In the backdrop of heightened polarization, the 59th quadrennial presidential election of the United States of America is scheduled in less than a month. Unlike in 2016 when a majority of pollsters were proven wrong, this time around there is caution in the air.
Irrespective of the result of the 2020 elections, multiple fluid vectors are set to influence the long-term political trajectory of the US. They will provide an understanding of the churn taking place in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial country. In this context, one of the key variables is the growing diversification of the US electorate that may leave its imprint on the battleground states even in the 2020 elections. Early estimates of the 2020 US census reveal that the diversification of the US is taking place earlier than expected.
In broad strokes, African-Americans, Hispanics, bi-racial and Asian communities now constitute 40 per cent of the US population. William H. Frey, senior fellow — Metropolitan Policy Program — at the Washington DC-based think tank, Brookings, states, “The new data shows that, by 2019, the white population share declined nearly nine more percentage points, to 60.1%.”
These facts are leaving their imprint on the ground as the 2018 mid-term US Senate and Congress elections illustrated. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with a Hispanic background, got elected for New York’s 14th congressional district. There was Jahana Hayes, the first African-American to represent the state of Connecticut in the Congress; the Somali-American, Ilhan Omar, defeated the Republican, Jennifer Zielinski, in Minnesota to get elected to the US Congress. Then there are Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian-American, and Ayanna Pressley, the first African-American woman to be elected to the Congress from Massachusetts.
Joe Biden catapulting to the Democratic presidential candidate can be attributed to the African-American vote in his favour in the South Carolina Democratic Party’s primaries. In the presidential elections, African-Americans have been at the heart of Democratic Party’s electoral strategy since 1964. In his article, “How the Black Vote Became a Monolith”, in The New York Times Magazine, Theodore R. Johnson cites a report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies that shows that from 1964 to 2008, an average of 88 per cent of black votes went to the Democratic Party’s presidential nominees, a number that increased to 93 per cent in the last three presidential elections. 1964 is a watershed year in the US’s modern political history. Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of July 2, 1964 froze the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects in the five southern states of Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi for decades to come although he won the presidential race in November 1964.
In the otherwise highly-regulated and controlled US immigration system, it is geography that has driven the recent demographic change due to population movement from other countries in the Americas. Hispanic or Latino, a loose identity threaded around people who speak Spanish and come from various Central American and Latin American countries, made up 18 per cent of the US population in 2019, up from 16 per cent in 2010 and 5 per cent in 1970. Emphasizing the Anglo-Protestant roots and their overall impact in shaping the core identity of the US, the political scientist, Samuel Huntington, in his book, Who Are We?, had pointed to the challenges of Hispanic migration to the US’s core identity and values. He points out that mass migration to the southwest of the country would erode the national identity due to bilingualism, multiculturalism, the devaluation of citizenship and the denationalization of the American elite. However, the reality of Hispanic migration has proven to be a lot more complex than what was envisaged by the academic.
The Pew Research Center informs that in 2020 “Hispanics will be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the electorate, accounting for just over 13% of eligible voters — slightly more than blacks.” “A record 32 million Latinos are projected to be eligible to vote in 2020, up from 27.3 million in 2016. [13% of eligible voters will be Hispanics.] California (7.9 million) alone holds about a quarter of the U.S. Latino electorate. It is followed by Texas (5.6 million), Florida (3.1 million), New York (2.0 million) and Arizona (1.2 million).” Within Hispanics, Mexicans constitute more than 60 per cent.
However, like the rest of Central American and Latin American countries, which have their own racial, class and political differentiations, the Hispanic vote is far from a homogenous entity. The racial history of Hispanic Americans is diverse as there are people with European, African and indigenous roots or they are multi-racial. Apart from this, there are obvious class differences. For instance, the Hispanic vote in Florida, a battleground state which literally decided the 2000 presidential elections, comprises a large number of relatively richer Americans of Cuban descent. Many who came to the US in the 1960s from Cuba were highly skilled and were quick to seize the opportunities available for professionals. As their parents or grandparents were asylum-seekers after Fidel Castro took over the country, present-day Cuban Americans viscerally oppose the US’s détente with the current communist regime in Cuba. They endorse a stronger stance against Cuba as outlined by the Republican Party.
In the 2016 elections, although he trailed in the popular vote, Donald Trump won on account of his narrow victories in the three states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He polled a mere 79,646 votes more than Senator Hillary Clinton and those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes. That is why in 2020 smaller ethnic or religious groups have also acquired importance in some of these states. For instance, in Michigan, an ethnically diverse Muslim population, a large number among which are Arab-Americans, forms around 2.75 per cent of the population. Till 2000, many Muslim-Americans were favourably disposed towards the Republican Party. This is not surprising as Republican supporters and the American-Muslim community shared a common perspective on a number of public policy issues. The bond between the Republicans and Muslims started to break after 9/11.
Asian-Americans make up 4.7 per cent of all eligible voters even though they are quite diverse as a group. The unprecedented proactive reaching out by both parties to the Indian-American community, a relatively richer ethnic group, this time illustrates the importance of smaller ethnic groups in fiercely competitive battleground states. Apart from possibly galvanizing the African-American vote, the nomination of Senator Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee is a factor that will resonate particularly among younger and second-generation Indian-Americans.
The US political landscape in 2020 is a lot more complex. Diversification alone cannot capture these complexities. However, it can explain some aspects of the politics of today, including the virulent aspects of conservative backlash after the presidential election of 2012 that propelled the rise of Trump. The political elite of the US often rhetorically calls the nation the land of diversity and immigrants. How this diversity impacts the present and the future electoral landscape in the US will be of keen interest to other multi-ethnic democracies.
