Some of the smartest minds in Democratic politics see warning signs for their party even as they celebrate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Trump.
While Biden’s advantage in the popular vote this year is nearing 6 million, some liberal political experts are disconcerted by demographic trends that they say look unexpectedly difficult for their party.
Two in particular come up over and over again: A weaker than expected performance among Latino voters this year, and continued GOP strength among white voters who don’t have a college education.
The schism in the electorate around education is troublesome to Democrats such as David Shor, a data expert who handled the internal election-forecasting models for the 2012 Obama campaign.
A shift against Trump among college-educated white people appears to have been one of the main reasons Biden won this year while Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.
Biden won white college-educated voters overall by 3 points, according to exit polls, whereas Clinton lost them by 3 points in 2016.
The party’s performance with Latino voters was just as troublesome for many in the party.
Much media attention has focused in Florida, where Biden’s advantage in Miami-Dade County — the heart of the state’s Cuban American population— was less than a third the size of Clinton’s four years before.
But Trump also performed strongly in some of Texas’s heavily Latino border counties. Democrats failed to make a single congressional gain in Texas and were also disappointed by the outcome of elections to the state House.
“There were many factors: a targeted disinformation campaign to Latinos; an electorate desperate to re-open, wracked with fear over the economic consequences; a national party that thinks racial identity is how we vote,” Mucarsel-Powell tweeted Wednesday. “It’s not just about socialism.”
Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, had a similar analysis, emphasizing in particular fears in the Latino community over new COVID-19-related restrictions and their economic ramifications.
More broadly, Teixeira added, “the case [Democrats] were making to Hispanic voters wasn’t nearly as good as they thought.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/526608-the-memo-democrats-see-warning-signs-beyond-2020