Bernie Sanders’s victories in the inaccurately counted Iowa caucuses, in the crisply conducted New Hampshire primary, and in the Nevada caucuses have made two things clear.
One is that the Vermont senator, elected and reelected to Congress as an independent, is on the high road to become the oldest political party in the world’s 35th presidential nominee, as I have argued in two columns.
The second is less obvious but potentially of more lasting importance: that the monolithic voting behavior of citizens classified as nonwhite, assumed by prophets to continue endlessly a lasting Democratic majority, may be ending.
The black community has been voting around 90% Democratic for more than half a century, since 1964. For a similar period, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, it voted (when and where permitted to) almost unanimously Republican.
But for the last half-century, blacks have also voted almost unanimously for one candidate in presidential primaries, even against sympathetic opponents: for Robert Kennedy over Hubert Humphrey, for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
In 2016, there were already signs of change. In the Michigan primary, blacks were split. Clinton won the black vote 68% to 28%, according to the exit poll. And the general election poll showed black women essentially unanimous (a 90-point margin in Clinton’s favor) but black men noticeably less so at 82% to 13%, for a 69-point margin.
This year, Joe Biden, the first black president’s choice for vice president, has been counting on near-unanimous support from black voters. But he’s not getting it.
The Nevada caucus entrance poll showed him leading Sanders by just 39% to 27% among blacks, a population that accounts for 11% of Nevadans. That’s a far cry from Clinton’s 88% to 11% win over Sanders in South Carolina in the 2016 primary. That margin was eight times greater and would amount to 8 whole percentage points of the Nevada electorate — a big difference in a contest where nonblacks are closely divided.
Nor is Biden getting the near-unanimous support his backers assumed in polls in South Carolina, whose Democratic primary electorate was 61% black last time. February South Carolina polling shows Biden leading Sanders by just 24% to 21% and averaging only 36% among blacks in three polls.
There’s also at least fragmentary evidence that President Trump may run better with black voters, especially young men, than he or other Republicans have for many years.
What seems to be happening here? It makes sense for people who identify as members of a disfavored minority group to vote unanimously for one party or one candidate. “Unity,” the word I’ve heard black preachers repeat over and over when favored candidates appear at services, increases their leverage.
But there eventually comes a time when racial identity chafes less and other issues obtrude. The New Deal got many blacks to abandon the party of Abraham Lincoln. Despite the lamentations of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the New York Times’s 1619 Project, perceptions that race relations have improved and black unemployment has plunged in the Trump years to the lowest level ever measured may switch some black voters away from the party of Lyndon Johnson.
What about Hispanics voters, who, unlike blacks, are increasing (slowly) as a percentage of the electorate? For many years, it was assumed that their paramount issue was immigration. But they never voted unanimously or uniformly across the country. And the Hispanic subgroup closest to unanimity (Puerto Ricans in New York) was always made up of U.S. citizens.
Nor did they recoil, as expected, from Trump in 2016. He actually ran slightly better among Hispanics than Mitt Romney had four years earlier. They formed no more than 3% of the electorate in states that turned out to be pivotal in 2016, aside from Florida, where both Trump and Republican statewide candidates in 2018 got enough Hispanic votes to win.
Hispanics tend to be younger and lower-income than average. That helps explain why Sanders, who has been running best with young and low-income voters, won 51% of Hispanics in Nevada, compared to 29% of whites and 27% of blacks. So, in this year’s primaries, Hispanics seem so far to be voting similarly to whites of similar age and economic situation.
In contrast, the three candidates favored by white college graduates with more liberal records on immigration — Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar — got only a combined 21% of Nevada Hispanics’ votes.
Bottom line: Blacks and Hispanics, to different degrees, are upending the notion that “nonwhite” voters are ineluctably wedded to the Democratic Party and walled off from the rest of political America.
