The Republican Party has won a majority of the white vote ever since the 1976 election. But how has this changed over the years?
This is a little tricky to measure. Obviously if Republicans win in a landslide, they're also going to win the white vote in a landslide. If they lose, their share of the white vote will go down. The only good way to measure this, then, is to look at the GOP's two-party share of the white vote compared to its two-party share of the total vote. Here it is:
In 1976, for example, Republicans won 48.9% of the total vote and 52.0% of the white vote, so the excess white vote was 3.1 percentage points. In 2020, Donald Trump won 47.7% of the total vote and 58.6% of the white vote, for an excess white vote of 10.9 percentage points.
The interesting thing to note is that the high point for the Republican Party was Mitt Romney in 2012. Running against a Black man they won an excess of 12.2 percentage points of the white vote. Donald Trump, running against the memory of a Black man, performed a bit worse in 2016, and worse still in 2020. This suggests that the white backlash against Barack Obama was at its peak when Obama was actually in the White House, and has declined a bit ever since.
If non-white voters turned out very strongly for Obama in 2012, then that would tend to increase the excess share of white voters compared to all voters, yes?
Did that happen? I don't recall it one way or another.
My recollection is that there was a sight decrease in the nonwhite vote from 2008 to 2012, but I couldn’t find numbers in a quick Google search. But you are correct in general, that a stronger turnout among voters of color, who vote quite strongly Democratic, will increase the difference Kevin is plotting here.
Wikipedia has good voter demographics info. Whites were 74% of the total vote in 2008, 72% in 2012. So the difference between the white vote and total vote would be increased by that change.
I think what I might have been thinking I remembered was that nonwhite turnout was a bit lower in 2012, which is a different thing, because the electorate grew. But I could be misremembering.
Focusing on Trump's racism alone skips over the fact that the GOP is rebranding itself as the working class party. And they might pull it off.
The Work Will Never End Party.
Seven day workweeks, with compulsory chapel for an hour over what we used to call lunch, is the future of employment.
This is when I miss the "Like" button. Stay well, stay obscure and interesting!
I was just happy to have the song "Work will never end" by Koufax get stuck in my head.
But thank you. Stay well.
Like the press/media, Republicans use "working class" to mean "white people, no college." It isn't rebranding, it's a slight shift in rhetoric from "working families," which almost everyone now uses to mean white people.
Yes. Basically since Nixon, Republicans have always claimed to represent the “working man,” even as they have always represented the interests of corporations and the wealthy, and pretty much everyone has always understood it to be little more than coded racism.
Interestingly enough, I grew up in a blue collar family that was very pro-union. They were Democratic voters through and through. Then they became Reagan Democrats. And by and large now they are full-on Trumpian lunatics. Even the younger ones born post-Reagan.
The only Democratic voters I know now are all college educated knowledge workers. I don't know anyone working class that would vote for a Democrat. And I am not alone in this.
Tis true. The GOP has been doing all it can do to kill unions (other than police unions, of course) and it is finally paying off. Without unions to focus their members on economics of labor compensation, these workers are free to focus instead on racial or immigrant resentments. Check. Mate.
I am more concerned that, as the Democrats rightly enact programs that improve opportunities and outcomes for PoC, that the beneficiaries will, to some degree, vote their newly-achieved economic interests in lower taxes, meaning Republican.
Not as long as the Democrats allow expanding the identity pool of plutocrats, offshorers, neoliberals, & exploiters while narrowing the reserves of the treasury thru evermore regressive taxation.
A Neoliberal Democrat Party with the same soak the poor IRS ethos as the Dave Stockman era White House Budget Office will keep the newly enriched Black, Latinx, & AAPI voting demographics aligned with Clintonite lack of socially redemptive principles.
Only way filthy rich Filipinos & such go GOP is if #OurRevolution succeeds. But even then, the larger number of impoverished workers beset by the Neoliberal deconstruction of the American economy & safety net will triumph over a minority globalist party.
That must explain the strong stance they're taking these days in favor of paid parental leave, daycare on demand, a fifteen dollar minimum wage and the right to organize.
/s
The Ivanka vs. Don, Jr., Republican primary battle royale will be epic.
Most of that decline has certainly been white, college-educated suburban women fleeing the GOP in droves over the past decade. Somehow I don't think more tweets of MTG posing with an AR-15 in each hand is going to get them back...
AK47 is the tool... the Republican Party is the motherfawkin' fool.
Tell her to take a DNA test.
Nix the evangelical/zionist vote out of this and go with electoral share, Obama won the white vote in 2008. I don't like raw comparisons. Zionism is zionism. Even 2012 it was only a small loss.
If you aren't winning the white vote in the north, its tough to win elections, something Obama supports and why the changes are being made to dccc policy. Total %%%%% is a waste.
As much as I think he made a lot of mistakes in his first term numbers like these remind us of just how good a politician he was.
^^^The Republican Party has won a majority of the white vote ever since the 1976 election.^^^
Surely they won it in 1972 also.
White hippies for acid & white feminazisforabortion might have narrowed the white margin enough that holdovers in the Democrat Klan Party who voted for Wallace in '68 & returned to Mc Govern's side in '72 put Democrats over the top withwhitey.
Remember, too: in the 70s, plenty of Blacks still voted GOP, like Undead Martin Luther King, Jr., & Condoleezza Rice's dad.
I don't think so. Nixon won in a landslide (60% of the vote), beating McGovern by 23 points. There's flatly no way the former didn't win a majority of white voters (they must have made up close to 90% of the electorate in those days). Perhaps Kevin didn't cite this election because of a paucity of demographic data from that cycle.
Also, it could be the case Kevin is referring to midterm elections, too (the chart doesn't show that, but maybe that's what he means), and in '74 Dems narrowly took the white vote? Hence he'd start with "...since 1976."
The mysteries of life.
Playing the white victim card: black people really screwed us over in 2016 when they stayed home from voting just because there wasn't a black person on the ballot.