The trends in these subgroups provide little comfort to the Biden campaign.
Among Black voters, Biden led Trump by 55 points (73-18), far less than his 83-point margin in 2020. Among Hispanics, Biden led by 6 points (48-42), compared with a 24-point advantage in 2020. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, Biden led by 8 points (50-42) compared with 24 points in 2020.
Despite the erosion of Black, Hispanic and youth support since 2020, Biden remained competitive in Carlson’s data compilation — just two points behind Trump (47-45) among all respondents. This was possible because Biden made modest gains among very large subgroups: 1.3 points among 2,014 white college graduates, 0.6 points among 2,103 non-college whites, 4 points among 923 voters 50 to 64, 1.8 points among the 2,208 65 and over.
In an email, Carlson voiced caution about drawing conclusions based on the aggregated polling data:
We’ve seen zero evidence in recent election results that young voters and Black voters are abandoning voting for Democrats, so all of this is speculation based on polling. Among Latinos the evidence is a bit more mixed, but there’s more electoral evidence from 2020 and some from 2022 that they could be moving right.
Carlson however, pointed to additional polling trends daunting to Democratic prospects.
Gallup reported on Feb. 7 that
in 2020 Black voters self-identified as +66 Democratic, and in 2023 they’re at +47. They find Hispanics at +12 Democratic now — an all-time low since 2011, but that decline has been more gradual. They’re also seeing a Democratic decline among age 18-29 year olds (+21 in 2020 to +8 in 2023).
I asked Carlson how he could justify using the word realignment to describe what’s been happening, since realignment suggests a full-scale partisan conversion of the country or of a major constituency, as in the 1932-36 realignment that saw the electorate go from majority Republican to majority Democratic, or the post-civil rights realignment that saw the white South go from majority Democratic to majority Republican.
Carlson responded:
If what we’re seeing in recent polls regarding shifts among young, Black and Latino voters ends up happening in November, in my view “realignment” is the right term. It won’t be like 1932 or 1964 where the parties essentially swapped coalitions for the New Deal and civil rights, respectively.
Essentially it would be a continuation of the trends we saw in 2020 among Latinos, a sizable but not earth shattering shift among Black voters (though even in the most pessimistic assessments Biden will still win at least 75 percent of Black voters), and a shift to roughly even among younger voters from a strong Dem advantage.
Carlson then added this caveat: “For what it’s worth, I am skeptical that these swings will be this large once all is said and done in November, but that’s neither provable nor falsifiable until then.”
Data from the Cooperative Election Study, which conducts surveys of more than 50,000 voters every election cycle, do not support the case for a realignment of any major voting bloc.
