A round of local elections has brought relief to the Democratic Party. Of particular note is the victory in Virginia, a swing state with a moderate Republican governor (Glenn Youngkin) who is seen as a potential rival to Donald Trump for the nomination. In Ohio, a reform of the local constitution was passed that established the right to abortion. Even in Kentucky, the left’s success can be at least partially explained by the campaign to protect the right to abortion. A scenario that Democrats have dreamed of is taking shape again: If the right’s attack on women’s right to vote mobilizes female voters, Joe Biden’s party can win the White House and Congress a year from now.
These local election results stand in stark contrast to the message of recent national polls: Donald Trump is leading in five out of six key states (the states that swing from one party to the other and typically decide an election). There is growing doubt that the problem is really him: Biden. The voices within his party calling for him to withdraw from the race are becoming louder. But his unstoppable decline in popularity also reveals a structural problem: the shift to the right of some ethnic minorities.
Behind Biden’s continued landslide in the polls lies a troubling phenomenon, not just for the president but for his party as a whole: it is the continued landslide in favor of Republicans among some segments of the ethnic minorities that the Democratic Party considered to be the most loyal. the African Americans and Hispanics. The majority of these groups remain loyal to the Democratic Party, but their support is dwindling with each election. And it seems that the left has not found a common analysis of the causes and remedies to stop this exodus of votes.
The latest New York Times poll showed that if there were an election duel between Biden and Trump today, the Republican would win. When broken down by ethnic components, the decline in consensus in the black community appears crucial. In these key states, Trump won only 6% of African Americans in 2016; in 2020 it was only slightly higher, rising to 8%. Today, however, that percentage has nearly tripled, and the share of Black voters who say they prefer Trump to Biden in the poll has risen to 22%. If these numbers are confirmed in the elections one year, it would be sensational: in half a century, no Republican candidate has ever received more than 12% of the African-American vote. The enormous support among this group of voters is all the more significant because African Americans were crucial to Biden being nominated for his party in 2020.
Among Hispanics, the increase in votes for Trump was already observed in 2020 and is becoming increasingly clear. The most authoritative scholar of this phenomenon is Ruy Teixeira, author of the new essay “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” Teixeira himself came to prominence 21 years ago with another book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” which envisioned a diametrically opposite scenario. In 2002, due to demographic dynamics, Teixeira experienced an America that was at the mercy of the “eternal” political dominance of the left: the ongoing migration flows were intended to strengthen precisely those components that voted democratically. Published at the beginning of the millennium, this book inspired left-wing politicians to over-reliance on “electoral determinism” to consolidate their hegemony. It certainly strengthened their belief that a policy of openness towards migrants would bring significant electoral benefits.
Today Teixeira completely destroys his prediction from 21 years ago. In the new essay, he warns that Latinos are leaving the Democratic Party, and paradoxically, one of the reasons is lax policies toward migrants. In a recent poll, 61% of Hispanics living in Texas said they want to strengthen border enforcement, increase barriers and tighten controls on illegal immigration. Even among blacks, the proportion of critics of illegal immigrants is growing.
For Teixeira, this stance would require the left to return to “normal”: Historically, the Democratic Party, as a representative of the working class, opposed open borders because the influx of migrants depressed workers’ wages, thereby primarily harming black and impoverished workers as well regular immigrants. Even public funding for social welfare, from schools to health care to income supplements, eventually dwindled when shared with a crowd of newcomers.
The feeling that migration flows are uncontrolled under the Biden administration has already led the federal government to make adjustments, such as building an “addition” to the Trump Wall. But the restrictions are not enough and the feeling of insecurity is exacerbated by the increase in crime in many American cities: a deterioration in public order, the first victims of which are the less affluent classes and ethnic minorities.