Are US Politics Undergoing A Racial Realignment?
54:56 Share

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad. Reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Lipson Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Lipson Ads. Go to LipsonAds.com now. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N-Ads.com.

Also, I'm going to rid myself of the baby. Oh, my God. Baby. That's iconic. The quietest baby in the world. Where was she hiding? She had some food and she's been chilling. How's her political analysis?

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's been well documented that support for Democrats amongst voters of color declined from 2016 to 2020. According to Democratic-aligned data analytics firm Catalyst, Latino voters swung eight points toward Trump, the largest shift of any racial or ethnic group.

Black voters swung a more modest three points to the right while still going overwhelmingly for Biden. White voters swung three points toward Biden.

But the question since then has been, what happens next? Was that dynamic unique to a pandemic election or Trump's incumbency or something else? In analyzing the data since 2020, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, John Byrne Murdoch, recently concluded the following, quote, American politics is undergoing a racial realignment. Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken.

He looks at the question from several different angles according to the data, age, class, and policy preferences amongst voters of color. One of his conclusions for why this might be happening is that memories of the civil rights era are fading and that the social pressure which contributes to conservative voters of color voting for Democrats despite their views is breaking down.

In his article, he cites the work of Cheryl Laird and Ishmael White, who co-wrote the book Steadfast Democrats, How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. And in the book, they use quantitative studies to explain why 90 plus percent of black voters cast ballots for Democrats, despite having a wide diversity of opinion on policy.

So for today's podcast, I've invited on Cheryl and John to talk about whether we are in fact undergoing a racial realignment, and if so, why. So here with me is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park, Cheryl Laird. Welcome to the podcast, Cheryl.

Thank you for having me. And I am still awestruck that you are doing this podcast with a five-day-old who was in your lap when we tried to start recording this podcast, and I didn't even realize. So congratulations, Cheryl, truly. Thank you. And also here with us is Chief Data Reporter for the Financial Times, John Byrne-Murnock. Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. Long time listener, first time guest, I guess. I'm very excited to have you and very flattered that you're a long time listener. So, John, we're going to start with you. How did you come to the conclusion that a shift to the right amongst voters of color is still happening and that it might even amount to a realignment?

Great question, which I think has two clear parts. So I suspect we'll end up talking a lot about semantics around what we mean by realignment. But if I start with the... Well, this is FiveThirtyEight, so if we're not going to nitpick, what are we even doing? But yeah, so with that in mind, if I start on the more black and white stuff...

The main thing I looked at here was pre-election polls today versus previous election cycles. Because one of the difficulties we always have when we talk about how groups are shifting is if you're comparing what people say in the polls before the election to the actual results from previous elections, then you're comparing apples to, I don't know, peaches or something. So what I wanted to do here was at least try and get close to

like-for-like comparison. So if you look at the share of non-white Americans who said before the election they were going to vote Democrat and Republican, you look at that in every presidential election going back to the 60s and bring it through to the present day, what we see is that in

in 2020, around 75% of non-white voters said they were going to vote Democrat, about 25% said Republican. Whereas if you look at the latest polling today, we see a significant shift. So depending on exactly what you look at, there was one particular eye-catching poll from the New York Times and Siena College, which had that

75-25 split going from only 56-44 to the Democrats. Or if you take an average of several recent polls, you still see 75-25 becoming 61-39. So that was sort of the headline

number that I opened this all my piece with saying, look, you know, we'd seen a slight move towards that direction over the last couple of cycles, but this looks like something much bigger. So the question of whether this constitutes a realignment, and again, we've got, I don't know about all day, but we've got plenty of time to get into this. But I think there's two slightly different parts of this. One is,

a realignment in the sense of if we go from certain racial or ethnic groups voting overwhelmingly for Democrats to something closer to a 50/50 split, that's a realignment. But the other part of this is the ideological sorting. When you look under the hood, it's not that all Black and Latino and Asian and other non-white voters are

are shifting to the right. It's specifically self-identified conservatives among those groups. So a realignment could be the headline shift. It could also be this alignment of self-identified politics with voting patterns. So conservatives who had been voting for the Democrats starting to vote for the Republicans.

There's a lot to get into there, both from the perspective of how we use polling, also why this might be happening. But before we get into any of it, Cheryl, I want to get your take. Do you agree from your own assessment that we are seeing a significant shift amongst voters of color when it comes to partisanship?

So I would say I think John raises some good points about some of the things that we're seeing in like the most recent elections around shifts that we're observing with, you know, who's aligned with which party a bit. I don't know if I would say constitutes a realignment, but I think John is correct. It's all in definitions here. And so how we define what a realignment is would be the biggest piece of it. From my work on Black voters in particular, I would say it's fairly unlikely that I would say that that's a realignment.

For other groups, I think there may be a bit more variation for shifting towards the Republican Party, partly because the ways in which the African Americans have maintained their partisan norm of Democratic Party loyalty is something that has been very much built in within the politics of within the community for decades.

