Are Demographics Really Destiny for the GOP?

Despite President Trump’s magnetic appeal for working-class whites, those fiercely contested voters continued their long-term decline as a share of the national electorate in 2016, a new analysis of recent Census Bureau data shows.

That continued erosion underscores the gamble Trump is taking by aligning the GOP ever more closely with the hopes and fears of a volatile constituency that, while still large, has been irreversibly shrinking for decades as a share of the total vote. The data analysis on 2016 voting, conducted for The Atlantic by Robert Griffin and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress’s States of Change project, found that non-college-educated whites declined as a share of the electorate even in the key Midwestern states that tipped the election to Trump.

“This is a good example of just how hard it is to reverse an ongoing trend like this,” said Teixeira, a co-founder of the project, which studies how demographic change affects politics and policy. “It says to Republicans: ‘You have intrinsically placed your bets on a political group that under almost any conceivable circumstances will continue to decline as a share not only of eligible voters, but [of actual] voters going forward.’ If that didn’t [reverse] in this election, you have to say it’s not going to happen.”

But the new Census numbers on voter participation last year also contain a clear warning signal for Democrats. While the overall U.S.more racially and ethnically diverse, the electorate’s demographic transformation slowed markedly in 2016 because turnout remained surprisingly weak among Hispanics and fell sharply among African Americans without former President Barack Obama on the ballot, according to the findings.