When Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi put on Kente cloth, I don't think it earned them one vote for their powerful emotional ties to Ghana.

Here in California, we're now segregating kidnapping. Really. California doesn't just have amber alerts for missing children, we have ebony alerts for black children and feather alerts for Native American Kids. What is that we look for them by listening on the ground?

Look, even if you like identity politics, this kind of thing is antiquated. From 2010 to 2020, the number of people identifying as multi-racial in America went up 276 percent. One in five newlyweds now are in an interracial marriage. And that number goes up to 100% in ads for Subaru.

You couldn't do a remake of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" today because almost 100% of Americans approve of interracial marriage. Especially with rich in-laws. And 95% of white women would leave their husband to marry Idris Elba. Idris Elba who says, "As humans we are obsessed with race and that obsession can really hinder people's aspirations." Actress Raven-Symone agrees. She told Oprah, "I'm tired of being labeled. I'm not an African-American. I'm an American." She says, "I don't know what country in Africa I'm from. My roots are in Louisiana."

And you don't have to agree with that, but it's a point of view a lot of people have. It should be respected. Morgan Freeman says the way to finish off racism is, "stop talking about it. I'm going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man."

There's even a movement now to ban racial questions on the census, and many of its leaders are people of color like Professor Sheena Mason who says, "to undo racism we have to undo our belief in race."

The liberal group moveon.org formed in 1998 to urge Republicans to move on from the Clinton impeachment. Today's Democrats should move on from identity politics. It's not working. It's not working for them or for us. Democrats are hemorrhaging the very voters they think they're pandering to.

The Financial Times writes, "Democrats are going backwards faster with voters of color than any other demographic," and suggests the reason is that, "A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity." Exactly. Far-left liberals are living in an old paradigm. Americans don't fit into into neat little boxes anymore.

Who has the number one country song right now? Beyonce. Lil Naz X won a country music award, and he's black and gay. And a brand ambassador for the waspiest purse in America, Coach. The biggest new star in country is Jelly Roll who was a drug dealer, then a prisoner, then a rapper and then a face tatted country music star. Not to mention a giant middle finger to the idea of staying in your own lane.

No, in America now, you're allowed to be many things all at once and that's a good thing even when it's really stupid.

Look, we're all Jelly Roll now. We're sloppy, complicated and contradictory. Two-thirds of Republican voters support weed legalization. And 41% of Democrats own or live with someone who owns a gun. Ms Marvel is Pakistani. And the winner of the last two NBA dunk contests is white. The new Captain America is black. And Spider-Man is black and Puerto Rican, just like AI George Washington.

Latinos make up half of the Border Patrol. And the name of the coolest black dude on the planet is Lenny Kravitz. Ru Paul has a ranch in Wyoming that does fracking. Really. And has a fortified compound with a bunker to die for. And somehow the leader of the Village People was straight. Really. Je just went to the YMCA to work out. And the leader of the Proud Boys isn't an old white guy he's Enrique Toreo, an Afro-Cuban. He burns crosses on his own lawn.

Caitlyn Jenner is a pro-Trump transwoman who supports a ban on trans athletes competing in women's sports. And there's even an LGBTQ organization called "Gays for Trump." And why wouldn't there be? Gays love drag queens.

Our black president was half white. And our black vice president is half Asian. And Tiger Woods is, oh we don't even have the time.

My point is, look, you're still building your politics around slicing and dicing people into these fixed categories. Democrats need to get the memo that you can't win elections anymore by automatically assuming you're going to get every voter who's not these guys.

The more you obsess over identity, the more you ignore the bread and butter issues that win and lose elections. The real issue is class, not race, and the real gap is the diploma divide. And the real future of the party and maybe democracy depends on Democrats figuring that out.

Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color

The trend is real in polls, and in at least some election results.

natesilver.net

Earlier this week, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times posted a thread that purported to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he termed a “racial realignment”. If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it’s been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here is the graphic that kicked it off:

It’s worth reading the whole thread. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are particularly bad for Democrats among working-class voters of color, and younger ones. Many Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters have long identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, and Burn-Murdoch theorizes that Democrats’ tilt toward more liberal policies (though I’d prefer to call them “left” or “progressive” rather than “liberal”) is catching up with them, especially as memory of the Civil Rights Era fades.

The thread triggered its share of responses from the usual suspects, part of a recent pattern of poll denialism among Democrats that has crept its way into even the White House. And it’s true that there are some things you could critique. Burn-Murdoch is mixing and matching data from different polls, and the observation from 2024 is based solely on the recent New York Times / Siena College poll, which has a relatively small sample size; I’d rather that he’d have taken an average of different surveys.

If he’d done that, though, he’d likely have found the same thing. As you may know, I’m not much of a fan of digging into poll crosstabs. Because of the small sample sizes an

d difficulties in reaching certain underrepresented groups, you can always find something “wrong” with them and use that to dismiss polling results you don’t like. However, the Adam Carlson1 has been performing an invaluable service by aggregating the results of different polls together, which at least solves the sample size problem. And he’s finding that Joe Biden’s share of the vote has dropped dramatically among Black and Hispanic voters as compared with an average reliable estimates of the 2020 vote:

As you can see, Biden’s margin against Donald Trump has basically not moved an inch among white voters; he’s losing them by 12 percentage points, as he did in 2020. However, Biden is now only winning Hispanics by 7 percentage points — down from 24 points in 2020 — and Black voters by “only” 55 points, as compared with 83 points in 2020.

I’m not going to cover every possible difficulty when surveying non-white voters, who generally have lower response rates to polls than white voters do. I’m just saying this has been a consistent pattern; Carlson has been doing the same analysis for months now, and he’s been finding the same thing every time. So at the very least, Democrats can’t wish this problem away by complaining about small sample sizes, although that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

But polls, schmolls. Is it really plausible that there could be swings this large when it comes to actual votes?

Sure. It’s at least plausible. Let’s look at data from two places where non-white voters are plentiful. One is somewhere I’ve never been to, Starr County in South Texas, and the other is the place where I live, New York City.

Starr County is 98 percent Hispanic — the most of any county in the country outside of Puerto Rico — which makes it a uniquely valuable data point. There are no possible problems with ecological inference — misconstruing the behavior of individuals or particular subgroups from aggregate data — when basically everyone there is Hispanic. Starr County is also quite poor, in the Rio Grande Valley along the Mexican border, so it’s a particularly good place to look for patterns among working-class Hispanics. And what’s happening there ought to be frightening to Democrats. Here are the presidential election results in Starr County from 2008 through 2020:

I’ve charted these as the total number of votes rather than just the vote margin, because that’s really what tells the story. Biden received about as many votes in Starr County as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, or as Barack Obama did in 2008 or 2012. But Trump surged from receiving 2218 votes in 2016 to 8247 votes, almost four times as many, in 2020. I’ve rarely seen anything like that, especially in the contemporary American political landscape where partisan preferences tend to be relatively stable. Turnout was much higher in Starr County in 2020 — but those new voters came out overwhelmingly for Trump, contradicting the longstanding belief that Democrats benefit from higher turnout among minority groups. The shift of the Hispanic vote in South Texas has undermined Democrats’ dreams of turning Texas blue, or at least purple, offsetting gains that Democrats have made in the Houston, Dallas and Austin metro areas.

It’s not just a Trump thing, either. In 2022, Henry Cuellar, the Democratic congressman in Texas’s 28th congressional district which represents Starr County and others along the Mexican border, won by 13 points. That’s not bad, I guess. But Cueller had won the race by 19 points in 2020, and by 69 points in 2018 against a Libertarian candidate as Republicans hadn’t even bothered to contest the race. He won by 35 points in 2016, when Republicans did have a nominee.