Right. And so there is a lot of things that are foregrounded that have been very important and vital for the maintenance of that partisan loyalty over time. And a lot of that has to do with historical practices and things that have gone on that have particularly affected the African-American community traditions and practices of collective action in order to try to push forward the group interest identification of democratic partisanship very much with black identity itself.

And that that norm is something that is fairly strong and that that is something that other communities, Latinx communities, Asian communities, although there's intersectional space there, may not have as much of because the history is just a bit different. And so that could allow for more variation there for those groups potentially, but not maybe as much for African-Americans.

So I want to dig into that a little bit more. You wrote a book called Steadfast Democrats. So why have Black voters been so steadfastly Democratic since the civil rights era? Yeah. So, I mean, the argument that Ishmael and I make about this is essentially that, you know, previously the text Behind the Mule by Michael Dawson came out in 1994 and was used as kind of the biggest justification for African-American Democratic partisanship. And in that he argued about this concept called link fate.

and said that it's this feeling amongst African Americans that what happens to the group has an effect on their individual life that results in them then behaving in this collective capacity. And particularly we see this manifest in their politics. However, although Dawson's book is a very seminal text, it wasn't actually as predictive of partisanship as it was for supporting Black candidates or supporting race-based policies.

And so we argue that what we have seen happen over time is an understanding that in terms of realized political power within the electoral context, African-Americans

in the period of the 1960s come very much crystallized with the idea that the Democratic Party is going to be the party that's going to allow for one legislation that is going to deal with issues facing African-Americans like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Housing Rights Act. Also, that it's going to be the opportunity space for Black people to see Black political empowerment. So Black elected officials,

coming into power, disproportionately coming through the Democratic Party, and that their collective leverage in a system where it's a majority-based system and they're a minority group empirically as well as status-wise allows for them to be able to leverage that voting power that they are now granted in more, you know,

ways after the Voting Rights Act to be able to leverage that with one party in mind as a strategic way to have power and influence in a system where empirically they just don't have as much, if not they work as a collective. And prior to that, you can see that that same collective power was utilized when they were Republicans, right, in the Reconstruction period. And that shifted over time, particularly around issues around civil rights.

Yeah, wait, I want to get back to John, but can we tease out the social dynamics for a second? Because if you actually look at policy preferences since the 1960s, it looks like Black voters as a group become actually more conservative in terms of what their policy preferences are, but they do

do absolutely not become more Republican voting. We see repeatedly that Black voters vote for the Democrat in presidential elections, giving 90% of their support or more. And that has endured for decades. The question now is whether that's breaking down. But how do you keep that

sort of alignment enforced, even as folks are becoming more conservative, maybe on other policies when it comes to guns or taxes or abortion or the gay rights arguments or things like that.

African Americans live in a context within the United States that really allows for the reinforcement of this group norm. And so they are living in housing and residential spaces that are highly segregated. Racial segregation in particular plays a significant role

That racial homogeneity, right? That basically Black people are around other Black people at very high levels in their day-to-day life, not only in their neighborhood, but also in their workplace where they shop, where they go get their hair done, that they are having contact points with Black people. There are also Black Indigenous institutions like the Black church and other spaces, even though those have changed over time, but like those spaces as well. And so people can be held socially accountable.

for doing things that seem to be putting the group at risk or going against the group interest. Now, everybody doesn't have to agree with this. And that's another component I think that's very interesting about the social sanctioning, even when we were doing our testing of it in the study,

there were Black people who expressed open, like, not liking, of like, basically not being very fond of the idea that there is a social sanctioning operating against people who seem to put the group at risk by defecting from the norm. However, they are aware that that can happen, right?

And so it is most constraining then to those who are more conservative leaning if they have strong social ties to the Black community. If one doesn't have social ties to the Black community, they are probably less likely to be as concerned about their social standing. And so the reputational costs that they may suffer as a consequence of basically stepping away from the democratic norm is less likely. And so they just don't have as much concern around it.

It's a reputational sanction, essentially. So people are being called out for deciding to defect in a way that puts the group at risk. And basically at risk in this case being you're going against this democratic norm that is so clearly tied to being a member of the Black community.

And it's interesting, the studies that you get into that you conduct in order to write your book include, you know, giving students money that they can donate to the Obama or Romney campaign and putting them in a context where they're in a room with another black student or with a white student and just seeing how they behave. Like you've actually gone into the lab, so to say, and tested these theories. And there is a strong connection there, John. But it sounds like part of the argument you're making in why this realignment could be happening is that.

Part of that social pressure is breaking down. I think can you explain that a little bit? Yeah, and I want to start by just saying a steadfast Democrats is one of the like most amazingly just fascinating and amazingly well executed books I've read like period. Sorry, is that what they say in America period? You're getting the American affectations right.

