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Blue Morning
In The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), John Judis and Ruy Texeira argued that college-educated professionals and nonwhites, along with a minimum number of working-class whites, could form the basis for Democratic hegemony in national politics. As Judis and Texeira point out in their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), Democratic strategists and journalists adopted a distorted, dumbed-down version of their thesis in which the Democratic Party could do without working-class non-Hispanic white voters at all. Conversely, the modest decline of Hispanic and Black voter support for the Democrats in the last few elections has led some to suggest that a racial realignment is underway that might enable Republicans to emerge as the party of the “multiracial working class.”
A more plausible explanation, however, is that Joe Biden has always been an unpopular candidate made more unpopular by inflation and botched immigration and foreign policies—and that he is likely to win anyway. Most demographic trends still favor the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. Democratic constituencies continue to grow as shares of the American electorate, while core Republican electoral blocs are steadily declining.
Consider the interaction between voting and religious belief. According to 2024 polling data, Republicans win supermajorities among only two religious groups—white evangelical Protestants (85%) and Mormons (75%)—while eking out bare majorities with white nonevangelical Protestants (58%) and Catholics (52%). All of these Republican-leaning religious communities are dwindling. As a share of the American population, white evangelical Protestants have shrunk by roughly a third from 33% in 1999 to only 21% in 2021. In only 15 years, from 2007 to 2023, Mormons also declined by about a third as a share of the U.S. adult population, collapsing from 1.8% to 1.2%. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are no longer the majority even in Utah. Since 2007, the Republican-leaning white Catholic share has dropped by 8 percentage points.
If demographic trends favor Democratic hegemony, why not maximize immigration? Why not expand the welfare state to enable illegitimacy? Why not pass out affirmative action bribes to newly invented official nonwhite ‘races’ like MENA?
Meanwhile, religious “nones”—atheists, agnostics, or vaguely spiritual individuals with no affiliation to any organized religion—have expanded to account for nearly 30% of the U.S. population—equivalent to the 30% of Americans (of all races) who identify as evangelical Protestants and outnumbering the one in five Americans who are white evangelicals. The nones tend to be the most left-wing voters in the Democratic Party coalition, as well as in the nation as a whole. Among Democratic voters, 69% of the nones call themselves liberal, but only 46% of Christian Democrats do. Among the nones, 70% favor the Democrats, with the number rising to 84% of self-described atheists.
Seven out of 10 Jewish Americans support the Democratic Party and half describe themselves as liberal; only Orthodox Jews support the Republican Party as a group. For half a century, Jewish conservatives have complained in vain that Jewish Americans are voting against the interests of Israel or their own economic self-interest. In the words of Milton Himmelfarb of the American Jewish Committee, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”
Extreme Democratic partisanship is shared by Jewish Americans with Muslim Americans. In 2000, 70% of Muslim voters cast their ballots for George W. Bush, the son of the Texas oil man George H.W. Bush who as president put pressure on Israel. But following 9/11, 90% of Muslim voters favored John Kerry in 2008. Obama got 89% and 85% of the Muslim vote in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton got 75.9% of the Muslim vote in 2016 while 86% of Muslims voted for Biden in 2020, helping to deliver swing states like Michigan. Muslims who are critical of Biden for being insufficiently anti-Israel are more likely to cast a vote for a third-party candidate or stay home in 2024 than to vote for Donald Trump.
Although foreign-born Muslim immigrants tend to be socially conservative, their descendants tend to assimilate to the progressive subculture, making Muslim voters an increasingly important part of the electorate not only for the Democrats in the United States but also for center-left and socialist parties throughout the West. Small wonder that the Biden administration has arranged for the U.S. Census to define Arab Americans and Muslim Americans as an official “race”—Middle Eastern or North African (MENA)—along with the pseudo-races of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI), Hispanic/Latino, and African American, an ethnologically absurd category that includes anyone of African descent, native or immigrant.
Designating Muslim Americans as an official “race” makes them eligible for affirmative action patronage, which Democrats have used since the 1970s in a cynical divide-and-rule strategy to pay off mostly Democratic nonwhites in return for their votes, while punishing mostly Republican “non-Hispanic whites” who are defined by progressives as “privileged” and “overserved,” no matter how poor and powerless they may be.
In the zero-sum competition of a two-party system like ours, a party whose core demographic constituencies are shrinking must win over voters from the other party. But instead of trying to detach and annex large chunks of the Democratic Party with an attractive vision of the American future, today’s GOP seems determined to repel potential converts with the extreme positions on abortion demanded by Republican evangelical Protestants and the continuing hostility of Republican libertarians to popular entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.
