politics

Sure I'll bite. This article was written by John Burn-Murdoch, and from what I can tell, he is not related to Rupert Murdoch and just seems like a boring centrist. So let's look at his first graph. It says it shows diminishing support for democrats among non-white voters, supposedly showing they're now at 60% support for non-white voters entirely. So the argument is that they are leaving the dems because they're being disillusioned. That 60% figure is suspicious though since actual voting shows completely different dynamics. In 2022 the breakdown actually shows around the same amount of support in particularly black voters, 93% of black voters supported the dems, which was around the same amount as the election in 2020 and 2018. But in the graph in your article it does not use those numbers. It uses share of non-white voters who identify as democrats, not actual voting patterns. The author uses that to show that black voters and other non-white voters are separating from the democrats, but never mentions the actual voting data showing that despite not identifying themselves as democrats, they still vote for democrats.

The next graph does the same thing, uses how people are identifying themselves in a poll as opposed to actual voting data and doesn't even make much sense when actually looked at, especially since the y axis isn't labeled so it's confusing. I mean, does it show how nearly 100% of white voters in 2022 are republicans and close to 100% of white voters are liberal? It just makes no sense and is not a good representation when the author doesn't even provide context to what the graph is trying to say. It makes no sense. Then he uses a book to try to illustrate that black voters are abandoning the democrats, but that book “Steadfast democrats: how social forces shape black political behavior”, was released in 2020 and is about how black voters are unified around the democrats and examines the reasons for this. So this author is using data to say what he wants to say that actually says the opposite of what he is trying to say. Then the next graph supposedly shows racial breakdowns for different more conservative beliefs and for those that identify as liberal or conservative. But it as a graph that also makes little sense. 75% of black voters identify as conservative while close to 90% or above identify as liberal? How can you have those numbers when they don't add up to be 100%? There's not 165% of black voters. This graph is suspicious as fuck, if you are gonna use percentages and want me to take you seriously, they need to add up to 100%. I'd also like to acknowledge here that multiple of the links in this article that are supposed to lead to actual other articles, actually just lead to the main page, that could be because I am not a subscriber, it's just annoying and not the important part.

Anyway, lets go to the next graph which the author introduces by saying that he extended the books research to include all non-white groups, despite it again not actually showing what he wants it to show. He claims it shows that different races are increasingly identifying as conservative, but it uses the book and a Pew Research Center American Trends Panel Wave 43 to make that case. But from what I can tell in that pew research trends panel, there is no mention on how many non-white voters identify as conservative, so I have no clue where he is getting that information unless it's from the book which I also doubt given the book being about how black americans rally around the democrats consistently. The article finishes by saying that as the US becomes less racially segregated, more black and non-white Americans will change party affiliations to republican. But all it uses for that is just the census data which never mentions less racially segregated america leading to more non-white GOP voters. It also uses a republican pollster named Patrick Ruffini and his book “Party of the People Inside the Multiracial populist coalition remaking the GOP” as evidence, again, for showing how black voters are abandoning the democrats despite the fact that the share of republican black and non-white voters hasn't changed much in the last couple of elections, the distribution is the same, it's just that turnout was higher so there were more non-white GOP voters. Okay last thing on this incredibly long post, the article actually ends by saying that these voters are likely to become swing voters and that they likely will be won back by the dems, or at least can be. Essentially saying that all that he was saying in the article wasn't actually influential and that the distribution in the voters could still be the same. He doesn't use voting data for the entire article, which is the most important data to use when it comes to this.

Anyway, I couldn't find a lot on John Burn-Murdoch, but this article is still trash.