Yes, period. Yeah, I think I'm unsurprisingly, I agree with everything Cheryl was saying there about how about why this is historically been the case and may indeed, well, still is the case to some extent. The question is to what extent? So the things for me are while, you know, the US does remain very racially segregated, far more so than a country like the UK, for example, that

The latest sensor did show a very slight decrease in segregation, so a little bit more mixing. We're obviously starting to see more mixed race marriages. And of course, if you're, as you showed in your own book, Cheryl, you know, when there's different exposure to races and ethnicities within your own family, that obviously can have certainly an impact on the extent to which one feels one has permission to hold certain views or not. And again, I'm not saying people explicitly think about it that way, but that's the sort of passive way it works.

it seems to go. So I think there's this increase in racial mixing, which again, I think there's almost an irony here of a lot of things that Democrats would certainly argue are good social trends could lead to this weakening of some of the pressure that leads groups to vote Democrat in such large numbers. So I think that for me feels like something that is happening. It's just, is it happening at such a tiny extent that it doesn't make a difference or is it slightly larger? Cheryl touched on the role of the black church in this.

And again, a classic example of a place where politics is really part of what's happening in that space. And as we've seen, the black church, as with all churches, we've seen a decline in religious, the strength of religious belief, but also in attendance at these churches. And you can imagine that

that someone who has strong ties to this community that they see one or more times per week, to the extent that we think there's this, whether we call it social policing or pressure, that is going to be stronger for people who are in those communities and those who may be falling out of those communities. And again, I think it comes down to how much of this happening. Because if we look, one of my favorite bits of the data on this is if you look at the age gradient in support for Republicans and Democrats. So

A lot of people, myself included, when we don't spend much time thinking about this, you think, well, yeah, you know, young people vote for Democrats. Older people are more likely to vote for Republicans.

And that's true in the aggregate, and it's certainly true among white voters, but among black voters, if you look at self-identification, at least, the age gradient is flipped. So it's still true, of course, at any point on the age distribution, black Americans are more likely to vote to identify as Democrats than Republicans, just getting that bit out there. But

among older black voters in the US, it's a landslide. We're talking sort of 90% identifies Democrat, 5% Republican and a few independents. Whereas among young black voters, about twice as many young than old black voters identify as Republican. And

significantly lower rates of Democrat self-ID among young than old black voters. So there does appear to be, and you know, self-ID is not the same as voting, but there appears to be a generational difference here. And there was a bit of research from Pew, which I really liked the way they framed this, which was that if you encounter a white Republican, they're almost certain, they're overwhelmingly likely to be old. Whereas if you encounter a black Republican, they're almost as likely to be young as old.

Again, none of this is, of course, conveniently for me, none of this involves putting a specific number on things and say, well, you know, clearly there's been a shift of X percentage points or that's what we would expect. But I think it's more about considering the reasons that Cheryl and Ismail set out in their book that...

particularly among black voters, Democrat voting has been so strong and saying, well, there are various slowly moving social shifts which could explain why those would start to weaken. And one other bit I just wanted to touch on in that is that

In the social science community, well, you know, we're all social scientists here. We're among friends. People talk about preference cascades. And this was a bit that Patrick Ruffini, who I know you've had on your podcast before as well, the conservative pollster whose book borrows a lot from Cheryl and Ishmael's work. He talks about how what you can happen in these situations is that you can quite quickly and quite quietly almost go from a situation where you have a

still a minority of people, but maybe a sizable minority, maybe let's say 10, 15% of a demographic group who hold certain beliefs, but because of the social context they move around in, they don't discover that as many of their friends of their social circle hold those beliefs as well, because everyone maybe thinks something. When I say everyone, again, we're talking about maybe 10%. 10% of these people maybe think something, but they know this isn't the done thing. So it doesn't get talked about.

But then when a couple of people start voicing these beliefs,

And suddenly, one of those other 10% thinks, hang on a minute, you kind of have a point there. I've often thought that myself. And then another one thinks that another one, and you can, in theory, at least, relatively quickly go from having this 10% of the population who maybe have certain views that they don't vote on, because they don't think anyone else in their group votes that way, to suddenly that becomes 5% of that group start voting in line with their beliefs, then 10%. So

I guess all I'm saying here is there are fairly sort of well-established, plausible ways that we could see some of this political glue or whatever we want to call it start to weaken a little bit. Whether it's happening... Look, I think I would say, I would probably say it is happening because we've seen the numbers move a little bit over the last few cycles.

But is it happening in a very incremental way that wouldn't really be a realignment? Or is it happening in a way where we'll see the results when the data comes out after November and say, OK, right, that was a significant shift? This is interesting, right? Because I think theoretically, I'm somewhere where John is, at least in some of this thinking, because I think...

There is something to be said about the social network and who comprises it, right? So typically why it's effective that the social sanctioning works is that when we're thinking about the social network, we are leaning into the fact that so many Black people identify so highly with being democratic.

that if you have a social network that is predominantly Black, it is going to be very homogeneous and in its partisanship because most of those Black people are going to be Democrat, right? Which is why it's different for whites because even though whites have homogeneous white social networks as well, they have more likely to have partisan variation in their social networks than Black people are.

However, there is like some growing, particularly I would say amongst the younger Black voters. I did think about, you know, when they did the Blacks for Trump stuff, they brought Black young people to the White House. And although that was a photo op during the Trump period in a lot of ways, there is something to be said about a social network of Black Republicans, right?

