The demographics of the United States are changing rapidly, and analysts have been debating which political party stands to benefit most from these shifts for decades. In recent years, the bulk of the evidence has pointed toward demographic trends favoring the Democrats, but as always, there are contrarians who take the opposite point of view.
One of those contrarian viewpoints comes from John Judis, whose new piece at Vox is headlined: “Democrats are in more trouble than they think. And changing demographics won’t save them.” Though Judis himself doesn’t use the d-word, the article’s URL sums up the piece as “democrats-doomed.”
Judis feels Democrats should be worried, not excited, about what the future holds. But while some parts of Judis’s piece article are inarguable (elections and candidates do indeed matter, as he avers), his section dedicated to “Some worrying demographic trends for Democrats” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Far from dooming them, current trends favor Democrats in presidential elections in the near term, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise.
Judis looks at several demographic factors that observers of all stripes have focused on intensely and draws pessimistic conclusions from them: He argues that Democrats are fading with working-class whites; that they’re losing ground among college graduates (and specifically white college graduates); that college-educated Hispanics will favor Democrats less in the future; and that seniors are turning away from the party. We’ll take a look at the weaknesses in Judis's arguments for the trouble Democrats supposedly face with each demographic group in turn.
Working-Class Whites
Judis’s claim that Democrats are unpopular with working-class white voters is both true and widely acknowledged—no one thinks any upcoming Democratic victories are going to come by winning working-class whites (who are generally defined as white voters without a four-year college degree). But while, as Judis says, Democrats won 36 percent of this group in 2012 and 34 percent in 2014, that seeming 2-point decrease actually represents an improvement once you take into account the overall 7-point swing against Democrats that occurred between those two elections when looking at the national House vote. Put another way, working-class whites defected from the Democrats at a much smaller rate than the electorate as a whole.
Furthermore, as Judis admits, this group is a shrinking portion of the electorate, from 54 percent of all voters in 1988 to just 36 percent in 2012, and headed down to 33 percent in 2016. So it’s unlikely this demographic group could do much to “doom” Democrats.
College Graduates
The second group Judis says Democrats have to fear is voters who have four-year college degrees (but no advanced degree beyond that), yet there’s no case to be made that this cohort is turning away from the party. College graduates have long tended to lean somewhat to the right compared to the overall electorate, but there’s no discernible trend in their views. The table below compares the presidential margin of victory with the margin among college graduates according to exit polls, and then examines the difference between them:
Year |
National Margin
|
College Grad Margin
|
Difference |
1996 |
Clinton +8.5 |
Dole +2 |
-10.5 |
2000 |
Gore +.5 |
Bush +6 |
-6.5 |
2004 |
Bush +2.5 |
Bush +6 |
-3.5 |
2008 |
Obama +7 |
Obama +2 |
-5 |
2012 |
Obama +4 |
Romney +4 |
-8 |
As you can see, there’s no evidence that college graduates are moving to the Republicans en masse. In fact, their political preferences have bounced around a fair bit. Judis takes note of this gyration (though he mistakenly says grads backed Clinton in ‘96), and then, pointing out this this group has more recently moved to the GOP, says that it “could stay there.” Or it might not—who knows? Judis doesn’t say why he thinks one outcome is likelier than the other.
What's more, while college graduates’ share of the electorate is growing, the relative margins they currently provide Republicans (again, compared to the overall electorate) are small. Judis also points to a 6-point swing away from Democrats between 2012 and 2014, but again, that swing was smaller than the shift in the country as a whole.
Within this group, Judis claims that momentum toward the GOP is particularly concentrated among white college graduates, pointing to a 7-point shift toward Republicans between 2008 and 2012. But Barack Obama’s national margin shrank from 7 points to 4, explaining about half of this movement. What’s left is a pretty small shift, and one that’s based on exactly two data points. That doesn’t make for a very robust trendline.
And while the proportion of college graduates overall is growing, there’s nothing to suggest that the share of white college grads is growing. In fact, the proportional decline in the overall white population in the U.S., combined with the already comparatively high rates of college achievement among whites, should mean that this group’s relative size is at best likely to hold steady, if not fall.
