Before I get too deep here, I want to be clear on a few things:
- I believe Trump won this race by running a deeply racist campaign.
- I believe Trump unleashed white nationalist forces in this country in a way that we have not seen in the modern era.
- I believe that addressing the bias toward women, PoC and other historically marginalized populations in our system is a top priority and is rightfully the major focus of the Democratic Party.
- I believe that the challenges of white supremacy can only be met by dismantling our existing institutions and rebuilding them since they were mostly formed to protect white supremacy.
- Lastly, I do believe a decisive factor in this campaign was the economic message.
I did a post showing White Vote History on Thursday and promised to do the same type of breakdown on black vote history. I will also do one on Latino vote history, My preview on that front would be that Republicans do a better job of maintaining the Latino vote that they get, even though it is far less than we get, but that is the subject for another post.
VOTING HISTORY GRAPHS
I will post the graphs charting the historic performance of the black vote since 1976. Below each graph I will make comments about what I observe. I hope the data and commentary will provide a starting part for a wider discussion. I do not pretend to know all of the answers, or that my commentary represents the only way to understand the data. I would hope we can avoid insults in the thread even when there is disagreement.
I am posting these diaries because I think we fundamentally need to understand what happened so we can begin to win again. I might try to do these for the states as well, heck, if there is interest and I can carve out the time, maybe cover all of the red states to see what trends there are at that level since this election has exposed how poorly we are doing across the board.
Anyhow, on to the graphs:
Note: Exit Polling data is not always the most precise data. You will observe odd things in this data, like 1976, 1984 and 1988 where there is no race data for 3rd party votes. That said, given the scale of our elections, it still provides relevant information regarding patterns over time, which is the thrust of most of my commentary on this data.
This data set proved fascinating to me. I mean I had heard there was a decline in the black vote, but I expected it to be reflected across the board. To see the uptick, albeit slight, in Republican and 3rd party support from black voters came as a surprise to me, this cycle in particular. Obviously that is not a good sign for any Democratic candidate when that happens.
From prior post on White Vote History.
It is good to know that the decline in total black vote began with 2012. With the losses in black vote the last two cycles, It is particularly surprising that Democrat support declined below the linear trend line, even if only slightly. That means the gains gained by Obama have entirely been lost and appears to have had a slight negative effect compared to where we would be ought if things trended normally.
When compared to trends found in White Vote History the overall white vote declined in 2012 as the black vote did, but it recovered to its 2008 levels while the black vote kept declining. It is important to note that most of the white vote recovery from losses in 2012 actually went to 3rd parties and not Republicans.
Well, this chart is revealing, to say the least. Republicans gained black votes in 2012 and 2016 while democrats lost black votes in both those cycles. That is never a good formula. The net increase for Republicans since 2008 has been around 630,000 votes while the loss for Democrats lost around 1,600,000 black votes since then. that is a net gain for Republicans of more than 2,000,000 black votes.
The other interesting thing to note is that the Perot campaign in 1992 had a similar effect on black vote as it did on white vote for Republicans. Driving support for Democrats by black voters dramatically. The black vote recovered more quickly from that than did the white vote. Perot ran a 100% purely populist economic campaign and cut into both parties core constituency base to similar effect.
Johnson actually made the largest gains in black vote this cycle as well, but only slightly. More on that after the next graph.
This chart shows the change in total percentage points between each cycle. I find it interesting just how volatile the black vote is for Democrats. Whenever you look at change in percent points like this it is fairly jumpy. This data wobbles pretty seismicallly. Black support for republicans actually appears to be more stable over time, less dramatic swings anyway.
Once again it is important to note that the Perot campaign drew away from the core support from each party while having a lesser impact on the non-core support. The implications of that might give us some insight to voter behavior. This is a good point to discuss below.
Reviewing the chart on the right, Perot gained 20 percentage point in white vote, while republicans a 20 percentage point decline in white vote support. Looking at the chart above, Perot saw a 7% change up in black support for a 3rd party, while democrats saw a 6 point decline in black support. White voters lost 1 percentage point for Democrats in the 1992 race, while black voters for Republicans lost 1 percentage point in that race.
I postulate that, since Perot ran an entirely economic campaign these voters that left for Perot might be what we now call “allies” on the social issues, but their personal primary concern is really economic matters and when they see a candidate offering a real different vision on our economic direction, the “allies” gravitate to the 3rd party candidate. Your thoughts?
CONCLUSIONS
There is not really much to say that is not pretty obvious. Obama drew an unprecedented surge of black voters in 2008, some loss from that was to be expected, but to have lost so many of those voters has had serious consequences for Democrats overall electoral prospects.
I do believe that voter suppression plays a role in the losses, I will dig into Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin (since they are all states that flipped and have new suppression laws in place).
I will end this diary on some questions for the comment thread:
- Why did we lose so many black voters?
- What can we do to win them back?
- Why is the black vote so volatile overall?
- What do you make of the Perot effect?