And what that does for one, expressing a perspective that may have not been heard before, and two, maintaining a social network that allows for you to express said opinion and not deal with the social sanctioning, at least from the group collective, like the broader Black community, but at least in your own social network, you would have some support for that because there would be others who are like you.

And so Corey Fields, I know, has a book that's, I think it's like Black Elephants in the Room, right? And he talks about Black conservatives and he goes like a conservative convention and meets a lot of those people and talks to them about what it's like to be a Black Republican, Black conservative, as well as, you know, some of these organizations where we're seeing younger Black people kind of coming together. In addition to the social media space, which is like a whole new, the digital social media space is a new venue that I don't think

We really had previous data on because it doesn't really exist. But like just the idea of, you know, the podcasting world, I think about particularly like a lot of men in particular, but in this case, I'll say Black men and the manosphere realm of podcasting. Men with podcasts? No, Cheryl. You know, like that whole space. Calling me out like that?

You know, the men out there, right? And so they have the podcast and, you know, but particularly there are certain types of podcasting that exist out there where I think not being PC or not being in line with group expectations is more allowable. Like people feeling real like. Or maybe even advantageous. Yeah, like that's.

their reason for being. That's sort of the draw. Yes, that's the draw. And so now you have these social spaces where if you want to be contrarian to some of the group expectation, I think there's probably a bit more latitude without as much cost

particularly for a younger person. Now, where you get checked in your life, if you decide to do that and act on that, that's something to be discovered. I think John is right. We need more data to really know more about that. But it is interesting because I think that that's where I would say if there was going to be some changing, it more than likely would be like, well, am I hanging out with other Black people who think like this? And so I feel comfortable with this.

Or is it the traditional, like, I just don't have a lot of Black peers at all. And there's more, Black people just have more contact with white people and they just, they don't need to worry about the social sanctioning cost. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

So

Did you know Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. and supports global brands like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen? Join millions of successful entrepreneurs across 175 countries, backed by Shopify's extensive support and help resources.

Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Start your success story today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Shopify.com slash 538.

Today's podcast is brought to you by GiveWell. You're a details person. You want to understand how things really work. So when you're giving to charity, you should look at GiveWell, an independent resource for rigorous, transparent research about great giving opportunities whose website will leave even the most detail-oriented reader busy.

GiveWell has now spent over 17 years researching charitable organizations and only directs funding to a few of the highest impact opportunities they've found. Over 100,000 donors have used GiveWell to donate more than $2 billion. Rigorous evidence suggests that these donations will save over 200,000 lives and

and improve the lives of millions more. GiveWell wants as many donors as possible to make informed decisions about high-impact giving. You can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free, and you can make tax-deductible donations to their recommended funds or charities, and GiveWell doesn't take a cut.

Go to GiveWell.org to find out more or make a donation. Select podcast and enter 538 politics at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Again, that's GiveWell.org to donate or find out more.

I promise we're going to get into the data deep dive of degree, you know, how much of a swing we might be seeing, if a swing at all. But I just want to note here that we've talked about the Black church. We've talked about sort of the age factor and people growing in terms of distance from the civil rights era. We've talked about social media change. I have not heard anyone say Trump so far. Is there something unique to Trump?

former president that could be contributing to this kind of breakdown. Because I will say, we saw a preference cascade, I would argue, amongst the white working class between 2016 and 2020. I mean, it started probably under Obama in 2012, and maybe to some extent in 2010 as well. But it really, things switched fast, where we saw...

non-college educated white voters who had traditionally voted for Democrats and even voted for Obama suddenly switch and vote for Donald Trump. Because while white people in the aggregate may have a lot more variance in terms of partisanship, increasingly people do live in areas where partisan norms are enforced. You know, like,

No matter your race, ethnicity, religion, whatever, there are partisan norms here where I'm recording in New York City. There are partisan norms on college campuses. There are partisan norms, you know, at the bar, wherever you may live or the grocery store or whatever. So is there something about Trump that has caused these kinds of social enforcement mechanisms to break down a little bit? Or if not that, for Trump,

All their preferences to become so strong that they outmaneuver the social pressure.

There is something to be said about what he represents. Like, he is very unique in what he is for the Republican Party. Like, he's not a traditional Republican, at least in the contemporary type of definition, right? Like, he was an outsider to politics. He didn't go through the normal trajectory of holding electoral office and then coming into this position of power. Like, he's like, you know, I'm a businessman. I mean, it was kind of giving a little bit like the Ross Perot days. Yeah.

of like, I'm gonna come in, but like not third party, I'm literally running for the Republican Party and I'm making a way and I'm gaining leverage, I'm gaining power and I'm able to shift the party. And obviously the Tea Party coming in before that helps to make that an allowable space for him because they move the party more to the right as well. And Trump's relationship with the public, right? And that includes like, has kind of broadly construed, but even within the African-American community, I mean, there's something around Trump

That is very particular about him. I mean, I am a millennial. I can remember Trump being talked about in rap songs like I can remember him being talked about in Source magazine, which was like a big hip hop magazine and talking about how he would be at like a party for Russell Simmons and hanging out with Trump.

various rappers, and that he kind of fit the aesthetic, particularly of a certain era of hip hop that was like, you know, like a bit of the gaudiness.

