Democrats are losing ground with black voters

With Hispanics, too

There are many reasons for Republicans to be optimistic about retaking the House of Representatives this year, and an increasing basis for not being pessimistic about retaking the Senate. One reason for both sentiments that hasn’t been much discussed is evidence that Democrats are lagging among black voters.

Harry Enten presents the evidence here. He writes:

Looking at the national polling, it seems possible that Democrats might not be able to count on nearly as much support from Black voters as they have in previous elections.

An average of the final five live interview polls of the 2020 election showed Biden with an 84% to 9% lead over then-President Donald Trump among Black voters – a big 75-point advantage. But this year, an average of the last five live interview polls I could find gives Democrats a 74% to 12% advantage among Black voters – a 62-point edge – on the generic congressional ballot, which usually asks respondents some form of the following question: “If the elections for Congress were held today, would you vote for the Democratic or Republican party?”

This represents a larger swing toward Republicans by Black voters than the swing we have seen among all voters from the 2020 baseline.

Enten points out that the black vote “put Biden over the top in a number of swing states – e.g., Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” In each of these states, a Senate seat is up for grabs this year. A decline in the Democrats’ share of the black vote in these races might swing them the Republicans’ way.

Enten attributes the Democrats’ diminished standing with black voters to Joe Biden’s diminished standing with this group:

[Biden’s] average approval rating among Black adults in these polls [the ones referred to in the quotation above] is 64%. In a compilation of Gallup polls I looked at earlier this year, it was 67%. Biden had an approval rating among Black Americans in the high 80s at the beginning of his term.

Biden’s positive standing with Black voters is still significantly higher than his average approval rating with all adults (in the low 40s). But it’s also lower than the lowest rating of the last Democratic president (Barack Obama) with this group.

Why has Biden’s popularity among blacks declined so significantly? Probably for largely the same reasons it has declined among the electorate in general.

The state of the economy is, I assume, the main driver. There’s no reason why blacks should be any happier with runaway inflation, for example, than any other group is. Arguably, they should be even more unhappy about it.

In my view, longer term trends also explain why blacks aren’t as solidly Democratic these days as in the past. One important trend is that Democrats are becoming the party of elites while Republicans have gained significantly among working class voters.

Blacks are well represented in the working class, but not among the elites.

For this reason, and because the economy flourished until the pandemic, Donald Trump appeared to make inroads among black men. However, he turned off black women for reasons that aren’t hard to fathom.

Democrats and their allies in the media characterized Trump as a racist. The charge was unfair, I think, but it stuck to some extent, thanks in part to Trump’s intemperate, poorly-phrased utterances.

This year, Trump is not on the ballot. Thus, any trends that work in favor of the GOP among black voters can play out more fully. (I think there’s a broader lesson in this.)

I’ll conclude by adding that Democrats are also losing ground with Hispanic voters in the Southwest. Beege Welborn writes about this at Hot Air.

Welborn points to Texas where, she says, “two border congressional districts are on the cusp of flipping firmly to the GOP;” to Nevada where “Democrats see signs of a nightmare scenario: Latino voters staying home,” thereby handing victory to Republican Adam Laxalt in that state’s crucial Senate race; and to Arizona, where MAGA candidate Kari Lake is ahead in the governor’s race.

Midterm elections are almost always difficult for a party with a first term president. But the Democrats’ struggle to maintain their normal margins with blacks and Hispanics — two of their core constituencies — seems like more than just a case of first-term, midterm blues. It strikes me as the outgrowth of Democrats losing touch with the common man and woman — e.g. Latinos and Latinas, as opposed to Latinx.