Is the floor falling out on Biden's nonwhite support?
Discover more from The Intersection
Is the floor falling out on Biden's nonwhite support?
Plus: Never Back Down's field experiments, how the rural-urban divide has widened over time, Joe Manchin's dismal re-election prospects, and a warning about online panel surveys
No. 283 | September 9, 2023
📕 Party of the People arrives November 7, 2023
The launch day for my first book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, is fast approaching. If anything, the arguments I make seem to have gotten stronger since I finished writing it. That’s in evidence this week with the top story in the newsletter on the apparent racial partisan realignment in that’s making a Biden vs. Trump rematch a tossup.
With one year to go until the 2024 election, Party of the People is the one thing you need to read to understand the surprising demographic forces shaping America’s future in 2024 and beyond. Pre-order your copy to get it on launch day.
But don’t take my word for it: here’s what some of the country’s most respected political observers have to say…
“Party of the People is a thorough, thoughtful, and nuanced look at the demographic and cultural trends that are shaping and re-shaping the Republican and Democratic coalitions. This deeply researched book, chock full of quantitative and qualitative data, provides much-needed context for how these coalitions came to be, and why it is the party that best appeals to the ‘multiracial mainstream middle class’ that will be successful for the foreseeable future."
—Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of The Cook Political Report
“Education polarization may sound like a term suited for academia. But with striking data and vivid anecdotes, Patrick Ruffini makes the case for why Republicans can rebuild their party by seizing on the populist realignment unfolding before our eyes.”
—Jonathan Martin, senior political columnist at Politico
🗳️ Elections
Nate Cohn: Consistent Signs of Erosion in Black and Hispanic Support for Biden (The New York Times 🔒)
“President Biden is underperforming among nonwhite voters in New York Times/Siena College national polls over the last year, helping to keep the race close in a hypothetical rematch against Donald J. Trump.
On average, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by just 53 percent to 28 percent among registered nonwhite voters in a compilation of Times/Siena polls from 2022 and 2023, which includes over 1,500 nonwhite respondents.
The results represent a marked deterioration in Mr. Biden’s support compared with 2020, when he won more than 70 percent of nonwhite voters. If he’s unable to revitalize this support by next November, it will continue a decade-long trend of declining Democratic strength among voters considered to be the foundation of the party.”
Nate Cohn: How to Interpret Polling Showing Biden’s Loss of Nonwhite Support (The New York Times 🔒)
“Is President Biden really struggling as badly among nonwhite voters — especially Black voters — as the polls say?
I’ve seen plenty of skepticism. Among nonwhite voters, a Democratic presidential candidate hasn’t fared as badly as those polls suggest in a presidential election result since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. In the case of Black voters, the disparity between the usual support for Democrats — around 90 percent or more — and the recent polling showing it in the 70s or even the 60s just seems too much to accept. Some skeptics believe they’ve seen results like this before, only for Republican strength to vanish on Election Day.
But if we compare the polls with those from previous election cycles, Mr. Biden’s early weakness looks serious. His support among Black, Hispanic and other nonwhite voters is well beneath previous lows for Democrats in pre-election polls over the last several decades — including the polls from the last presidential election. Yet at the same time, his weakness is put in better perspective when judged against prior polls, rather than the final election results.”
Sasha Issenberg: Ron DeSantis’ Super PAC Thinks It Has Cracked the Code on Delivering His Message (Politico)
“Within the Georgia headquarters of Never Back Down, the super PAC backing Ron DeSantis, it was called ‘the surge.’
There was a little more than a month to go before DeSantis was expected to launch his candidacy in late May and begin campaigning in earnest, and his well-funded outside allies would fill that void by introducing him to the 34,634,388 Americans whom Never Back Down analysts had identified as Republican primary voters. Every one of them was a potential target for a series of 60-second television advertisements emphasizing different aspects of DeSantis’s persona: one called ‘Steel,’ which traced the politician’s resolve to his identity as “grandson of a steelworker’; ‘Anthem,’ lionizing DeSantis as a champion of parents’ rights; another that showed him boasting that during the pandemic he had turned Florida into a ‘refuge of sanity.’
By most obvious gauges, the monthlong surge was a failure. Polls now show DeSantis worse off just about everywhere, even struggling to hold onto second place. Indeed, the insurgent seems no closer to figuring out how to position himself to either peel off Donald Trump’s supporters or consolidate support from those already backing other opponents in the 13-candidate field. A once-formidable contender is starting to look like just another also-ran.”
Kyle Kondik: How the Other Half Votes: The United States, Part Two (Sabato’s Crystal Ball)
“Among the many things that stand out from a longer-term look at how the nation’s biggest counties vote versus the rest of the country is this: The George W. Bush realignment of 2000 was comparable to the Donald Trump realignment of 2016 in widening the gap between the nation’s two halves.
As part of our ongoing series in comparing the ‘top halves’ to the ‘bottom halves’ of both the nation and individual states, we decided to expand our look at the nation to encompass not just the changes between 2012 and 2020 — which we did in Part One of this series — but also the trajectory of the last quarter century, from Bill Clinton’s second victory in 1996 to Joe Biden’s win in 2020.
As a reminder, what we are doing in this series is adding up a state’s or, in this case, the nation’s largest counties until we get to half of the total votes cast. That group of counties becomes the top half, and then whatever is left becomes the bottom half. Based on the number of votes cast in 2020, 151 of the nation’s 3,100+ counties or county equivalents make up the top half of the nation as a whole.”
Armin Thomas and Harrison Lavelle: Joe Manchin’s 2024 Re-Election: Difficult or Impossible? (Split Ticket)
“Senator Joe Manchin is the last remaining Democrat elected statewide in West Virginia. After defying state partisanship to win reelection in 2018, pundits wonder whether he can pull off an even more impressive victory in 2024.
Our Safe Republican rating reflects the fact that Manchin’s path to victory is currently too narrow to indicate a competitive race. If he does decide to seek reelection, he will have to overcome increasing polarization and outrun the top of the ticket by unprecedented margins in what is now one of the reddest states in the country. All this must happen in a presidential election year when turnout is high and partisan tensions are higher.
Looking at the fate of former Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson (MN-07), a Trump-district Democrat who lost reelection in 2020, sheds light on our West Virginia rating and shows how Manchin’s 2024 reelection bid might turn out.”
📊 Public Opinion
Andrew Mercer and Arnold Lau: Comparing Two Types of Online Survey Samples (Pew Research Center)
“As the field of public opinion research continues its steady movement toward online data collection, probability-based panels and opt-in samples have emerged as the two most common approaches to surveying individuals online. At the same time, the methodologies and industry practices for both kinds of samples are evolving.
To shed light on the current state of online probability-based and opt-in samples, Pew Research Center conducted a study to compare the accuracy of six online surveys of U.S. adults – three from probability-based panels and three from opt-in sources. This is the first such study to include samples from multiple probability-based panels, allowing for their side-by-side comparison.
The study compared each sample’s accuracy on 28 benchmark variables drawn from high-quality government data sources. These benchmarks included a variety of measures on topics such as voting, health, and respondents’ work, family and living situations. (Refer to the appendix for the full list of benchmarks and their sources.)”
