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For years I've been seeing conservatives arguing that that Democrat line about "demographics is destiny" was more the product of wishful thinking than facts on the ground. I'm starting to feel that way myself. After every Presidential election cycle, centrist Democrats redouble their efforts in encouraging the DNC to do some earnest soul-searching and recognise the fact that non-white voters are a demographic (or rather, collection of extremely loosely affiliated demographics, each of which has its own interests, many of which are zero-sum) that must be actively appealed to just like any other demographic, and cannot be simply taken for granted under the increasingly tenuous assumption that "Republicans are racist so people of colour won't vote for them". Then the next Presidential election cycle starts and the DNC immediately resumes taking non-white voters for granted, then react with shock and horror when they lose even more of them than in the last election.
Trump making historic inroads among Latino and black voters in 2016 may have come as a legitimate surprise to the DNC in 2016. No one should have been surprised by it last month. In November 2024, any white Democrat rending their hair and asking "how could a Latinx person vote for Trump??? Don't they know how racist he is???" just comes off as pathetic, like an ostrich. How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away from Charlie Brown before he learns pattern recognition?
I'm honestly wondering if, within the next ten years, we'll see Democrats claiming that they never claimed anything as racially essentialist as "demographics is destiny" and the whole thing was just invented by conservatives as an antisemetic dog whistle.
I think Hanania had an article along these lines a few weeks ago: for a long time "demographics is destiny" was the consensus among Democrats and Republicans. This served as a convenient fig leaf for Republicans who want to appeal to anti-immigration voters without being accused of racism: "we don't hate non-white people, we just want to win elections, which is impossible if non-white voters can be assumed to vote Democrat" (as Democrats themselves openly believe, to the point of it being a major component of their electoral strategy). So the increasing recognition that non-white voters are up for grabs by either party is a bit of a double-edged sword for the Republicans. On the one hand, a new demographic is voting for them, yay! On the other hand, if they want to keep appealing to their white nationalist faction while still appearing respectable, they're going to have to come up with some new justification for being opposed to immigration other than racial animus or the still-unacceptable euphemism of "cultural homogeneity", and so far the replacement fig leaf of "immigrants commit more crimes" doesn't appear to be playing ball. I don't think there's any conflict between being a social and economic conservative while also believing that Diversity is our Strength™ (i.e. we will welcome people of any colour or creed to America, provided you share our values and are willing to work hard), but the impression I get is that is that there is a very large Republican faction who will accuse any Republican politician who isn't aggressively opposed to immigration of being a RINO regardless of their stances on other policy questions - a faction that no serious Republican politician yet feels comfortable marginalising or alienating.
(While this is my third response to you in short order, I dont mean to pick on you)
If he had just repreated his old numbers, then Id agree. But he made gains again, and significantly bigger ones than last time. I think its pretty reasonable to expect at least diminishing returns.
I'm not sure if I understand the point you're making.
Hispanic Republican voteshare%:
2012 Hispanic: 27
2016 Hispanic: 28
2020 Hispanic: 32
2024 Hispanic: 46
Looking at the first three numbers, I would project the next one to be 32-36. Not 46. I think expecting people to predict that is unreasonable.
It would be unreasonable to expect anyone to predict a spike of that magnitude, yes.
It's not unreasonable to expect that the Republican share of the Hispanic vote would be broadly commensurate with recent historical trends. The impression I get is that there are a lot of Democrats (perhaps not senior DNC figures, but certainly pundits and ordinary voters) who still can't quite believe how popular Trump is among Hispanics, respond to all the evidence in support of this trend by sticking their fingers in their ears, take the Latin vote for granted, then get continually caught out when a larger and larger share of Hispanics vote Republican each campaign. Every four years, the same chorus of shock and horror: "how could you have voted for him?! Don't you realise he wants to sic ICE on you?!"
It was reasonable for certain Democrats to go into the 2024 presidential election anticipating that 68-64% of Hispanic voters would vote for them, then get blindsided by only 54% of them doing so. A jump of that size is hard to predict.
It was not reasonable for other Democrats to go into the 2024 presidential election expecting only a single-digit percentage of Hispanics to vote for Trump, then get blindsided when nearly half of them did. The idea that only a single-digit percentage of Hispanics would vote for Trump was wishful thinking, wholly unsupported by polling data or voting trends from recent elections. Anyone who believed this ought to have known better.
I guess Im not convinced they thought that. Like if you had that you could basically stop campaigning at all. Hillary at one point did seem to think she had won already, I dont think they did this time.
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