8/18/20
The Democratic convention kicked off on Monday with a deliberate, unmissable emphasis on diversity. The lineup of speakers and introduced guests was similarly diverse, a pointed reflection of the country and, by itself, an intentional contrast to President Trump and his politics. It’s important not to lose sight, though, of the fact that the Democratic Party itself is both far more diverse than its polar opposite but, also, than the country itself. Pew Research Center has tracked the demographics of the parties — and the partisanship of demographic groups — since the 1990s. The evolution of its data over time provide a lot of insight into the current political moment. Take race and ethnicity, for example. In 1996, 85 percent of the country was non-Hispanic White. Nearly all of the Republican Party — 94 percent — was White, as was three-quarters of the Democratic Party. Most of the non-White Democratic population was Black. In the most recent Pew assessment, looking at 2018 and 2019 (we’ll use 2019 below, for simplicity’s sake), we see that about 7-in-10 Americans are White, compared to 6-in-10 Democrats and 8-in-10 Republicans.
Notice one key point: the Republican Party as currently constituted is more densely White than the Democratic Party was a quarter of a century ago. One reason that the Democratic Party is more heavily non-White is that non-White Americans are more likely to identify as Democratic. That includes 8-in-10 Black Americans who are either Democrats or independents who lean Democratic. Partisanship among Hispanics has been similarly static, with about 6-in-10 identifying as Democratic or Democratic-leaning. The biggest shift has been among Asian Americans, who were once about evenly split by party but now identify overwhelmingly as Democrats. Since 2016 — since Trump, probably — college-educated Whites have become more likely to identify as Democrats. In 2016, they were 4 points more likely to identify as Democratic; now, the gap is 12 points. The Democratic convention is about America as it looks now. But it’s also deliberately about the America that’s emerging. One that increasingly doesn’t look much like the Republican Party.