Whites have fled the Democratic Party. Here’s how the nation got there.

Washington Post ^ | May 22, 2018 | by Joshua N. Zingher

[Oldeconomybuyer]

With the 2018 midterms months away and the 2020 presidential election cycle approaching rapidly, Democrats are considering how to improve their poor showings in 2014 and 2016. The party has been debating - sometimes heatedly - how to do this. Which voters should they target? How should Democrats target them?

But here’s what’s clear: White voters have been fleeing the Democratic Party, and that’s a big reason Democrats are looking to rebound from back-to-back losses.

Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party. These recent losses are on top of Democrats’ losses among Southern whites during the 1960s and 1970s after Democrats’ support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

My new research helps explain how Democrats got to this point. I utilized survey data from the American National Election Study that spanned 1972 to 2012 and the General Social Survey that spanned 1983 to 2014 to see how the predictors of white vote choice had changed. I found that white voters’ shift toward the Republican Party has been driven by two factors.

The first factor is that growing elite polarization has caused the electorate to “sort” along ideological lines.

On the elite level, Republicans are conservatives and Democrats are liberals. The parties are clearly divided ideologically, and there is no overlap between the two.

The second factor is that demographic changes have decreased the ratio of whites to nonwhites in the electorate. The electorate was 29 percent nonwhite in 2016. This is up from 11 percent in 1976 and 19 percent in 2000.

This is politically important because the average white voter is more economically conservative and more socially liberal on issues such as abortion, gay rights and so on than the average nonwhite voter.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party. These recent losses are on top of Democrats’ losses among Southern whites during the 1960s and 1970s after Democrats’ support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

More Republicans than Democrats voted for that law.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Hillary Clinton isn’t white any more either?

[jmacusa]

Democrat support of the Civil Rights Act and The Voter Rights Act? Who wrote THIS bs? The Democrats did no such thing. They fought it tooth and nail. Johnson had to turn to the Republican Senate minority under Everett Dirkson to get these bills passed.

[trebb]

Might have something to do with a lot of Whites getting tired of being told they are the problem to everything and the scum of the earth....hard to stick with an organization that wants those that look like you dead and gone...

[Durus]

It’s absurd isn’t it? Do you think the author actually believes the lie or is it willful deception?