A Reminder That Demographics Are Never Destiny

When I first started writing for RealClearPolitics, a fair amount of my time was dedicated to rebutting what was then known as the Emerging Democratic Majority thesis. The idea was this: Minority groups were growing in America, and the Republican Party was the party of white voters. Over time, America will become majority non-white, and assuming Democrats govern well, they should be well positioned to hold government. In short, the theory was: Demographic change was driving America toward the Democrats, and this is good.

Toward the end of the 2010s, a similar theory emerged on the right: The Great Replacement thesis. It held, well, that minority groups were growing in America, and the Republican Party was the party of white voters. Over time, America will become majority non-white, and assuming Democrats govern well, they should be well positioned to hold government. This theory can be summarized as: Demographic change is driving America toward the Democrats, and this is bad. The only real twist was that this sometimes added an element of intent: that Democrats were intentionally loosening the border because they wanted to add voters to their coalition.

I was opposed to both theories, for a simple reason: Voting patterns are rarely static. It was simply an error to project forward 95% Democratic voting rates among blacks, or 75% Democratic voting rates among Hispanics. That’s not the history of minority groups in America; rather there’s a reversion to mean as the group becomes increasingly established in the country. I was also skeptical that immigration policy was as important to Hispanic voters as either theory seemed to hold.

Fast forward to 2024. As it turned out, it was minority voters who propelled Donald Trump to victory. Trump actually continued to lose ground among white voters, posting one of the worst showings for Republicans in that group since the '90s (John McCain fared worse in 2008).

What enabled Trump to offset this and to win the popular vote was his improvement among black voters (the best Republican showing since 1976) and Hispanic voters (likely the best Republican showing ever).

It wasn’t just the popular vote, though. Had Trump not improved Republican margins among minority voters, he likely would have lost the Electoral College. Consider the last non-Trump year in Texas for which we have exit polls – 2008. Had Trump performed as poorly among voters of color in 2024 as had John McCain in 2008, he would have lost Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. For that matter, had he performed as poorly among non-white voters in 2024 and he did in 2016, Texas would have been a 1-point race, and the Electoral College would have been a nailbiter.

Some might argue that, had the Democrats been successful in granting citizenship to Hispanic non-citizens, Biden would have performed better. Perhaps. At the same time, the average migrant farm worker doesn’t strike me as a voter that is particularly culturally friendly to the Democrats; the same trans rights and parental rights issues that likely helped drive non-white voters to the GOP likely would have driven these voters as well.

In short, 2024 was a good reminder that demographics are never destiny, at least not in America. Despite the best efforts of some, we remain stubbornly a melting pot, and sooner or later that shows up in election returns.