Biden’s tenure hasn’t just soured non-whites on him; it’s soured them on the entire Democratic Party.
Biden’s tenure hasn’t just soured non-whites on him; it’s soured them on the entire Democratic Party.
D emocrats are reportedly panicking over President Biden’s poor standing among non-white voters. A deep dive into recent polls shows they have reason to be worried: It’s even worse than they think.
The Democratic Party has long relied on massive margins among non-white voters to offset significant deficits with whites. Their presidential candidates have not carried the white vote since at least 1972 and have not come within ten points of the Republican since 1996. That deficit has only grown larger since Donald Trump won, and even the well-documented leftward shift of college-educated whites only reduced Biden’s white-voter deficit to 17 points, according to the exit polls.
This reliance on non-white votes is especially important in the ultra-close swing states that decide the presidency. Biden carried Georgia, for example, by only about 11,800 votes. Blacks cast 29 percent of the total votes, according to the exit polls, and Biden won them by 88–11 percent. Roughly 5 million votes were counted, meaning blacks cast about 1.45 million votes. Had Biden’s margin been only four points smaller, 86–13, he would have lost 58,000 votes from his margin, and Trump would have carried Georgia.
Huge margins among Latino voters are just as important to Democratic hopes. Biden carried Arizona by a mere 10,500 votes while winning among Hispanics by a 61–37 margin. Hispanics cast 19 percent of the state’s roughly 3.4 million votes, or about 646,000. Biden’s 24-point lead gave him a 155,000-vote margin among Latinos, about 15 times his overall margin. Had Biden won by only 59–39, his Latino lead would have shrunk to “only” 129,000 votes, and Trump again would have carried the state.
This is why Democrats are so terrified by recent polls showing Biden performing much worse among blacks and Hispanics than any other recent nominee. Even the slightest drop from his 2020 margins would doom his reelection chances even if he didn’t lose a single white vote. The levels he has dropped to make his reelection a virtual impossibility.
Recent national polls that include publicly available data on black and Hispanic voting preferences make that painfully clear. These surveys show Biden winning only between 55 and 67 percent of the black vote and 40 to 43 percent of the Hispanic vote. Trump would win between 14 and 27 percent of the black vote and 37 to 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Even Biden’s largest margin among both ethnic groups — 52 points with blacks and four points with Hispanics — would put him well behind Trump in each of the five closest states from 2020 even if the white vote stayed the same.
What makes it even worse for Democrats is that these figures track Biden’s job-approval figures and measures of party identification. Biden received 62 percent job approval with blacks and 40 percent with Hispanics, for example, in the most recent Emerson College poll. He won 67 percent of the black vote and 43 percent of the Hispanic vote in that same poll, statistically identical figures in each. Moreover, only 69 percent of blacks and 48 percent of Latinos said they identified as Democrats in that poll. Partisan identification, Biden job approval, and Biden vote preferences are all nearly identical.
A recent Economist/YouGov poll shows this has nothing to do with any purported backing for Trump. Biden beat Trump in that poll by 66–14 with blacks and only 40–38 with Hispanics. Those are nearly identical to the responses given to a question asking them which party’s generic presidential nominee — no actual names provided — they would likely back. Blacks backed a generic Democrat by only 71–13 over a generic Republican, and Hispanics gave the generic Democrat an infinitesimal 38–37 lead. Biden’s tenure hasn’t just soured non-whites on him; it’s soured them on the entire Democratic Party.
If this continues through Election Day, Democrats could end up getting shellacked in Senate races currently thought to lean toward them. Hispanic voters constituted 17 percent of the electorate in Arizona in 2022, while blacks and Hispanics combined were 23 percent of Nevada’s vote. Results like those in recent polls would likely cost Democrats both seats. On top of the expected loss of West Virginia, where Joe Manchin is retiring, these voter shifts would cost Democrats control of the Senate regardless of what happens in the presidential race.
It could get even worse when one considers the demographics of the Midwest. Four Democratic-held seats — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — are up in 2024. Democrats lost the white vote in three of them even in that big Democratic year but won comfortably because their candidates carried the 12–15 percent of the electorate that was black by between 78 and 83 points. Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin narrowly won whites 50–49 but also won blacks by a huge margin. A small three- to four-point shift toward the GOP among whites, coupled with a big shift among blacks, would likely be enough to flip all of these seats red.
Democrats so far seem to be relying on abortion and fear of Trump to reform the 2020 coalition, but the data show that isn’t working with many non-whites. If non-white dissatisfaction with Biden and Democrats remains anything close to this high next November, Republicans could be in for an unexpectedly good year.