A new Democratic coalition is taking shape—and it may have trouble winning elections
White, college-educated voters are slowly supplanting some non-white voters as the party's base
During Barack Obama’s presidency, many political observers saw the emergence of a new Democratic coalition—one that included young voters, women, people of color, and highly educated professionals as well as some working-class white voters who remained loyal to the party due to its history of economic populism. This was a powerful mix of groups that cut across all segments of America’s population.
What’s more: it wasn’t just Obama who seemed to benefit from these shifting demographic trends but the entire Democratic Party. As Obama became the country’s first-ever black president in 2008, Democrats won huge majorities in Congress. This included the most Senate seats for either party since 1978 (and, for a brief time, a rare 60-seat supermajority) and several seats in both chambers that represented deeply rural areas of the country.1 Although Republicans made significant gains in the 2010 midterms, giving them optimism they could beat back this rising majority in 2012, Democrats’ coalition basically held, and Obama became the first Democratic president since FDR to win twice with more than 50% of the national popular vote.
These results were a sign to many people, including prominent figures in both parties, that a more progressive and diverse—and, therefore, less white—country was taking root and that the long-term viability of the Republican Party, specifically, was in question if it did not adapt to this new reality. At the time, the GOP coalition was a hodgepodge of mostly different types of white voters, including many who were older and working-class as well as a wealthier, college-educated business class.
However, the party appeared glaringly devoid of non-white voters. According to the Democratic data firm Catalist, in 2012, Mitt Romney won less than a third of Asian (33%), Hispanic (30%), and black (3%) voters. Meanwhile, he won 59% of white voters who did not hold a college degree and 53% of whites who did. The post-election exit polls also showed that he won more affluent voters while Obama carried working-class voters of all races.
After the 2012 election, the national Republican Party famously conducted an “autopsy” to determine what went wrong. The report’s authors noted, “It will be increasingly difficult for Republicans to win a presidential election in the near future” if the party did not change its ways, especially on social issues. In their understanding, the GOP’s long-term survival rested on its ability to expand its appeal to younger voters and non-white voters. One of the most memorable takeaways from the report was that the party must change its tune on the issue of immigration, with the authors saying bluntly, “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.”
But that all quickly went out the window when Donald Trump arrived on the scene and ignored all that advice—and won anyway. The 2016 election was the start of a massive realignment between the two parties, one that could have consequences for decades to come. An emerging fault line in that election was educational attainment (or whether a voter had a college degree). More so than income, this factor was highly predictive of whether a voter was likely to vote for the candidate of the opposite party they supported in 2012.
This was especially apparent among white voters. According to a post-election analysis by the New York Times, large shares of college-educated whites of nearly every income level voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 after supporting Romney in 2012. By contrast, significant numbers of non-college whites across all income levels voted for Trump after supporting Obama, including huge rightward shifts among poor and working-class whites.
While Democrats despaired over the outcome of the election, many remained convinced that a new, emerging coalition could keep them competitive—that the problem in 2016 was simply poor turnout.2 In fact, Clinton won the national popular vote with such a coalition (and only lost the Electoral College to Trump by about about 77,000 votes). Hers somewhat mirrored Obama’s: it was still younger, female, and highly diverse, but it also included a greater share of college-educated whites and a smaller share of non-college whites.
The first glimpse at this coalition’s staying power came in the 2018 midterms. After Republicans nationally won white voters with a college degree in 2016 by 2 points, Democrats won them by 7 points in 2018, marking a 9-point leftward swing. This helped them win back the House of Representatives that cycle and regain lost ground at the state level as well.
In addition to these changes in voting patterns, another important development occurred over the past decade (especially during the Trump years): college-educated white Democrats grew much more ideologically liberal, especially on social issues. Whether this evolution happened naturally or came as a backlash to Trump’s presidency, this shift would alter the course of the Democratic Party’s future in a profound way.
So, heading into 2020, many candidates running in the Democratic presidential primary seemed to think that basically replicating Clinton’s coalition was the path to success. They began catering to college-educated whites by tacking increasingly to the left. But this became a risky electoral strategy for a couple reasons.
First, non-white Democrats, who have long been at the core of the party’s base, are typically less progressive than white Democrats. Specifically, one of the party’s most loyal blocs for decades has been older black voters, who are famously moderate and pragmatic. As a sign of this pragmatism, they rejected the party’s more progressive candidates and helped steer it toward the most moderate one in the field: Joe Biden. However, as younger white liberals become a greater part of the party’s base—potentially one day supplanting the very voters who helped make Biden president—it seems unlikely that Democrats will continue nominating more center-left candidates for much longer.3
The second reason why this leftward drift among Democrats might be risky: there is growing evidence that non-white voters have begun moving toward Republicans. Catalist’s estimates show that in 2020, non-white voters largely backed Trump at a higher rate than they did in 2016. This included a 5-point rightward shift among black voters and an even bigger 14-point swing among Hispanic voters.4 While Asians’ vote preference remained static versus 2016, Republicans made inroads in heavily Asian communities in California, with two Korean American women ousting Democratic House members. Furthermore, a New York Times analysis of precinct-level election results found that Hispanic and Asian immigrant communities across the country almost uniformly swung rightward compared to four years ago.5
Democratic data guru David Shor has also found that non-white voters of all stripes who are not college-educated have been slowly trending more Republican over the past decade, including black voters—long thought to be a staple of the Democratic coalition:
Black voters trended Republican in 2016. Hispanic voters also trended right in battleground states. In 2018, I think it’s absolutely clear that, relative to the rest of the country, nonwhite voters trended Republican. […] I think there’s a lot of denial about this fact. I don’t think there are obvious answers as to why this is happening. But non-college-educated white voters and non-college-educated nonwhite voters have a lot in common with each other culturally. So as the salience of cultural issues with strong education-based splits increases—whether it’s gender politics or authoritarianism or immigration—it would make sense that we’d see some convergence between non-college-educated voters across racial lines.
