Why Democrats Shouldn’t Keep Taking Minority Voters For Granted
It is insulting for the left to think black and brown voters will always vote en masse for the Democratic Party.
“Demography is destiny” has been the left’s mantra for the last decade or so. They can’t wait for the country to turn majority-minority, which is predicted to happen in roughly 2045.
The left’s electoral calculation is, of course, as follows: As the country turns majority brown and black, the Democratic Party will be electorally invincible because, you know, they have minority voters in the bag. Per their calculation, brown native-born and foreign-born citizens especially will forever vote for Democrats because they represent the good party that looks out for minority voters, while the GOP is the evil, racist, white nationalist party.
In the short term, it looks like changing demographics benefit Democrats. In recent years, traditionally red states such as Arizona, Texas, and Georgia have been turning purple due to an influx of minority voters. But changing demographics won’t necessarily work long-term for Democrats for many reasons.
Minorities Aren’t Single-Issue Voters
First, as immigrants get older and more prosperous and assimilate into American society, they don’t reliably vote Democrat anymore. One reason is that Democrats’ redistribution policies don’t look very attractive to older immigrants who’ve worked hard for decades to build more prosperous lives.
But the big-picture reason may also be that as immigrants assimilate more into the American mainstream, they realize more fundamental political truths: The Democratic Party is more interested in having a co-dependent relationship with its voters — you vote for us, and we’ll give you free stuff.
The modern Democratic Party also increasingly pretends to be for the little guy but is actually a neoliberal outfit dominated by college-educated, affluent, coastal liberals. Not to mention, the Democrats’ fierce culture-war battles are calculated distractions so voters won’t focus on the pocketbook issues that affect both donors and voters.
Second, white voters hardly vote as a monolith, and minority voters don’t either. This might come as a surprise to the Democratic establishment and its overpaid analysts, but minority voters aren’t lemmings, can and do think for themselves, and are often a bundle of contradictions just like any other group of voters.
Do Democrats even realize how incredibly diverse the “person of color” constituency is? It contains multitudes: Asians from all over the Asian continent; Latinos from Mexico, Cuba, and Spain; Muslims from culturally different countries; African Americans; not to mention native-born minorities of every background and mixed parentage. All these voters have different ways of thinking about life, culture, and politics, which leads to another reason Democrats’ demography dreams are unsustainable.
Third, brown voters aren’t always single-issue voters who think only of immigration when they vote. In reality, minority voters have other interests and concerns similar to those of other voters. A Pew Research Center poll found that Hispanics’ topmost concerns are education, the economy, and health care.
Minorities are not one voting blob, unable to look out for their economic self-interests and discern all the nuances of American politics and the machinations and hypocrisies of the Democratic Party.
Minority Voters Know What Is Best for Them
Election results bear out the above assertions. Donald Trump won in 2016 partly due to sizable percentages of Hispanic-American (29 percent) and Asian-American (29 percent) voters. Who knew this many deplorables were in the ranks of brown voters?
By all accounts, Hispanic and African-American support for Trump in 2020 has been steadily increasing. Oh, the racists! But the not-so-secret sauce for this burgeoning support has been their rising employment and increasing wages. It turns outthat actually making people’s lives better economically counts more than empty gestures, such as talking endlessly about racism.
Fourth, brown voters are often motivated by the same things that motivate many white voters: self-interest and self-preservation. Although the modern Democratic Party’s position toward illegal immigration is de facto open borders, you won’t find many legal immigrants who think this is a good idea. My informal, non-scientific poll of my Indian-American community always unearths a version of this comment: “We immigrated to America to leave behind the problems of developing-country conditions, so why would we support uncontrolled mass immigration? That would only ‘Third-Worldize’ America.”
In reality, the Democratic Party continues to take minority votes for granted just like Hillary Clinton took her “blue wall” voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for granted in 2016. Surprise, surprise! Sometimes voters don’t like that political attitude and vote the other way.
The Democratic Party Doesn’t Own Minorities’ Votes
Fifth, the Democratic Party’s support for late-term abortion could erode support in black and Hispanic communities, which are traditionally more religious than other voter groups. For the Democratic Party’s demography-is-destiny electoral calculation to work, they’d have to import potential new voters all the time in the form of illegal immigrants, whose American-born children will vote Democrat, and newly arrived legal immigrants who will vote for them no matter what. This is one reason the left supports uncontrolled mass immigration.
The Democratic leaders and their supportive media have also been doing something calculating and invidious: verbally attacking white conservatives casually and gratuitously, riling up minorities to ensure they remain in the Democratic Party. My own experience as a legal immigrant, Indian-American voter for nearly 15 years is relevant here. In my early years in America, I was a solid Democrat. I fell for the party’s assertions that it was the only refuge for minority voters and that the GOP was the inhospitable party.
It took several years, but I gradually realized the Democratic Party is more about power and control, and it doesn’t really care about the little guy, especially in economic matters. Most of all, I have been put off by the left’s hypocrisies on diversity, climate change, and a host of other issues.
The Democratic Party needs to realize that demography, in the long run, isn’t destiny. Minority voters aren’t loyal robots who will vote for them no matter what, and the sooner the left realizes they aren’t entitled to minority votes, the better our politics will be.
Saritha Prabhu is a freelance writer.
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