Do we really think this Nigeria forecast is going to happen?

I mean I guess it might. And there is a fair amount of momentum built into demographic trends. But this seems an awful lot like an unwarranted straight line projection.

Good report from Pew:

This gap is driven by two demographic factors—youth and non-citizenship. More than one third of Latinos (34.9%) are younger than the voting age of 18. And an additional 22.4% are of voting age, but are not U.S. citizens. As a result, the share of the Latino population eligible to vote is smaller than it is among any other group. Just 42.7% of the nation’s Latino population is eligible to vote, while more than three-in-four (77.7%) of whites, two-thirds of blacks (67.2%) and more than half of Asians (52.8%) are eligible to vote.

Yet, even among eligible voters, Latino participation rates lag those of other groups. In 2010, 31.2% of Latino eligible voters say they voted, while nearly half (48.6%) of white eligible voters and 44.0% of black eligible voters said the same.

Obviously, progressives in general and Latino groups in particular should try to work on closing that turnout gap. But I think a lot of people underestimate the extent to which these demographic factors make a difference in driving our politics. A hugely disproportionate share of the poor people in the United States are children. And a hugely disproportionate share of the poor adults in the United States are non-citizens. The fact that poor eligible voters tend not to turn out and don’t possess the social capital and money needed to impact the system through non-electoral means all make a difference. But the fundamental base on which all the other inequities are layered is the simple fact that the electorate is substantially richer than the population.

Conor Dougherty writes about the growing Hispanification of America’s children:

The number of non-Hispanic whites fell in 46 states and 86 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas. In 10 states, white children are now a minority among their peers, including six that tipped between 2000 and 2010. Others will follow soon: In 23 states, minorities make up more than 40% of the child population.

The number of black and Native American children declined as well, but by a far smaller degree than whites, according to an analysis of 2010 Census data to be released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. The Census Bureau released the first results of its once-a-decade head count of U.S. residents, regardless of citizenship, late last year; over subsequent months, Census released state and local data.

I think this is a widely misreported trend. When the New York Times recently did a piece on me, Ezra Klein, Brian Beutler, and Dave Weigel exactly zero people complained about the massive over-representation of people of Latin American ancestry that reflected. People saw it as a profile of four white dudes. Which is what it was. But my dad’s family is from Cuba, Ezra’s dad’s family is from Brazil, and Brian’s mom’s family is from Chile. That’s kind of a funny coincidence, but the combination of continued immigration and intermarriage means that over time a larger and larger share of American people will be partially descended from Latin American countries. That will probably change various aspects of American life in various ways. But we’re not going to become a predominantly Spanish-speaking country, race isn’t going to stop being a social construct, and it won’t cease being the case that the primary “race issue” is the gap between black people (almost all of whom are in part descended from white people) and a fairly miscellaneous group of socially dominant whites.

Texas’ population grew rapidly over the past ten years from an already large base. That’s why the state will be adding four congressional districts. So its fascinating to learn from the Census Bureau that even amidst 20 percent population growth, huge swathes of the state are actually losing people:

The result is a state becoming radically less rural as remote areas decline in population while central cities and (especially) suburbs boom at an incredible rate.

A good series of charts by Lee Drutman shows that one of the best predictors of declining Democratic partisan ID between 2008 and 2010 is the number of white people:

I used to hold to the view that the growing non-white share of the electorate would, over time, tip elections to Democrats. I now think the system will remain near equilibrium and what we’ll instead see is white voters growing more Republican as Democrats are more and more seen as the party of non-whites. Mississippi and Arizona, after all, have very large minority votes but they’re hardly hotbeds of liberalism. Instead they’re hotbeds of very conservative white people. This does mean, however, that politics will become even more abstracted away from “the issues” and questions of identity will become even more central.