Gold toilets? Gold toilets, gold stuff, just bling. I mean, when that was a popular term, you know, he just, he kind of fit in. And also the, you know, his presence, right? Like kind of like masculinity that he portrayed of himself is very bombastic. It's very loud, you know, and it's very much kind of what a lot of,

hip hop wise, right? It's supposed to kind of be a pushback to the mainstream. And Trump is kind of like not your mainstream business guy. And also that he was a reality show person, right? Like, so, you know, The Apprentice is where many people have memory of Trump. And so he's very different from

I would say. And so it's hard for me, at least empirically, I would want to see maybe another election where he is not in it to know really if how solid that data is because he is such a weird case. And we're also coming off of the first Black president of the United States, which I think set a high bar for a Democratic partisanship, right? Like that is the ceiling effect there.

and was a very well-liked, beloved figure in terms of him doing that. So I think Trump has a uniqueness to it. So is people being drawn more to the Republican Party or are people drawn to Trump

And then vicariously, that means they're drawn to the Republican Party. And can the Republican Party stay the party of Trump, even in the absence of Trump? There are those who said that the party is going to stay that way, like that the Trumpism will live long after Trump in terms of his leadership in the party. But I'm curious to know. I mean, I completely agree. I think Trump's a huge part of this. I often come back to, not to this blasphemy or something, to mention a competing podcast, but...

Just getting called out left and right here. A stead hand at the Times. I was thinking that one too. The run up. Yeah. The run up. Exactly. About black voters. Yeah, fantastic podcast. We're allowed to talk about it. Excellent. Friends of the show. But yeah, this one line really stuck with me, which was one of the black voters he spoke to saying that,

To him, a lot of what prevented or was a barrier to voting Republican in the past wasn't this sense that a Republican Party was somehow racist. It was that it was the party for like country club elites. And I know there's always a reaction when you say Trump,

appeals to people who are anti-elite because people are like, look at him, he's an elite. But, you know, it's the old money, new money thing. Trump sort of doesn't obviously come across that way. People get the sense that he's anti this kind of elites that they don't like, right? Right, this is elites on like the...

intelligentsia access as opposed to the like financial access. Exactly. Right. Does that make sense? Exactly that. Yeah. And so and so it really struck me that sense that it's it's Trump as a as someone who is not one of those fusty wood paneled room

golf course although I realise every word I say I'm like he is actually but what I'm trying to say is he doesn't appear to be so exactly or he doesn't you know there's something about the way he talks and carries himself which is

allows people who would have seen someone like Mitt Romney as like, oh, well, I would not know what to say if I was stood in a room with that guy to think like, oh, Trump, yeah, you know, he's my guy. So, yeah, I absolutely think Trump is a very big part of this. And, yeah, I've wondered a lot or in conversations I've had with people recently, like if the Republican Party goes back to a more traditional, conventional approach,

country club type candidate, I absolutely would expect any realignment to either very, very significantly slow or even slightly reverse. I think the type of Republican party that the type of Republicanism that Trump conveys is a really, really big part of this for sure.

Yeah. And in fact, when you look at the Republican primary polling back when Nikki Haley was still in the race and you compared sort of how did Nikki Haley do head to head against Joe Biden and how did Donald Trump do head to head against Joe Biden? Donald Trump did significantly better amongst voters of color and Nikki Haley did significantly better amongst white voters. And I think sometimes in the press, people get compressed down to, well, Nikki Haley is a woman of color. She's going to do better with voters of color. That's not

the sort of like cultural ties that we're talking about here. Maybe more of what we're talking about is how you've described former President Trump. I do want to dig into the data here for a second, which is I think I've been doing this long enough to know that before a lot of elections, there is a lot written about how

Voters of color don't seem particularly enthusiastic about the Democratic candidate. There's depressed turnout amongst young voters as well. And that when the actual election happens, a lot of times we see that the

pre-election polls exaggerated the effect for various reasons, among them that these are groups of the electorate, young voters and voters of color, that can be difficult to reach. And even if you are able to reach enough sort of Black or Latino or young voters, that the kind of voter that you're reaching is not representative of the whole of that segment of the electorate.

And so I'm curious how you, I mean, one way to address that is by only comparing like poll to like poll. So only comparing pre-election polls. And that's one thing you can do. I think in your analysis, you did also in some places compare results to pre-election polls. And I'm curious if we see how much of a difference we see when we try to sort through that complication in the data. Yeah.

Yeah, so certainly all of the main analysis I did was only comparing like with like. There was, I think, one chart which was using some of the data that Adam Carlson has been collating, which is showing swings from the results to where they are today. But that was sort of one of the smaller bits of this. I think there's lots of interesting things here. I wouldn't have written this piece, basically, if...

if it hadn't been for the fact that they were like, as far as I could see, multiple data points, multiple smoking guns, shall we say. And the sort of explanation for this that was made available by Cheryl and Ishmael's fantastic book. So for me, you've got...

