Update to Demographic Political Projections

The Census also has voter participation data broken down by age or race, but not both.

This chart shows us what everyone knows: Old people are more likely to vote. This chart also explains why social security reform is not likely to happen, as old people won’t vote to give away their benefits and they may even vote against other reforms that only affect the young out of paranoia. The same could be said about programs that might have knock-on effects to Medicare down the road.

A little bit more surprising is the contrast between turnout in presidential election years and congressional election years:

I repeated the study using age based voter turn out numbers from the last two years as a guide, also adjusting the Hispanic voting population down by one third to adjust for the illegal immigrants who are unable to vote.  One surprising effect was that the slightly lower age of the growing minorities was not enough to affect the general thrust of the voting pattern.

Next I looked at the race based voter turnout.

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And again, I compared it presidential election turnout with turnout from the previous year:

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The results were rather extreme, showing how off year elections had a much bigger impact when voting by race was taken into account than when voting by age was taken into account.  This is because more whites vote during off years, with their off year voting at 75% of presidential election voters while only 66% of minority voters in presidential elections decide to vote during off years.

No model is ever truly complete, and this model is still lacking in numerous ways.

  1. The predilection for the youth to vote for democrats has not been taken into account. An older population might be more conservative in nature, which would be a boon to the republicans.
  2. Secondly, the recent data on black voter turnout was driven upwards by Obama’s election and it remains to be seen whether or not this recent shift will revert to the mean. 
  3. Gerrymandering and state based Electoral College make national projections of the total popular vote less important than close analysis of swing states.
  4. Short term economic fluctuations and personality politics means that the above charts are at best vague projections to show the direction of things to come where the emergence of a larger minority population makes republicans fall behind by an average of 0.1% or 0.2% of the population each year.

Furthermore, this analysis assumes no large shifts in party politics that might change racial voting preferences.  It does suggest that any big move towards the center is likely to be made by the republicans and not the democrats, as the democrats are riding a trend towards more power and while they may occasionally get ahead of themselves as they have with the healthcare legislation, the voting population is drifting further left every year.

The Republican Party's Demographic Future

Stereotypes are often statistically significant, and that is why the relative and absolute decline of the white population is going to hurt the Republican Party. After the last four years the talk of a permanent Republican majority seems especially ridiculous, but even when the Republicans were in charge their long term prospects have been tentative at best.

Source: US Census

Of course, politics is more complicated than just white people vote republican and other people vote for democrats. In order to narrow down the results further, I averaged the CNN exit polls from 2008 and 2004 (Counting the Nader voters as Democrats) to get the table below. 

 

 

Democrat

Republican

 

White

42%

57%

African-American

92%

8%

Latino

61%

38%

Asian

59%

40%

Other

61%

36%

 

Using this table and the US Census data, I generated the following projection:

 

This projection is obviously a bit off, as Republicans were equal or ahead of democrats in 2000 and 2004.

There are a few factors that bias the analysis towards making democrats appear stronger than they are:

  1. Minority voters are younger and lean more democratic.  Young voters don’t show up in the same numbers as older voters, so an age weighted analysis would show Republicans as better off.
  2. There is some amount of over counting of Hispanic voters, as many of the Hispanic population are illegal aliens and unable to vote.
  3. There is a possibility of over counting of Hispanic voters voting democratic and under estimating the extent to which non-Hispanic white voter’s lean republican because all Hispanic people in the census were assumed to act as if they were Latino. It is very likely that a significant fraction of the Hispanic population told exit polls that they were white instead of Latino.
  4. The Electoral College based system gives Republicans a chance to retain control of the senate and white house via the smaller states with white majorities for far longer than the above chart would suggest.

Even given the above irregularities, it is obvious that demographic trends mean Republicans face an uphill battle. Democrats get the minority votes by supporting entitlement programs that disproportionately benefit minorities. Republicans then imitate the democrats in order to try and get votes, a strategy that is generally ineffective in terms of netting votes and has the effect of permanently expanding the entitlement infrastructure. Brown’s win in Massachusetts may have temporarily halted healthcare reform, but the demographic trend means that victory is only temporary.

The only way demographics are on republican’s side is that the consistent increase in age based entitlement spending from Medicare and Social Security means that a few years down the line the government will not be able to afford any additional entitlement spending without making everyone pay for it.