American politics used to be very idiosyncratic, because we have this historical legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and all of these things that don’t have clear foreign analogues. But the world is slowly changing—not changing in ways that make racism go away or not matter—but in ways that erode some of the underpinnings of race-based voting. So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party.
By contrast, white voters across education lines actually voted more Democratic in 2020 than they did four years ago, with Biden gaining 8 points among college-educated whites and 2 points among non-college whites.
This week, new data was released showing that the parties’ coalitions may have shifted even more since the 2020 election. In a national survey ahead of the midterm elections, the New York Times found that fully 57% of registered white voters who hold a college degree said they support Democrats in the upcoming midterm election compared to 36% who support Republicans—a massive 21-point gap. Meanwhile, non-college whites appeared to be reverting to their Republican-voting trends: after 37% of them backed Biden in 2020, just 23% support Democrats in this year’s congressional elections.
Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from this is that Democrats’ massive advantage with white, college-educated voters is now bigger than their advantage with non-white voters—the first time this has ever happened in the New York Times’ polling. The Times called this a “striking indication of the shifting balance of political energy in the Democratic coalition,” noting that, as recently as 2016, Democrats won more than 70% of non-white voters and lost college-educated whites. One of the most disturbing findings for the party came from Hispanic Americans, who were nearly evenly split in their partisan support, with 41% preferring Democratic control of Congress versus 38% preferring Republican control—this, despite Biden winning Hispanic voters nationally by 25 points, 61–36%.6
The Times added:
The confluence of economic problems and resurgent cultural issues has helped turn the emerging class divide in the Democratic coalition into a chasm, as Republicans appear to be making new inroads among nonwhite and working-class voters—perhaps especially Hispanic voters—who remain more concerned about the economy and inflation than abortion rights and guns.
These shifts could become incredibly problematic for Democrats. The conventional wisdom has long been that although non-college whites were voting more Republican, they were also shrinking as a share of the population (and, consequently, the electorate). Indeed, over the past 10 years, their vote share declined from 50% (2010) to 44% (2020). Therefore, some observers thought that this new blend of the Obama and Clinton coalitions—which essentially includes every racial group other than non-college whites—would help Democrats grow into something resembling a permanent majority, as non-white voters remained loyal to the party and increased their share of the country’s population. It would allow the party to finally become competitive in a state like Texas.
However, these rightward trends among non-white groups could stop that thinking in its tracks if they continue. Hispanics, specifically, are the largest non-white demographic group in America and a fast-growing constituency. If they no longer vote as Democratic as they did for Clinton in 2016 (when she won them by nearly 40 points), the party will need to offset those losses elsewhere. Unfortunately for them, the ascendant college-educated white voters coming to dominate their coalition are not nearly large enough in number—nor are they growing as a share of the electorate the way Hispanic population is.
All this could pose long-term structural problems for Democrats: if they increasingly become seen by non-college voters of all races as the party of highly educated, cosmopolitan, wealthy, urban elites who have less and less in common with the average voter, they risk locking themselves out of power as fast as they once thought they might lock themselves into a permanent majority. Political writer Matt Yglesias recently noted that the median voter is “a 50-something white person who didn’t go to college.”
As the Democrats become a more liberal coalition in response to their base’s changing demographics, they risk moving further away from the center of the electorate, where many non-white voters are. Since the 2020 election, we have already seen some evidence that this may be impacting their political fortunes. Axios explains:
Democratic strategists say the party’s biggest vulnerability is assuming that the priorities of progressive activists are the same as those of working-class voters.
Progressive activists led the push to cut police budgets. Communities of color have borne the brunt of higher crime.
Hispanics living on the U.S.-Mexico border are more likely to favor tougher border security measures that Republicans have championed.
The recall of liberal school board members and a district attorney in San Francisco was fueled by disillusioned Asian-American Democrats.
This drift toward the interests of more liberal, college-educated voters could have repercussions for Democrats in future presidential elections, which are decided via the Electoral College—an institution with a growing Republican bias—and not a national popular vote. It could also make it very difficult for them to win power at the state level. In addition to the Electoral College, the Senate, House, and state legislatures are all biased toward rural voters for a variety of institutional reasons. And, as of 2020, Republicans had a two-to-one advantage with rural America.
The only way out of this quagmire for Democrats is to increase their appeal once again to Hispanics, white working-class voters, and/or voters living in exurban and rural areas (who tend to be white and lack a college degree). But, as recent trends have shown, the Democratic base increasingly resembles the exact opposite picture, and many of its members do not necessarily seem to be in a rush to reach out to the other half of the country. Regardless of whether the other side has shown any interest in doing the same, Democrats’ prospects in future elections may depend on it.
It may seem hard to believe today, but after the 2008 election, Democrats controlled U.S. Senate seats in Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia—all of which today are deeply Republican states. (Democrats still improbably control one Senate seat in WV.)
Lower turnout among key constituencies was a major factor behind Democratic losses in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin. But carrying those two states still would not have been enough for Clinton to win (and win convincingly, at that).
Indeed, there are already signs this is happening in the 2022 Democratic primaries.
Compared to 2012, black voters moved right by much larger 14 points and Hispanics by 13 points
Those swings in Asian precincts were likely from working-class households, though they may have been offset by wealthier and better-educated Asians, who moved more Democratic.
This mirrors other recent data showing Democrats’ slide with Hispanics over the past several years.