Even if we put aside the pre-election polls versus results type stuff, it was the fact that whether you look at the American National Election Studies, whether you look at Gallup, whether you look at Pew, the Cooperative Election Study, like all of these things show, at least in terms of self-identification, you know, a substantial, as in...

something you can clearly see that isn't just noise in terms of changes in party-downed self-ID over the last, say, five, six, seven years. So that, for me, is why it made sense to say, look, we do know that pre-election polls are not results and we do know that these things move around. And yet there seems to be enough in multiple sources of data here to think that

what we're looking at right now might be real. But, you know, the other side of that, of course, as you said, is that among non-white voters and young people in particular, we are seeing some numbers from polls at the moment which are pretty crazy. Like the number of polls we've seen with 18 to 29s breaking for Trump by large margins, I would be absolutely astonished.

if that is what we end up seeing in the Catalyst data, for example. And someone could quite reasonably turn around to me and say, OK, well, if you think that's not worth paying any attention to, why are you paying more attention to what we're seeing with non-white voters? And as I say, I think my answer to that would be we see these shifts in many, many more long-running high-quality surveys, whereas we haven't seen that with young voters.

One other thing that I think is actually kind of funny here is that we may actually never know if there's a realignment. And the reason I say that is because when we get the gold standard post-election surveys coming in, it's not...

entirely implausible that you would have some people, some voters of color who held their nose and voted for Donald Trump. And then when the survey comes in, they go, no, no, no, I voted Democrat. Me, I'm always Democrat. Me. So for the exact reasons that Cheryl lays out in her book. OK. All right. So, yeah, I think I think there's nothing about this to me feels watertight.

But there were enough things, arrows pointing in one direction to think that there is more reason to be talking about this this year than in previous cycles.

No, I think John's assessment of how he would go about doing the analysis is also something I would take into consideration as well, because the overtime data is definitely something you would be wanting to look at. The pre and post-election data is something that one can do the comparisons like to like in terms of the survey design itself. I think sometimes, too, when it comes to capturing voters, right, if you think about polling, polling often is looking at likely voters, right?

Right. Like people we think are going to vote, which is very hard when you're trying to look at that with certain age demographics, as well as certain like ethnic and racial populations. Because if you have a situation like during COVID, what we saw was a major influx of people who had not been registered registered. Right. Because we changed the operation of how you would vote in the election by promoting absentee ballots. Right.

Right. So suddenly there was a lot of people who voted who were newer voters or maybe had not voted, but wouldn't have been captured in a poll. And so how do you then make assessments on behavior if you have a set of people that are just not in there? And the size of that population is kind of unknown. I mean, you'd basically have to deduct, right, like what we know are registered voters from the total population of all possible voters and then figure out what percentage of that is registered.

People who will eventually vote, but maybe haven't voted and we just wouldn't see them in a poll. Right. And then somehow they get captured in a random sample of a survey. And did the survey have weights? Did we do oversampling? You know, all these factors come in, which leads to that variation. So, you know, I think meta analysis is also beneficial to try to figure that out as well, because these populations are just kind of harder to tease out.

But I think you're also right as well. It's going to be interesting. I mean, if people did do a swing, like if what, you know, Ested was finding in that focus group kind of thing that he did for his episode on the run-up, I thought it was fascinating because, you know, when they were asking them people about Trump, you know, people were saying, Black men in particular, or, you know, like one guy was like, you know, I will trump his word and his bond. And he's like, what word? And he was like, he said he's going to build a fence and he built it. Yeah.

He's going to build a wall and he built it. And then he noted to the fact that you'd only need one in five Black men to defect from what was going on. And the Black women that were then asked were all like, yeah, I can see that possibly happening. Right now, would they all admit it later? Probably not. Right. Like they would be people who may in certain companies.

particularly I would say Black women in particular, or other Black men who challenge it would maybe not feel comfortable saying that. And so it is interesting to see, you know, how do you observe an effect if people also are aware of the sanction

And so they don't want to be known for that. Where I think, you know, and what I liked about John's data analysis that he was showing and the replication one of our work, which was also just like a moment of verification, like, okay, no, we did get that right. But two, when you did it also for the Latinx and Asian communities as well, I thought that was interesting to see that because we had not tested that.

I think we had believed that, but to even have a norm of some sort seeming to grow there to the effect that people's social ties are having that level of impact, I think speaks a lot to one, the likelihood that people might defect.

and to which groups might be the ones that do it, right? And they seem to have a little bit more likelihood that that could be a space where that would happen. But again, you know, that that is there and that social ties matter there is important to know. As well as the difficulty of just working out who's going to vote, like who's just saying on a poll that they're going to vote Trump but might not turn out.

When we talk about the role of Trump in all of this, again, this anti-establishment thing means that whereas historically, the less establishment someone were, you know, the more peripheral to mainstream society, to politics someone is, the more likely they would vote Democrat if they voted. That was the way things have looked historically. So, of course, the Get Out the Vote campaign was always super, super important for the Democrats because your marginal voter was most likely a Democrat.

