Sarah Longwell on the amazing “Focus Group Podcast” (thank you @KerryEleveld for recommending) recently interviewed several former Biden 2020 voters who said they were going to vote for Donald Trump this fall. I had just read about how recent polls have shown a potentially historic shift to Trump from voters of color who did not attend college and forced myself to listen. What if there is a huge rethinking going on and we just missed it? Here’s some quotes from the voters Sarah spoke about why they were switching to Trump and away from Biden.
“I think he just has an more of an ability to jump start the economy to inject energy into the economy, and that’s really what a lot of us boil down to, for me, I think it’s kind of optimized to, there is no standard or traditional or typical president in a sense.”
“With him and, Putin from Russia. They had some kind of rapport, and so that’s what keeps us alive without getting bombs, you know, thrown on our country. So it seems like I don’t know. Maybe a gangster knows another gangster and they have respect from one another, but it seems like he was able to get along with them people a little better. And he also pays a lot of attention to where the United States is sending money to.”
”We tend to send a lot of money overseas, and I remember when they were looking to approve the stimulus package, you know, this is what, a thousand page, act, a thousand page law, He noticed how congressmen and senators were sending money to their own states and stuff. It was so much fat that was in that bill to be passed for us to get that stimulus check.”
“For me, personally, strongest is the only not the only president to speak against secret societies and what elite people do. They have power above him. But he’s one of the only people that recently speak about it. And he mainly got demonized because he was allegedly the president during COVID. Wish for anybody that wouldn’t be a fair presidency and a fair way to judge because, you know, again, he wasn’t in control.”
“So when he helped characters on the straight path, So, I mean, I grew up, grew up in the south. And so we were, you know, being black and from the south, you automatic a democrat almost. And so we were trained to bleed it. We voted this person because, you know, this is what was best for us. I think we were sold a, bill of goods.”
”Then I voted for Biden because some of the views that I had on Trump in the twenty twenty election I didn’t think was a good idea after, all these years of indictments. And it’s just everybody else in the media made him look like a bad person. And again, it was peer pressure and influence. Now this presidential election being, you know, twenty eight going on twenty nine years old, actually working in the economy, living the economy, being a part of the people that our president is here to serve, to be honest, Trump would honestly be the best choice. And the only reason why I say that is because of the fact that he was president.”
There are even more of these interviews but they follow the same pattern. And, as you might notice, almost none of these voters is shifting to Trump because of a change in political values (which you would think would drive a structural shift). Instead, they seem to mostly (with one exception) to be basing the change based on questionable information. These are not disaffected voters, these are, instead, under or misinformed voters who we could clearly get back.
I am leading with this quotes because I think they reveal the truth about this supposed historic realignment — it does not pass closer inspection and in truth — other than around the margins — does not seem to be happening. In other words, it’s largely BS.
The historic shift and realignment is real — if you only look at the polls
The historic shift freakout really began when an FT reporter name John Burn Murdoch announced on Twitter that “American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment” and posted this now
famous image. The chart is actually quite stable from 1980 on and then from 2020 to 2024 shifts dramatically. This is shift — the heavily sloped arrows of our doom — all stem from recent polling.
Now, I’d like to tell you the John Burn Murdoch is full of it but he’s not, the polls are, as Adam Carlson has noted “suggesting 2024 will be the largest racial realignment since the Civil Rights Act was passed.”
Carlson — to counter the possibility that this insight was based on crosstabs with a very small number of interviews (like the NYT Siena poll which, in big headlines, proclaimed that Biden was almost losing with voters of color based on 200 interviews) aggregated cross tabs from all the polls and found that it — a huge swing in support of black and brown voters from Biden to Trump in recent polls — does indeed exist in the polling.
However, Carlson notes the following — at the end of his post
my priors make me skeptical that 2024 will be a major realignment election:
- It’s likely to be a rematch election in which both candidates are not only nearly universally known but also widely disliked, so there’s likely little that can change voters’ views of them (though a Trump conviction or a major medical episode could shake things up).
- Polls a year out from the election are just plain noisy. The campaign hasn’t really started, billions of dollars have yet to be spent, we don’t have formal nominees, voters aren’t really playing close attention to the race, Trump has been out of the news (by his standards), and voters may be engaging in expressive voting against Biden rather than viewing the race as a binary choice.
- We haven’t seen almost anything in the post-Dobbs election results that presages major coalitional shifts like we saw among Hispanics in 2018, when we saw Democrats perform poorly in the Rio Grande Valley and South Florida. If anything, Democrats have faced turnout challenges among young voters/voters of color, not persuasion challenges.
- Partisan differential non-response, recent subgroup polling misses, and recent methodological changes in polling are things we should take seriously (though they don’t explain everything).
The historic shift does not exist — according to the politics
I think Carlson is being way too kind. Most importantly, this historic shift has not show up in any of the elections since 2020 which — if a structural shift was happening — would be present.
The gleeful “Biden is doomed corps” pundits — like Nate Silver — are jumping on this finding to defend polling and I guess their egos. This corps claims that these new anti-Biden voters haven’t shown up in the specials but will in November.
It doesn’t make sense on just a basic level — Trump — as Carlson — points out — is not new. What has he suddenly offered to make voters who were formerly ready to vote for Biden to now vote for him? If anything, he’s older and less anti-institutional (unless you are full MAGA). Why would people of people of color are suddenly turn MAGA in great numbers during an economic recovery and during a political time when MAGA is getting more extreme and racist rather than less?
Polling is broken, there is no generational shift, just a small one (that we should pay attention to…)
The focus group responses at the start of diary did have one thing in common — they indicated that the voters in the focus group are being influenced — with misinformation — by someone or something (bots?) aligned with Trump. As Dan Ancona wrote, in the midst of the debate over this issue, on twitter “there’s a simpler explanation: conservatives and Republicans are marketing their ideas very heavily to these groups.”
And as Ancona notes
I think Ancona is right and this change is likely on the margins. However, we should listen to our voters and — where we can — respond to them. And, we should also be cognizant and aware of how the Trump campaign is marketing Trump to these very important voters and be ready to counter.
Feel good because the Trump campaign is basing its entire strategy on this fantasy
Trump and his campaign acknowledge that they are likely to lose Haley voters and the like. This could be 5% to 10% of his 2020 electorate not voting or switching to Biden. This is a complete doomsday scenario for Trump and a blowout scenario for Biden. Yet, instead of denying this historic loss of GOP voters is happening Trump and his strategists are saying “yes we don’t want those voters” but we are going to win because we will get more working class voters of color (the historic realignment).
While this is scary — that the Trump campaign is somehow — off the radar — reaching and persuading huge swaths of working class voters of color to leave the Democratic Party — it is not a very likely scenario and the Trump’s loss of a significant chunk of the GOP electorate is very likely. I like our odds and — if I was a Trump supporter — I’d be really worried about his odds and the fact the most likely historic realignment that is going to happen is with the GOP electorate not with voters of color suddenly supporting Donald Trump in much greater numbers.