by Ron Unz, The Unz Review:
Contrary to widespread expectations, Republican gains in last week’s midterm elections were absolutely minimal, nothing at all like the “red wave” that so many had predicted.
The GOP seems to have picked up enough Congressional seats to achieve a very narrow majority in the House, but the Democrats actually extended their control in the Senate, with the final results awaiting a January run-off in Georgia. A new president’s first midterm elections have usually shown a huge swing to the other party, with the Republicans gaining 54 seats in 1994 and 63 in 2010, while the Democrats picked up 42 in 2018. But despite the highest inflation in four decades and up to 75% of the country saying America was “on the wrong track,” the Republicans will be lucky to win even ten additional seats, representing the worst midterm results for a party out of power in two decades. This quickly led Donald Trump’s bitter neoconservative opponents to blame him for the debacle.
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But although the overall outcome of the election was hardly good news for the Republicans, relatively little attention has been paid to one major bright spot, a development that was even more important for the national future of our country. The demographic results provided strong evidence that America’s rapidly-growing populations of Hispanics and Asians were continuing their political convergence with the existing white majority.
Taken together those two groups already represent a quarter of our total population, roughly double what they had been thirty years earlier, and according to reasonable projections they may account for one-third of all Americans within another generation. In recent decades, they have voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats, and the likely impact of their increasing numbers had become a linchpin of the confidence of party leaders in their long-term prospects. But although those groups do still lean strongly in that direction, over the last half-dozen years, their margins have sharply declined, a trend that initially shocked much of the media given that it seemed so contrary to their narrative of a “white supremacist” takeover of the Republican Party by Trump and his right-wing, MAGA supporters.
Political analyst William Galston is a staunch Democrat based at the Brookings Institution, and writing in the Wall Street Journal on election night, he summarized some of those alarming trends:
Democrats have even more cause for worry about their standing among Hispanics, who gave Donald Trump 38% of their votes in 2020, up from 28% in 2016, while Joe Biden’s share was only 59%, down from Hillary Clinton’s 66% in 2016. Recent surveys suggest this slide is continuing. AEI reported that Hispanic support for Democratic congressional candidates averaged only 53% in October. A Wall Street Journal survey conducted in late October 2022 offered even worse news, with Hispanic support for Democratic congressional candidates averaging 46%, only 5 points ahead of their Republican counterparts.
The actual results were released the following day by two different consortia of major news and research organizations, and these were considerably better for the Democrats, but still confirmed the very substantial gains the Republicans had made since the previous midterms:
In House contests, 11 percent of voters indicated they were Hispanic. In both polls, they voted 60 percent for Democrats, 39 percent for GOP ones. In 2018, nearly seven in ten Hispanics voted for Democrats. Democrats also appear to have lost significant ground among Asian voters. In 2018, around 80 percent of them supported Democrats. In this election, it was around 60 percent.
Obviously, well over half of Hispanics and Asians still voted for the Democratic candidates in 2022, but changes in ethnic party loyalties are usually glacial, and so rapid a shift is really quite remarkable.
A few days prior to the election, the Atlantic had published a lengthy article discussing these same Hispanic trends.
- Why Democrats Are Losing Hispanic Voters
The left has alienated America’s fastest-growing group of voters just when they were supposed to give the party a foolproof majority
Tim Alberta • The Atlantic • November 3, 2022 • 8,100 Words
Prominent political demographer Ruy Teixeira has long been associated with the Democratic Party and twenty years ago, he had co-authored The Emerging Democratic Majority with John Judis, a widely discussed book arguing that long-term population trends were likely to ensure the party’s political success. But in his latest Atlantic article, he now argued that the Democrats were continuing to lose working-class voters, greatly damaging their prospects. Given that Hispanics are heavily concentrated in that economic category, both these developments were obviously related.
- Democrats’ Long Goodbye to the Working Class
The party’s biggest challenge heading into the midterm elections is the erosion of its traditional base of support
Ruy Teixeira • The Atlantic • November 6, 2022 • 3,800 Words
Although this pair of long Atlantic articles provided an excellent description of these trends, I think they necessarily shied away from one of the most important political factors responsible, which instead was unexpectedly emphasized by a different academic.
Prof. Michael Hudson is an influential Left economist with deep Marxian roots who ranks as one of the leading critics of the neoliberal policies that dominate today’s Democratic Party, and just before the vote he published a long interview addressing those economic matters. But I was shocked at the extreme bitterness of his closing remarks, which focused on the violent ethnic tensions that he believed were now pushing Asians and Hispanics out of the Democratic Party.
DLJ: Economies are interdependent. I.e., it would still be a question of the Chinese working class and the American working class building bonds across nations.
MH: The Democratic Party has produced such an anti-Asian, hate-filled racism, that I don’t think that can be. The Democratic Party has done everything it could to spur an ethnic war between the black and Asian populations. You see that here in New York by the attacks on the subways, on the street, mainly by blacks against Asians. The Democratic Party, by pushing this ethnic identity, has pushed ethnic hatred. That’s why the Democrats are surprised that the Hispanics and Asians are moving towards the Republicans. The Hispanics and Asians realize that the Democrats have a race-hatred policy, much like the Nazis. I don’t believe that any political progress can be made in the U.S. until the Democratic Party, certainly the current leadership, is swept away. There cannot be any progress in America today led by the Democratic Party, which is today the ideologically Right-wing party that has turned what should be an economic problem into an ethnic and non-economic problem. It’s like the old industrial capitalist was supposed to have said, “if I can get half the working class fighting against the rest of the working class, then we have won.” That’s the Democratic Party. They asked, “how do we do it?” We divide the working class into ethnicities, ethnic identity, gender identity.
DLJ: You can have the working class cancel each other.
MH: Yes.