Judis is also concerned about Hispanic college attendees, too, theorizing that there’s an emerging split between those who’ve spent at least some time in college and those who haven’t. But even college-educated Hispanics still heavily support Democrats: Judis cites data from the American National Election Studies saying 55 percent of this group backed Obama, and according to Latino Decisions, the most highly regarded pollster when it comes to surveying Hispanics, the rate was even higher—71 percent.
Judis is correct that Hispanics who haven’t gone to college are even more Democratic: 70 percent for Obama per ANES, 81 percent per Latino Decisons. But recent Census Bureau figures show that only 14 percent of Hispanics have bachelor’s degrees; while Judis relies on a somewhat broader category (Hispanics who’ve attended college but haven’t necessarily earned a degree), that still only represents a minority of Hispanics overall. This group is certainly growing, but bear in mind that newer college attendees are also millennials, which comprise the most liberal cohort in American politics today.
Yet even if this gap were to persist, even Judis acknowledges that at most it might bear fruit “in a generation.” That, however, has no bearing on the next few elections, which is as far as it’s worth trying to predict demographic trends in the first place.
Senior Citizens
The last group in Judis’s purportedly burgeoning Republican coalition are senior citizens. It’s true that this group has turned against Democrats: Bill Clinton won the 65-plus set by 7 points, while Mitt Romney carried it by 8. Judis argues that since 2008, seniors have left the Democrats because of the party’s policies on health care and immigration, citing opinion polls that show particular hostility toward the Affordable Care Act among older voters.
But it’s far more likely that these voters were already conservative—that they dislike Obamacare because they dislike Democrats, not that they dislike Democrats because they dislike Obamacare. Though analysts of all stripes do so constantly, it’s unwise to view “seniors” as sharing a particular set of views simply due to their age, and that they must as a matter of course “care deeply about Medicare” (and thus be susceptible to Republican fearmongering over it) simply because they are old enough to be beneficiaries.
Rather, what matters far more to determining political outlook is the year people were born. That may sound like a hair-splitting distinction, but there’s actually a profound difference. That’s because, generally speaking, voters’ political opinions don’t change very much as they get older, despite what the old aphorism might hold. Instead, the actual people who make up the group we call “seniors” changes over time, as each generation moves up and eventually out of the electorate (that is to say, dies).
And the political climate you experience as you come of age tends to profoundly impact your personal views, usually for life. Many older senior citizens turned 18 during the placid Eisenhower years or turbulent Johnson years, and they’ve almost always voted more Republican than the electorate as a whole—long before they became “seniors,” as you can see in this illuminating chart from Pew Research:
By contrast, voters who came of age during the Nixon administration and who are just now becoming senior citizens have tended to vote more Democratic over the years. This could very well cause the senior vote to shift back toward Democrats over the next five to 10 years, as these “Watergate babies” replace the children of Ike. And as the years go by, senior citizens will also be increasingly racially diverse, better educated, and less religious, all of which would point toward improved Democratic performance among this group.
It’s also worth noting that the senior share of the electorate has not grown in the past two decades. In 1996 it was 16 percent of the electorate, and in 2012 it was ... 16 percent of the electorate. While there’s a good chance that this will change as the baby boomers fully move past the age 65 cutoff, again, incoming seniors are more apt to lean Democratic.
In sum, you have the white working class, which is increasingly Republican but increasingly shrinking; college graduates, who are growing in size but are no more Republican now than in the past; and senior citizens, who are getting more Republican—but might also be on the verge of trending back toward the Democrats (and in any event aren’t yet growing in size). That’s hardly a recipe for Democratic doom.
Judis’s other points—where he argues that candidates, issues, and elections matter, and that one can’t just point to demography as the sole decider of elections—are indisputably true. Voting trends among different demographic groups change as the political atmosphere changes, and nothing is set in stone. And there isn’t a single Democratic strategist out there who doesn’t acknowledge the serious problems the party faces in turning out voters in midterm elections.
Democrats cannot, of course, allow themselves to grow smug and complacent—to simply assume that a changing country will continue to favor them. But demographic trends are on the party’s side, and there’s no reason think Democrats are “doomed.”