But of course, again, the interesting thing with Trump and the, I'm going to use the word realignment again, I guess to me, everything's a realignment, but the alignment which has seen the old class, like rich, poor, educated, less educated gradient in politics flatten over the last few years. You know, it used to be that people on low incomes massively broke towards Democrats. Now it's much closer to 50-50.

The result of that in terms of turnout is also interesting because it means these marginal voters now, the types of voters who might say they're going to vote Trump on a poll but not turn up, they're not the Democrat-leaning group that they once were. So we're now in this position where, depending on even among voters of colour, those marginal voters are not your sort of, well,

You know, they're from more working class backgrounds, so they're probably going to vote Democrat. It's now much more up in the air which side they would come down on. So it just makes this whole question of how do different likelihood filters on polls affect how we should interpret the data sort of even more of a head scratcher than it has been in previous years.

Yeah.

Latino, you see that the actual number of votes going for Biden doesn't decline much from support going for Clinton. But what you see is a really big increase in folks supporting Trump. And so it's driving out these marginal voters who are in large part going for Trump is a key factor in this sort of realignment that we're talking about. But I want to I want to touch on another important piece here, which is so for me, I think

Comparing like poll to like poll is the best way to show a shift. And to that effect, Gallup published data recently that showed that the Democrats' lead in terms of how Black voters identify is the smallest it has been since they started tracking this in 1999. So that lead is 47 points, which is a lot, but is down from a 66-point net average lead

in 2020. So almost a 20 point swing in just four years. And again, like poll to like poll.

So, I mean, I'm curious what you make of that. But one thing that I thought when I looked at it was, well, just partisan identification is falling in general. Increasingly, Americans say both of these parties suck. I don't want to identify with either of them. And that's actually probably happening to a greater extent amongst younger people who don't have decades long affiliations with parties. And so I wonder if to some extent the thing that we're seeing amongst Black voters or

He's also just what's happening amongst the broader public, which is people don't like these parties and therefore they don't want to identify with them. And also, we also see a phenomenon that when one party is in power, they receive some sort of backlash and people will change the way that they identify in a poll in terms of partisanship for the time being because I don't like this guy. I mean, come on. Like, I'm not going to identify as a Democrat as a result. So...

Both like to like poll, meaning this is stuff we should take seriously, but also a couple caveats when we're processing that information. Where do you all land on where the weight of the evidence is?

I mean, so in our analysis in the book, we did look at people who like identified as independent and particularly independent Democratic leaners. And so when we were looking at specifically things like the ANES, we looked at the 2012 study there. It's because we were able to change the race of interviewer effect, which we were using as our mechanism for social pressure and found that independent leaner Democrats were still

conforming to the expectation of the party norm, right? So even as I'm saying I'm an independent, I'm still at least identifying later on with being or doing behaviors that are consistent with being a Democrat. And so we were looking at the voting behavior, likelihood to vote for Obama and support them. And so for us, I think you're right. There is an increasing amount of people. And I would say, again, that definitely has an age swing to it where the younger demographics are.

tend to be leaning against not wanting to put into these partisan baskets. I think there's increased frustration of the two-party system amongst people as well, at least that's some of the commentary I've been hearing. I don't have like data on that, but I think that the idea that this is the two choices and I'm like, well, you know, just...

Duverger's law comes to mind, like it's just what it is. And so, you know, the system is winner take all, first pass the post, like this is what we got, we got two parties. And so people kind of feel restricted, right, in what that then looks like because it means that they may not feel as they have as much ability to change, right, things that are going on within the partisan politics because it is so constrained.

However, yeah, I think that there's shifts towards the independents. More so independent or non-identifying party than maybe move all the way to the Republican party. Like that's a bigger move to make, a bit more of a costly move to make for people within the Black community. And also there are people who are just like, I just, I'm apathetic about politics altogether. Like not only am I not partisan, I'm just like not engaging very much.

But a lot of that is made up for in the research on Black political behavior is that, you know, one of the ways in which a group that is dealing with such significant disadvantage when it comes to participating in politics is that the, you know, spaces that they engage in, the community spaces,

grassroots efforts that are done there tend to encourage their political participation in ways where, you know, time and resources of those types of things, money are not necessarily as available. And those would be places where they would also be reinforcing of the norm, even if one is someone who is not identifying with the partisanship identity, they would at least be aware of the expectation of the group around what you're supposed to do when you go to the, to go vote, right? So I think that that is a growing thing.

but is it a realized shift in behavior to I'm not voting Democrat, I'm now voting Republican? Not as much so, I would say.

