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Why Non-White Voters Are Moving Away From Democrats
The Democrats fear that they are losing support from non-white voters.
Polling data indeed shows that parts of the non-white voters are shifting away from the Democrats and towards the Republicans.
John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, has looked at the reasons why that is being the case.
John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch – 14:39 UTC · Mar 11, 2024
NEW 🧵:
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.
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Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.
Averaging all recent polls, the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.
A further investigation of this trend finds that there are three factors involved in this.
The first, according to Burn-Murdoch, is memory. The civil rights movement in the 1960s aligned lots of non-whites with the Democrats. But since that movement was at least somewhat successful younger non-white people are no longer bound by that.
Typically people become more conservative with age. Black Americans so far defied that trend. But as those who lived during the civil rights movement are dying away the effect dissipates.
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Another factor is that the Democrats have become a party of (many) rich people while the Republicans, at least in their rhetoric, have become more labor orientated.
Black Americans are economically on the poorer side of things. They may see more potential gain for themselves by voting Republican.
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The third factor though, seems to be the strongest one. There were once a lot of conservative non-whites who still voted for Democrats. That is changing. More people are now aligning their choice with their ideology.
This may be because the society has become less segregated. Group pressure, for blacks to vote for Democrats, has thus dissipated. People have become more free to vote their mind. This allows natural conservatives, of all colors, to increasingly vote along their personal ideology.
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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch – 14:42 UTC · Mar 11, 2024
[I]f you take one thing away from this thread:
The left’s challenge with non-white voters is much deeper than it first appears.
A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity. This is a big challenge for Dems.
It is an especially big challenge when one's presidential candidate is one Joe Biden who has long thrived on black votes and a (fake) image of pro-worker policies.
The observed trend strengthens my assessment that Donald Trump is highly likely to win the next presidential election.
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The longer version of the above discussion, with more graphics, has been published in the Financial Times:
American politics is undergoing a racial realignment – (archived) – FT, Mar 11 2024
Democrats are rapidly losing non-white voters as the forces that ensured their support weaken
They are pivoting towards China and Trump won’t go to war against China.
He’ll do what he did the last time thinking he was losing the trade war against China when the US was winning it big time. Do things that he thinks hurts China that only helps them. China will chuckle behind his back like they did the last time.
So it will be a win, win for the sane countries on the planet who don’t want war.
Trump no doubt knows that when you go shopping, buying at the lowest price is the mark of a winner, while paying too much is the mark of a loser.
Yet, when it came to his tariffs wether it was buying lumber from Canada, cars from Germany, and steel and aluminum, Trump was retaliating against other nations for not charging Americans enough for their products. Putting the prices up on these products with his tariffs.
And while everyone knows that buying at the lowest price is a good thing, there was no serious push back from Democrats, the ‘free trade’ Republicans, the media or any of the headline mainstream analysts. There is clearly something very wrong with their underlying mainstream logic that leads to this type of costly Presidential blunder.
Trump will do exactly the same thing again because he is an idiot and the Bannon MAGA war room will cheer him on.
Yes, when the US buy imports jobs are lost, just as when we replace workers with machines, including lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, and power washers, jobs are lost. And yet somehow the US survived all that.
They went from needing 99% of the people working to grow their food to less than 1%, and manufacturing jobs are down to only 7% of the labor force. And yet the remaining 90% of all Americans are not all unemployed, as jobs have proliferated in the service sector, where most of those jobs are now considered to be better jobs than the lost agricultural and manufacturing jobs.
Nor has a trade deficit necessarily resulted in higher unemployment or lower pay. In 1999, for example, the US had record imports with unemployment under 4% and inflation under 2%, and students were getting recruited for good paying jobs well before graduation.
The answer to sustaining high levels of employment and pay is fiscal policy. If for any reason, including more imports, weak demand at home is keeping unemployment too high or wages too low, the appropriate policy response is fiscal relaxation- either a tax cut or spending increase, even if that increases the public debt- and not to tax or otherwise drive up the cost of imports.
Unfortunately however, the policy that allows all of us to pay the lowest prices for imports and have good paying jobs to replace those lost because of imports has been taken entirely off the table by both Republicans and Democrats. Consequently a very good thing for America- lower prices of imports- has been turned into a very bad thing- unemployment, and all because of the fake news about the public debt that is supported by Republicans and Democrats.
The US public debt is nothing more than the dollars spent by the federal government that have not yet been used to pay taxes. Those dollars spent and not yet taxed sit in bank accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank that are called ‘reserve accounts’ and ‘securities accounts’, along with the actual cash in circulation.
Treasury securities (bonds, notes, and bills) are nothing more than dollars in securities accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank, functionally the same as dollars in savings accounts or CD’s at commercial banks.
Think of it this way- when the government spends a dollar, that dollar either is used to pay taxes and is lost to the economy, or it’s not used to pay taxes and remains in the economy.
Deficit spending adds to those dollars that were spent but not yet taxed, which is called the public debt. And what’s called ‘paying off the debt’ (as happens to 10’s of billions of Treasury securities every month) is just a matter of the Fed shifting dollars from securities accounts to reserve accounts- a simple debit and a credit- all on its own books.
(No tax payers or grand children required…) The ‘ability to pay’ is always there- it’s just a debit and a credit to accounts on the books of the Federal Reserve Bank. The fear mongering about the US running out of money or constraints by foreigners is simply not applicable to today’s monetary system.
And if you are worried about inflation, Trumps direct policy is to raise the prices all US citizens will pay for imports. That helps China.
The problem is of course “fixed exchange rate thinking ” which comes from mainstream economics and its everything is a veil over barter myth. There isn’t, and never has been, a universal exchange commodity that you can deny China that will somehow shrink its output.
In any national economy there is the pile of stuff you can make yourself, then there is the stuff you can get from somewhere else which makes your pile bigger (imports), and after that there is the amount of stuff you have to give to somewhere else which makes your pile of stuff smaller (exports).
The only reason to export is because you can’t get imports for promises (currency). If there are no imports on offer, then you may as well keep what you would have exported for yourself – redeploying manpower as needed to other areas.
By refusing Chinese exports, the West will free up production manpower that China can redeploy into its Military Industrial Complex.
All while making the pile of stuff the West has smaller.
The neoliberal globalist obsession with exports is the wrong focus. The obsession should be with imports and then providing as little as possible in exports to ensure they turn up.
There is a section of society that believes that everything should be sacrificed on the altar of ‘international trade’. Once you realise that exports are a physical loss to the country and imports are a physical benefit that increase our standard of living then you can switch that belief around.
Trump and Bannon’s MAGA war room doesn’t understand that The purpose of international trade is to gain as many physical imports as possible for as few physical exports as possible. That, along with full domestic employment, is how you maximise a nation’s standard of living.
China will remain Quiet as Trump continues to make the same mistakes. The world can breathe a huge sigh of relief. A win, win for the sane.
Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 11 2024 20:23 utc | 72
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