Is Demography Still Destiny After 2024?
Party coalitions change, but group ideological preferences are more persistent.
Jason Richwine
Dec 10, 2024
In winning reelection, Donald Trump lost the Hispanic vote by a much smaller margin than he and other Republican candidates lost it in the past. According to exit polls, Hillary Clinton won Hispanics 66–28 when she faced Trump in 2016, but this year Kamala Harris won the group by just 52–46. Contradicting the Republican National Committee’s 2013 “autopsy,” which claimed that the party needed to embrace amnesty as an outreach tool, Trump managed to attract Hispanic support while still taking a strong stand against illegal immigration. Party strategists will hopefully internalize this lesson.
Republicans should be skeptical, however, of another possible “lesson,” which is that they need not worry about the political effects of immigration. Hispanics are no longer a reliable Democratic voting bloc, as this argument goes, so fears that immigration will shift the political center leftward must be unfounded. This argument confuses ideology with party. The U.S. will probably always have two major parties, with each garnering the support of roughly half the country through coalition politics. The potentially transformative effect of mass immigration is therefore not that Republicans will disappear, but that they will weaken their traditional conservative ideology in order to stay competitive. Put more succinctly, many Hispanics could be Trump Republicans but not Reagan Republicans.
For a straightforward illustration of how voting groups can change parties without changing their basic ideology, consider 1988. That year Democrats suffered their third straight blowout loss in a presidential election. The party’s nominee, Michael Dukakis, managed to win only in progressive bastions such as Oregon, Massachusetts, and… West Virginia? Yes, today’s Trump-loving West Virginia was one of only 10 states that Dukakis, a liberal technocrat, managed to win in 1988.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-demography-still-destiny-after-2024/
