Why Do Socially Conservative Nonwhite Voters Side with the Left?

E xplaining away the GOP’s poor showing with nonwhite voters has become something of an art for Republicans. The mantras employed in such discussions tend to have a “next year in Jerusalem” quality — nonwhite voting blocs are always on the verge of realizing that their true home is in the GOP. “More and more Hispanics realize our conservative values of faith, family & freedom align with GOP,” Texas Republican Mayra Flores tweeted, one month before being trounced by a Democrat in her heavily Hispanic congressional district. “Latinos have always been conservative in their hearts,” Carmen Maria Montiel declared at last year’s CPAC. “I believe Democrats duped the Latinos into believing they were the party for us.”

If that’s true, the dupery has a long half-life. Over the course of the last half-century, the share of the Latino vote won by Republican presidential candidates has fluctuated between 20 and 40 percent. Recent talk of a Republican “realignment” has reinvigorated conservative hopes that paradigm-shifting inroads with the growing Hispanic voting bloc are right around the corner. But except for a few specific regions, the GOP’s material showing has yet to crack its historic 40 percent ceiling.

Yet a related realignment has materialized — among white voters. As the Atlantic noted last year, working-class white voters began migrating toward the GOP half a century ago and are now “the indisputable foundation of the Republican coalition.” While Trump is regarded, with good reason, as the avatar of that shift, his remaking of the Grand Old Party was mostly an accelerant of trend lines that predated his presidency. In a 2001 analysis for the Washington Post, Thomas Edsall noted:

The transformation of voting patterns over the past three decades has weakened the long-standing link between income and voting among whites. . . . In the process, some of the nation’s best educated and highest income communities have become Democratic bastions, and some of the nation’s poorest white counties — especially in southern border states — have turned into GOP strongholds.

Zach Goldberg’s new Manhattan Institute report, “The Rise of College-Educated Democrats,” assesses the “awkward paradox” that this shift has produced in the Democratic coalition: “The Democratic Party will likely become a majority-minority party relatively soon, but one that is still largely and disproportionately steered by liberal college-educated whites.” The largely white, upwardly mobile, college-educated progressives who have flocked to the Democratic Party are from a demographic that is wealthier, more politically engaged, and closer to the centers of political and cultural power than the party’s nonwhite working-class base; as a result, they are overrepresented in leadership positions. But given that progressive elites “are more socially progressive and are more likely to prioritize post-material or moral-value-related issues (e.g., abortion, climate change, LGBT rights) over kitchen-table issues,” Goldberg argues, “the sensibilities of white and nonwhite Democrats differ.”

This “high–low” nature of the Democratic coalition is “an alliance of highly educated urbanites, service workers and the underclass . . . sharing a common political opponent but lacking a common way of life,” as Ross Douthat put it. And it’s the basis of the common conservative argument for working-class nonwhites breaking away from the Democratic Party. Goldberg cautions that nonwhites aren’t “destined to abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Republican candidates en masse anytime soon.” But he maintains that “the policy priorities of college-educated white progressives” could encourage “an electorally meaningful subset of working-class nonwhites to reconsider their political allegiances.” After all, the cultural disconnect is what drove working-class whites to defect from Democrats. Why hasn’t it done the same for nonwhite working-class voters?

One largely unconsidered explanation is that the supposed disparities between the “high” and the “low” portions of the Democratic coalition are less contradictory than they might seem. Rather than expecting that the long-standing fault lines between white and nonwhite Democrats will inevitably produce mass defections, conservatives should ask why those defections have failed to materialize. One possible answer: The common interests that hold Democratic constituencies together are more powerful than their disagreements.

Black voters, for example — long one of the most loyal Democratic voting blocs in the country — are the most Christian racial demographic in the country, and they have a well-established socially conservative streak. (Last month’s Pew survey, for example, found that black Democrats held vastly more conservative views on transgender issues than their co-partisans in other racial groups.) But a 2016 study from New America’s Theodore Johnson also showed that “conservative positions on social issues actually didn’t matter” in determining black voting habits: While “conservative positions on issues like same-sex marriage and abortion are common among . . . black churchgoers,” a “candidate’s stances on these social issues had virtually no effect” on the voting choices of religiously observant blacks, Johnson wrote.

The fact is that “most black voters view a Democratic vote as a heuristic for supporting strong federal civil rights protections and support for a Republican presidential candidate as a vote against group well-being,” Johnson argued. As Goldberg noted, that’s an issue where “the attitudes and priorities of white Democrats closely approximate those of their less politically active nonwhite counterparts. . . . The views of white and nonwhite Democrats have largely converged on racial issues.”

Given the disparities between white and nonwhite Democrats in other areas, perceived group interests may simply play a more powerful role than other issues in the voting habits of many demographics. That’s certainly what the data show for black voters, and the GOP’s consistent inability to crack its traditional ceiling with Hispanics suggests that the unpopularity of cultural progressivism matters less to Hispanics than their entrenched sense of group affinity with Democrats.

The practical implications of that conclusion are an entirely different matter. They point to the need for a political strategy that prioritizes turning out winnable demographics in lieu of pouring resources into trying to reach unwinnable ones. Republicans need to fish where the fish are. Group affinity can and does change, but it is far more difficult to dislodge than many Republicans seem to believe. Conservatives continue to predict that “Hispanic voters will find a religious connection with many, many white Republicans, and that religious connection can prove far more culturally and politically consequential than any effort to create a politics based on ethnic or racial identity,” as David French argued last summer. But so far, at least, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Democratic Party’s mobilization of ethno-politics has been a resounding political success.