Another place to find heavy concentrations of non-white voters is New York City. And here are the results there in presidential and gubernatorial elections since 2012 in the five boroughs as well as the three innermost suburban counties, Westchester County north of New York City on the mainland, and Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island:

The story here is somewhat more nuanced: Andrew Cuomo, the Democrats’ gubernatorial nominee in 2014 and 2018, was relatively popular in Long Island and in Staten Island, whereas the Republican gubernatorial nominee in 2022, Lee Zeldin, represented Eastern Long Island (mostly Suffolk County) in Congress.

But still, these trends are ominous for Democrats. In the Bronx, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white, Democrats went from winning the presidential race by 83 points in 2012 to winning the gubernatorial race by only 55 points in 2022, a 28-point swing. And there was a 29-point swing against Democrats in Queens — which is just 26 percent non-Hispanic white — between 2012 and 2022. Democrats’ results have been steadier in wealthier (although still relatively diverse) Manhattan, conversely, and in well-to-do Westchester County.

Nationwide trends aren’t this dramatic, although you see some of the same pattern. Modeling from Catalist, a Democratic firm, found that Democrats went from getting 97 percent of the two-party Black vote (that is, the vote excluding third parties) in 2012 to 90 percent in 2020. And they dropped from 70 percent of the Hispanic vote to 63 percent over the same period:

Democrats’ share of the Asian American vote had been steadier by comparison — but then it fell substantially in the 2022 midterms as compared with 2020, according to a Catalist analysis:

It’s worth pointing out that Black voters overall are still heavily Democratic. But going from 97 percent of the vote to 90 percent — not to mention 80 percent as more recent polls have found — is an enormous problem for the party. Democrats have become increasingly dependent on the votes of college graduates, but college grads are the minority — about 40 percent of people aged 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and the share is no longer really increasing as the number of Americans attending college is leveling off, particularly among men. Without winning huge majorities of Black voters, and solid majorities of Hispanics and Asian Americans, Democrats’ electoral math doesn’t add up to a majority.

Let’s keep it to that, for now. Although Burn-Murdoch’s theory is plausible — that Democrats’ increasing progressivism and generational turnover is the root of the problem — that’s something that deserves a longer analysis. What he’s seeing in the data shouldn’t be dismissed as some kind of outlier, however. It’s been replicated in poll after poll, and it has become increasingly apparent in election results, too.

Thread by @jburnmurdoch on Thread Reader App

@jburnmurdoch: NEW 🧵: American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment. I think this is simultaneously one of the most important so

threadreaderapp.com

NEW 🧵:

American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.

I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.

Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.

Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.

People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.

High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.

And America’s gold-standard national election surveys show a similarly sharp decline, with non-white proximity to Democrats now at its lowest since the 1960s, before the civil rights movement and the 1964 election which aligned Black voters with the Dems and against the GOP

So the non-white shift away from Dems seems very real. But what’s driving it?

One factor is fading memories. The civil rights movement and 1964 realignment formed very strong political bonds for the people who lived through it, but this is less true for more recent generations. 

The bond between young Black Americans and Democrats is far weaker than among older cohorts.

I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar "young favour Dems, old favour Republicans" gradient we see in the US population overall is *inverted* among the Black population.

The oldest Black Americans, whose political allegiances were formed in the 1960s and ’70s, identify as Dems over Reps by a margin of 82%.

Among the youngest Black voters, who have grown up in a very different socio-political environment, the Democrat advantage is just 33%

The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor.

In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities

But fading memories and increased competition for working class votes are fixable problems.

As long as these voters’ values remain fundamentally aligned with those of the Democratic party, the right person, policy, or rhetoric can win them back.

However… 

Much more ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic:

Large numbers of non-white Americans have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest.

Their values are very much *not* aligned with the party. 