Yeah, I think, again, pretty much agree with all of that. I think there's a couple of little details I would add. One is that if we do look under the hood of that Gallup data, there has been an increase in identification as Republican among black and Latino voters as well. Again, it's not as big as the drop off in Democrat identification. So just eyeballing it, it looks like

in the last five to 10 years, there's been about a 15 percentage point drop in black cipher ID as stems and about a six or seven point rise in Republican self ID. So maybe half is people apathetic going independent and, and half is, is going Republican. But so that's one small point is that there does at least a quite, if we, if we think that Gallup data is legit, there's, there's a bit of something going on there. But I think there's also just this question of,

Of course, you know, as people who work with data, we want to know exactly what's going on. But in terms of electoral outcomes, it doesn't really matter how the, like what compositional things are going on under the surface if it gets to a point where the split, the breakdown, the partisan gap in voting in a group shifts significantly in one direction. And it's not just that it doesn't massively matter, it's that if this happens from, let's say,

a small number of the more marginally engaged black voters who previously voted Democrat not voting this time around. That matters a lot. And the reason I say that is that I worked on analysis in the aftermath of 2020 with a colleague at the FT where we were making the point that in 2020, we saw this slight proportional shift towards Trump among black voters, but it actually was offset by the increase in turnout.

So if you have a group that goes from, say, 95-5 split to like 92-8 split, but turnout massively increases, then basically what looked like it happened in the last election was that even though there was a margin shift among black voters, among non-white voters as a whole, towards the Republicans...

the sheer number of increased votes cast by voters of color for Democrats meant that that didn't have as such negative electoral consequences as it could have done.

And of course, if we're talking about something potentially opposite happening this time, which is that maybe you get a bit of margin shift, but significantly, you also just get a big reduction in turnout among groups who've historically leaned very strongly to the Democrats, then that is a big problem, regardless of whether they're crossing the aisle completely and checking the box for Trump. So I would just add that while these things, it does matter what's happening under the surface. You know, we want to know in terms of the consequences on election day, it matters maybe less.

If what's happening is that black voters are more starting to vote their ideology, that conservative black voters who have been conservative for a long time are now just sort of leaning more towards Republicans than Democrats.

What you would do to get those voters back in the Democratic column is a little bit different than if you thought like, oh, these voters are becoming more disillusioned with the process and sort of Democrats need to be like more Democrat like in order to win black voters back. I don't know sort of what the Democratic Party's philosophy is on this. But, John, it's something that you look at in your in your research.

Yeah, I think I got a couple of reactions to the piece, which were from sort of concerned Democrats saying, yeah, we're worried that this is because of Gaza, for example. And I was saying, well, see, I hear that concern. And obviously, you know, this is clearly a big issue for some people. But when you look at the data on trends in self-identification, for example, and you break that down by political ideology, it's

The share of self-identified liberal voters of colour who still plan on voting Democrat has not gone anywhere. You know, they're still solidly Democrat. Of course, there's going to be some individuals in there who are maybe shifting away from the party for some reasons. But basically, self-identified liberals of any race or ethnicity...

are still very reliable Democrats, whereas the decline is all coming among ideological conservatives. So certainly I think to the extent that there is an aggregate shift towards Republicans or away from Democrats among this group, it's really important to understand that this is among ideological conservatives.

you know, that could help influence the messaging that might be used to win this group back. I don't have specific recommendations on that. Of course, it's always tricky for a party that is losing voters to its opponent for ideological reasons, because in trying to use

conservative language or shift slightly in the conservative direction to win those people back of course you're going to lose people at the other end and you even run the risk of allowing even more conservatively minded people to leave because they say oh right well you don't turns out you don't even disagree with these views at all so so i don't think there's there are any sort of particularly neat solutions to that but yeah i think it's super important for

for a party that is seeing this drop off in a demographic to the extent that it is, to be looking at who those people are. All right. Well, there's a lot more to discuss here, and maybe we will all meet back up before November 5th, but we're going to leave it here for now. Thank you so much, John and Cheryl. Thank you. Thank you.

Before I sign off, I have one very important announcement to make, which is usually this is the part of the show where I say Tony Chow is in the control room. But after more than eight years, I am

no longer going to be able to say that well maybe spiritually but at least in person tony is moving on to an amazing new job at tony actually you are in studio with me right now so can you can you move into the into the for those watching along on youtube um this is tony chow um for those who are listening tony chow is now sitting next to me so tony it's been um it's been a long time

Yeah. It's been, we were both babies when this started. I think we joined, I think we joined, um, very close to the same time. Yeah. Like months apart. 2015. Yeah. It's been, it's been a while. We've been doing this for a while. Um, and it's been a pleasure and a privilege to do it with you. Uh, what can you share with us what you're doing, where you're going next?

Yeah, I am going to move to become the director of digital video at Men in Blazers. Oh, we weren't fancy enough for you. You got to go over to the guys with blazers. No, I just wanted to go back to back to sports, back to soccer, leave politics behind for a little bit. So, yeah, nervous, but excited.

Disillusioned with politics. I've actually never heard of that, despite the podcast we recorded today. I'll still listen. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's the biggest lie I've ever heard. I'll still listen. It's going to be weird not hearing my name at the end, but, you know, I'll still listen.

Okay, well, Tony, it has been so very real. For one final time, my name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. And once again, thank you, Tony Chow. Thank you. It's been an honor. Thank you.