The majority that didn't emerge

Hispanics and woke progressive haven't mixed well

In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority. They argued that the political future would belong to progressive Democrats thanks in part to the growing number of Hispanic voters and in part to the rise of a professional class to which a left-liberal agenda would appeal.

The book was very well received, but some conservatives pushed back against the idea that Hispanic voters would give Democrats the boost Teixeira and Judis expected. These conservatives emphasized that Hispanic immigrants are hard-working, patriotic, religious, and socially conservative. Thus, they might well balk at the “progressive” agenda the two authors believed would carry the day for Democrats.

There was also a third way things could go. Since political parties exist mainly to win elections, Republicans could be expected to adjust to any major new demographic and cultural trends. Therefore, if the trends Teixeira and Judis cited looked to be tilting the playing field decisively towards the Democrats, this might well push the GOP, and thus the country, leftward, but wouldn’t necessarily produce a Democratic majority.

Twenty years later, we know that a Democratic majority hasn’t emerged. We also know that the GOP has blocked such an emergence without moving towards the center. If anything, the Republican party is more conservative today than it was in 2002.

Teixeira now acknowledges that Hispanic voters aren’t paving the way for a Democratic majority. Instead, he says, they are abandoning the Dems. And he has the numbers to back it up.

In the 2020 election, Hispanic voters moved sharply away from the Democrats. Both Catalist and States of Change (forthcoming) data agree that it was around a 16 point pro-GOP margin shift (two party vote). States of Change data indicate this shift was heavily driven by Hispanic working class voters, whose support for the Democrats declined by 18 points. This pattern could be seen all over the country, not just in states like Florida (working class Hispanic support down 18 margin points) where they fell short but also in states they narrowly won (Arizona down 22 points; Nevada down 15 points).

Moreover, things have gotten even worse for Democrats since the 2000 election:

Indications are that Hispanic support for Democrats, especially Hispanic working class support, has continued to decline since 2020. That can be seen in election results since then and also in polling data. Civiqs tracking data shows Biden’s approval rating among Hispanic noncollge voters down to 38 percent, which is substantially lower than his rating among college Hispanics. And Biden’s rating among working class Hispanics is the same or worse in three states where the Democrats are defending Senate seats: Nevada (38 percent); Arizona (36 percent); and Georgia (17 percent).

These numbers aren’t very different from the polling results for Americans as a whole.

Why are Biden and his party doing so poorly among Hispanic working-class voters? Surely the poor state of the economy under Biden has something to do with it. Yet, there was no Biden economy in 2020. Nonetheless, the Democrats lost ground in that year’s election.

Back then, there was the Trump economy, and it was in terrible shape. Presumably, Hispanic voters recognized that the problem was Covid, not Trump’s economic policies. Even so, I don’t think the disillusionment of Hispanic voters with the Democrats is driven mainly by the state of the economy at any given time.

Neither does Teixeira:

Democrats often seem to act like Hispanics are basically a liberal voting bloc that just needs to be mobilized. This is not true about Hispanics in general and is very far from the truth among working class Hispanics. In the Pew survey, just 20 percent of these voters described themselves as liberal, while 45 percent said they were moderate and 35 percent said they were conservative. . . .

One area where these non-liberal attitudes show up most clearly is on sociocultural issues. From race and gender to crime, immigration and schools, the Democratic move toward the left is quite clear and has made it much easier for Republicans to pry moderate to conservative Hispanics, especially in the working class, away from the Democrats. If anything, this problem has simply intensified since the 2020 election.

Thus, the coalition that was supposed to lift Democrats into permanent majority status — the professional class and Hispanics — seems not to be viable. The left-liberal and woke policies favored by so many in the former group are turning off a great many in the latter one. (To be fair to Teixeira and Judis, they could not have anticipated in the pre-woke days of 2002 how bizarre portions of the left-liberal agenda would become.)

I suspect that, in time, some of the policies that are turning off Hispanics will turn off a large number of voters in the professional class, as well. Thus, Democrats will either have to abandon such policies (or at least soften them considerably) or rely on Republicans to turn off blocs of voters by overplaying their hand, as the Dems have done .