A Democratic Party for Whom?

Understanding racial realignment and its consequences, for 2024 and beyond

FT has a story with the above harrowing graph, and it starts out with foreboding numbers: According to a poll from last week, Biden leads Trump:

by just 56 points to 44 among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points when the two men last fought it out for the White House in 2020.

There is a clear generational shift that the data bears out. The civil-rights generation is slowly dying off, and as it does the loyalty of that minority-voter demographic should naturally wane in two ways.

One is that conservative Black, Latino, Asian voters are freer than in the past to vote Republican without a corresponding social stigma.

But the other way, which I think is more important, is what Janet Jackson asked, rhetorically: “What have you done for me lately?”

Do minorities feel their interests are represented by the Democratic Party? If the answer were “yes,” then it would be really, really hard to explain the trend of party-switching—all the more so given the racialized, white-supremacy-whistling currents in Trumpism.

Here’s what I think is going on, some alternative hypotheses, and some pondering about what ought to be done.