Ta-Nehisi Coates sees a “Great Migration in reverse” lurking in the Census data. He quotes this:

Historically, the South was home to roughly 90 percent of the nation’s blacks from 1790 until 1910, when African-Americans began to migrate northward to escape racism and seek jobs in industrial centers such as Detroit, New York and Chicago during World War I. After the decades-long Great Migration, the share of blacks in the South hit a low of about 53 per cent in the 1970s, before civil rights legislation and the passage of time began to improve the social climate in the region. [...]

The nation’s black population grew by roughly 1.7million over the last decade. About 75 per cent of that growth occurred in the South – primarily metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Charlotte, N.C. That’s up from 65 per cent in the 1990s, according to the latest census estimates.

To me that mostly sounds like black people are moving to the same metro areas as everyone else. Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Charlotte in the south and Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas outside the south. After all, the basic dynamic of weak job opportunities in the midwest and no affordable housing in the northeast applies regardless of skin color. What’s more, this is really not a reversal of the Great Migration in any meaningful sense. Texas wasn’t a major historic African-American population center and it strains credulity to describe Miami as part of the south. If black people start leaving Chicago to move to rural Mississippi that be a reversal, but this is the same sun/permit-driven migration that everyone’s doing.

I’m familiar of course with the fact that union households are more inclined to vote Democratic than are members of non-union households, but since union membership isn’t distributed randomly amongst the population it’s a bit difficult to know exactly what to make of that. Nate Silver, however, took National Election Survey data to do a logistic regression analysis to try to isolate the impact of specific demographic characteristics on the 2008 presidential vote:

Union status, roughly speaking, is less important than race or religion but more important than the rest.

(cc photo by twicepix)

Engines of upward opportunity for woman and minorities:

As millions of Americans dine out this Valentine’s Day, new research from the National Restaurant Association shows that nearly 50 percent of restaurants are now owned by women. The research also shows that restaurants employ more minority managers than any other industry, and that Hispanic restaurant ownership has increased 42 percent in the past five years.

Once again, in my view these people are “making things.”

I thought I’d look up how union members voted in the 2010 Wisconsin midterms. The exit polls didn’t actually provided the data, but they did ask about whether you live in a union household. Not surprisingly, union households like Democrats:

That’s a strong showing for Barrett but not nearly as strong as, say, his pull of 87 percent of the African-American vote. Had unions delivered 70 percent of the union household vote to Barrett, he would have won. Russ Feingold pulled 59 percent of the union household vote in his failed re-election bid. Nationally, 61 percent of union household voters pulled the lever for a House Democrat in 2010.

One of the most important facts about present-day American politics is that poor people have essentially no political “voice” in Washington. They do, however, vote. And they’re also human beings with moral worth and interests who count. What often winds up happening is that you get liberal bloggers, whose opinions about things are easy to find out since we publish them on the Internet, used as a generalized proxy for a huge swathe of the electorate. Hence this kind of thing from Michael Shear:

One liberal supporter who listened to the [conference] call described it as “mostly boring,” an indication that the president’s base was not particularly upset about the budget. During the call, Mr. Plouffe also offered some comfort to the bloggers by suggesting that Mr. Obama is not interested in big reductions in Social Security.

As a colleague of mine snarks, “because if one thing is indicative of how poor people feel about cuts, it’s white upper class bloggers.”

Right. As best I can tell the electoral base of the Democratic Party continues to be low-income people and racial minorities. Obviously better-off white people with idiosyncratic ideological motivations also play an important role in progressive politics on a practical level. But I often thought during the health care debate that poor people would be saying “hell no I’m not going to give up this Medicaid expansion so you can hold out indefinitely for a public option.” Conversely, the political tactics of calling for an overall discretionary budget freeze while insisting on investments in energy, infrastructure, and education has a lot of merit but it necessarily entails taking the hammer to programs that subsidize consumption for poor people. I kind of doubt that all that many LIHEAP recipients eagerly downloaded the budget yesterday morning and then blogged about it in the afternoon and got on a press call in the evening.