Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color
Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color
The trend is real in polls, and in at least some election results.
I don't want to discount the findings too harshly, because I believe that democrats have a ton of issues with their voters in general and can only go on promising everything but delivering nothing for so long before people wisen up, but I do want to just gently remind everyone how accurate polling was in the 2016 and 2020 election cycles and its general decline among the population as a way to understand how people vote. Polling groups have not adapted to the times and frequently demand far too much out of a population which is overburdened and simply not interested in engaging with pollsters through archaic mediums and conventional means of identifying who is eligible to be polled are not applicable to a modern populace.
Political polling has also always carried the inherent bias of more opinionated people being more willing to participate. This doesn't matter in, say, health studies, but it sure does with politics.
You might get a range of opinions, but it's heavily biased toward people who have a stronger urge to share their opinion. That may not always be a matter of huge significance in every single issue, but it definitely is when you're talking about enthusiastic support for a candidate known for having a particularly loudly opinionated base versus begrudging support for a candidate whose base isn't super happy with him.
Polls are going to show that Trump has more support in that context regardless of the truth if it's anywhere remotely close to the level of support for Biden.
Because the reality of polling is that most of the pool of calls you're getting your sample from are no answers, hung up during intro, endless voicemail, or straight up refusals. Completes make up a tiny portion of phone surveys.
Polling has become a mess, mainly because we can no longer rely on landlines for generating unbiased samples. Most attempts at fixing this issue, such as online polling, have their own massive biases. So it's incredibly difficult to figure out what's real and what's not. And no, doing a hundred bad polls or increasing the sample size won't fix it. Bias in the data can only be fixed by figuring out a way of creating truly fair samples.
That's a fair point and it should be taken into account. But at the same time, this is Nate Silver. He's essentially the pre-eminent expert on polling, polling errors, and best practices in that regard. And what's more; when you imagine the different potential political factions amongst the African American community (a practice Dems try not to do); it's not hard to see why 2016 to today could have soured them significantly. Some examples from my family, friends, and extended family:
- As much as Republicans aren't great on "black issues" under Trump Black Labor saw unprecedented gains in employment and income (until COVID hit). And a cohort of black voters are economic voters first.
- The "vaccine mandate" talk from the left didn't go over well in Southern Communities where the oldest (like my grandparents) remember. And Oftentimes knew people that were part of things like Tuskegee (which was also one of many experiments like this. It's just that the exceptional journalistic work and integrity of several academics and journalists brought this one instance to light).
- Student Loan debt affects people from lower and middle-class families a lot. The promise and almost delivery of student loan relief and then the total rug pull of it and sellout of the Biden Administration towards it soured lots of people.
- It's not like Africans don't know what Alzheimer's is. And Biden's refusal to even address the concerns impact black voters as much as they do whites.
- For the BLM cohort; running the guy who designed and championed the three strikes policy that has put so many blacks in jail for life unnecessarily and then running a prosecutor who knowingly tried to keep innocent black people in jail to maintain appearances doesn't sit right. Especially when the other guy made it a habit to pardon wrongly or likely wrongly convicted men and women of color and did so at an exceptional clip.
- Inflation is super high and FED interest rates are 59 times higher than they were when Biden was elected. For "low information" voters that's just Biden's fault. But even for "high information" voters they realize that Trump was willing to bully the FED to keep those numbers down. "Stagflation" killed Carter it can kill Biden too.
It's really not at all surprising that the current Dem ticket isn't going to win black voters at 90% clips.
He’s essentially the pre-eminent expert on polling, polling errors, and best practices in that regard.
i would not call Silver this anymore; he's an increasingly partisan libertarian with weird hangups and a stick up his ass about things he wishes he understood (like COVID-19), and it's almost assuredly part of why he's out of a job at 538. he's also increasingly being lapped by people like G. Elliott Morris and an armada of Twitter-based election analysts and prognosticators. at the bare minimum he's absolutely not the only guy in town on this, and some of the people i just described like Adam Carlson actively dispute he's even using the data in this article correctly because they're the ones who made it. he's also being challenged on his points here by professors like Matt Blackwell, specific polls of Black voters and data about minority youth voters. in general: the case is not nearly as clear-cut as he makes it seem and deferring to him on this would be a bad case in which to do it, because he's probably wrong.
Student Loan debt affects people from lower and middle-class families a lot. The promise and almost delivery of student loan relief and then the total rug pull of it and sellout of the Biden Administration towards it soured lots of people..
Almost delivery? Total rug pull?
It's odd to me that the reasoning given here and in the article for this problem for the Democrats is that they aren't acting Republican enough and they are too leftist. It is so clear that the Democrats have managed to do very few of the things they say, and what they do accomplish is either just what Republicans would do, or hamstrung by the Republicans and media blitzed. That's why they lose ground. Becoming Republican will also lose them different ground. It doesn't feel like the data should need an explanation in the first paragraph like that, it skews the interpretation of what is pitched as objective.
I think all these economic and business interests are just desperate for the old Republican party back and are trying to sculpt the Democrats into it because they were close enough already. Probably successfully. It's pretty bleak all around.
Also I'm sorry I can't leave it, but are you saying that the BLM "cohort" prefer trump in there? I'm not going to say that anyone is enthusiastic about Biden, but Trump encouraged beat downs across the country and threatened to march the military on these folks. (Would have done it too if it weren't for the woke liberal adjenda of General Mark Milley).
What is sad is that the people most capable of redirecting the party are also the least vulnerable to the consequences of losing elections to Republicans. They'll be fine. If they happen to get voted out, they can get a consultant job the next day and live a far easier lifestyle. No skin off their nose.
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Interviews with students at two historically black colleges in Orangeburg — South Carolina State and Claflin universities — reveal a glaring generation gap: a chasm separating what the students say is important to their lives, and what older officials believe ought to be important. Biden wants to talk about broadband; the students want to talk about civilian deaths in Gaza. Democrats tout a road widening project along Interstate 26 in Columbia underwritten by Biden’s infrastructure program; the students are focused on “food deserts” that contribute to diabetes and obesity.
Asked if they believe elected officials are addressing such issues, a chorus of voices filled a campus conference room: “No.”
Some of the students objected to what they saw as a transactional mentality underpinning Biden's case for reelection: Goodies in return for votes. Christian Nathaniel, an 18-year-old Claflin student, was among those whose home was wired for broadband last year. “You’re doing these things as a last-ditch chance to beat Trump and get over it a little bit," said Nathaniel, who wants to be a doctor and eventually run for elective office. "'Now you’ve got internet, so hopefully you can give me a vote.'" He said he plans to vote for Biden, albeit reluctantly. "This is my first time voting and this is very discouraging to the young Black voter," he said, adding that he is not "confident in either of the choices." "We're picking the lesser of two evils," Nathaniel said.
Ginning up excitement isn’t so easy, though. Jaime Harrison, a Black South Carolinian who chairs the Democratic National Committee, turned up at a party breakfast in Spartanburg recently to rally support for Biden. All went fine as the audience listened to his speech over a breakfast of grits and eggs. Then, when Harrison finished, 36-year-old Amia Harrison approached to say she was fed up with “voting blue no matter who.”
Harrison listened a bit and then turned away with a clipped, “I appreciate you.”
Democrats touting a road widening project... why celebrate a carbrained regressive idea. No it's not murdering people in Gaza or Ukraine but seriously folks, not the right move. May be democrats in name but not progressive in practice. That's increasingly why I'm frustrated with dems and the two-party shit system.