To show you what I mean by that, I will refer to the brilliant work of @IsmailWhitePhD and @ChrylLaird, whose 2020 book Steadfast Democrats explores why Black Americans historically voted Democrat in such large numbers *despite* often holding very conservative views.

Take deeply conservative positions like support for gun rights, opposition to abortion or the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives.

Very few white voters with these views identify as Dems, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do.

This anomaly has historically given Dems a huge boost, but it has begun to unwind.

In 2012, the vast majority of Black conservatives still identified as Democrats, but that has since fallen to less than half. Latino and Asian conservatives show similar but less sudden trends

Once you realise this, the Dem -> Rep migration among non-white voters that we’ve seen in recent years becomes not so much a case of natural Democrats drifting away because they’ve become disillusioned, but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party. 

We can also use this chart, which I adapted from White & Laird and @PatrickRuffini’s excellent book Party of the People.

It shows people’s self-reported political views from left to right, and their Rep-Dem margin top to bottom

Liberals vote Dem, conservatives vote Rep. Simple.

Except here’s how it actually looked in 2012: white voters were very well sorted, matching ideology to voting patterns

But Asian, Latino and especially Black voters were misaligned, with large numbers of non-white ideological conservatives voting Democrat in that year’s election

But just look at the realignment since then:

Latino conservatives are now a very solidly Republican group, and Black conservatives favoured Republicans over Democrats for the first time in 2022.

All groups are increasingly matching vote choice to ideology.

So you can see the problem for the Dems.

The non-white voters they’re losing are conservatives.

They won’t be won back by a bold green policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is as likely as a reversal. 

So this explains the big shifts we’re seeing, but why is the racial realignment happening *now*?

@IsmailWhitePhD & @ChrylLaird find that social pressure is key.

When everyone around you votes a certain way, you feel pressure to do the same. Political norms are hard to overcome 

In a brilliant piece of research they found that when Black voters with very conservative views have almost exclusively Black social groups, they still vote Dem.

But if they have a more mixed social group, the weaker norm for voting Dem lets them vote in line with their beliefs.

I’ve extended their analysis and I find the same thing, with a similar effect among Latinos.

When people have more diverse social groups, there’s less social pressure to vote for the dominant party in the community, so non-white conservatives feel they can vote Republican.

There are echoes of Britain’s Red Wall — the English communities identified by @JamesKanag which had conservative demographics and attitudes but had stopped short of voting Tory due to a long-held sense that the party was not for them. In 2019 that changed

Non-white Americans are in a similar position.

Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column for decades, but those forces are weakening.

The surprise is not so much that these voters are shifting their support to align with their beliefs, but that it took so long. 

So you have: • Decline of church attendance (key source of political norm policing) • The US becoming more racially mixed, less segregated, fewer people with no friends/family of other races

The friction preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican is diminishing. 

And crucially, that weakening of political norms doesn’t only come from people of other races.

As the number of Black Republicans has risen from ~5% to 15% (the figure among young Black adults today), the Democrat-voting norm is eroded and the stigma of voting Republican reduced 

This can happen very quickly in a “preference cascade”, where people who previously masked their true feelings to fit in, start discovering that other people actually share their beliefs, so suddenly lots of people shift their behaviour at once (screenshot from @PatrickRuffini)

And ‘a rapid shift in [voting] behaviour as people who were previously masking their [political] beliefs discover that others hold the same views as they do’ fits well with these charts.

Viewed in this light, the size of the shifts in current polling is entirely plausible.

To be clear, nothing in politics is guaranteed to last.

Some shifts are temporary, and many of those deserting the Democrats will become swing voters rather than solid Republicans.

These people can be won back and should absolutely not be written off. 

But if you take one thing away from this thread:

The left’s challenge with non-white voters is much deeper than it first appears.

A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity. This is a big challenge for Dems. 

And here’s my column in full:

The Democrats’ Knowledge-Economy Bust

The core problem the party faces in trying to build a political coalition around knowledge-economy professionals is that, compared to most o

Compact