#@jburnmurdoch

[arthropooda]

X

X

Read more

[hackernewsrobot]

An ideological divide is emerging between young men and women around the world

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932

[maaarine]

@jburnmurdoch @ruthbenghiat

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: John Burn-Murdoch

Published: Mar 11, 2024

NEW 🧵:

American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.

I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood.

Last week, an NYT poll showed Biden leading Trump by less than 10 points among non-white Americans, a group he won by almost 50 points in 2020.

Averaging all recent polls (thnx @admcrlsn), the Democrats are losing more ground with non-white voters than any other demographic.

People often respond to these figures with accusations of polling error, but this isn’t just one rogue result.

High quality, long-running surveys like this from Gallup have been showing a steepening decline in Black and Latino voters identifying as Democrats for several years.

And America’s gold-standard national election surveys show a similarly sharp decline, with non-white proximity to Democrats now at its lowest since the 1960s, before the civil rights movement and the 1964 election which aligned Black voters with the Dems and against the GOP

So the non-white shift away from Dems seems very real. But what’s driving it?

One factor is fading memories. The civil rights movement and 1964 realignment formed very strong political bonds for the people who lived through it, but this is less true for more recent generations. 

The bond between young Black Americans and Democrats is far weaker than among older cohorts.

I don’t think everyone appreciates that the familiar "young favour Dems, old favour Republicans" gradient we see in the US population overall is *inverted* among the Black population.

The oldest Black Americans, whose political allegiances were formed in the 1960s and ’70s, identify as Dems over Reps by a margin of 82%.

Among the youngest Black voters, who have grown up in a very different socio-political environment, the Democrat advantage is just 33%

The changing image of the parties regarding class and income is also a factor.

In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest. The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities

But fading memories and increased competition for working class votes are fixable problems.

As long as these voters’ values remain fundamentally aligned with those of the Democratic party, the right person, policy, or rhetoric can win them back.

However… 

Much more ominous for the Democrats is a less widely understood dynamic:

Large numbers of non-white Americans have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest.

Their values are very much *not* aligned with the party. 

To show you what I mean by that, I will refer to the brilliant work of @IsmailWhitePhD and @ChrylLaird, whose 2020 book Steadfast Democrats explores why Black Americans historically voted Democrat in such large numbers *despite* often holding very conservative views.

Take deeply conservative positions like support for gun rights, opposition to abortion or the belief that government should stay out of people’s lives.

Very few white voters with these views identify as Dems, but much larger shares of Black, Latino and Asian conservatives do.

This anomaly has historically given Dems a huge boost, but it has begun to unwind.

In 2012, the vast majority of Black conservatives still identified as Democrats, but that has since fallen to less than half. Latino and Asian conservatives show similar but less sudden trends

Once you realise this, the Dem -> Rep migration among non-white voters that we’ve seen in recent years becomes not so much a case of natural Democrats drifting away because they’ve become disillusioned, but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party. 

We can also use this chart, which I adapted from White & Laird and @PatrickRuffini’s excellent book Party of the People.

It shows people’s self-reported political views from left to right, and their Rep-Dem margin top to bottom

Liberals vote Dem, conservatives vote Rep. Simple.

Except here’s how it actually looked in 2012: white voters were very well sorted, matching ideology to voting patterns

But Asian, Latino and especially Black voters were misaligned, with large numbers of non-white ideological conservatives voting Democrat in that year’s election

But just look at the realignment since then:

Latino conservatives are now a very solidly Republican group, and Black conservatives favoured Republicans over Democrats for the first time in 2022.

All groups are increasingly matching vote choice to ideology.

So you can see the problem for the Dems.

The non-white voters they’re losing are conservatives.

They won’t be won back by a bold green policy or defunding the police. Their historical support for Democrats was an anomaly and a further rightward shift is as likely as a reversal. 

So this explains the big shifts we’re seeing, but why is the racial realignment happening *now*?

@IsmailWhitePhD & @ChrylLaird find that social pressure is key.

When everyone around you votes a certain way, you feel pressure to do the same. Political norms are hard to overcome 

In a brilliant piece of research they found that when Black voters with very conservative views have almost exclusively Black social groups, they still vote Dem.

But if they have a more mixed social group, the weaker norm for voting Dem lets them vote in line with their beliefs.

I’ve extended their analysis and I find the same thing, with a similar effect among Latinos.

When people have more diverse social groups, there’s less social pressure to vote for the dominant party in the community, so non-white conservatives feel they can vote Republican.

There are echoes of Britain’s Red Wall — the English communities identified by @JamesKanag which had conservative demographics and attitudes but had stopped short of voting Tory due to a long-held sense that the party was not for them. In 2019 that changed

Non-white Americans are in a similar position.

Strong community norms have kept them in the blue column for decades, but those forces are weakening.

The surprise is not so much that these voters are shifting their support to align with their beliefs, but that it took so long. 

So you have: • Decline of church attendance (key source of political norm policing) • The US becoming more racially mixed, less segregated, fewer people with no friends/family of other races

The friction preventing non-white conservatives from voting Republican is diminishing. 

And crucially, that weakening of political norms doesn’t only come from people of other races.

As the number of Black Republicans has risen from ~5% to 15% (the figure among young Black adults today), the Democrat-voting norm is eroded and the stigma of voting Republican reduced 

This can happen very quickly in a “preference cascade”, where people who previously masked their true feelings to fit in, start discovering that other people actually share their beliefs, so suddenly lots of people shift their behaviour at once (screenshot from @PatrickRuffini)

And ‘a rapid shift in [voting] behaviour as people who were previously masking their [political] beliefs discover that others hold the same views as they do’ fits well with these charts.

Viewed in this light, the size of the shifts in current polling is entirely plausible.

To be clear, nothing in politics is guaranteed to last.

Some shifts are temporary, and many of those deserting the Democrats will become swing voters rather than solid Republicans.

These people can be won back and should absolutely not be written off. 

But if you take one thing away from this thread:

The left’s challenge with non-white voters is much deeper than it first appears.

A less racially divided America is an America where people vote more based on their beliefs than their identity. This is a big challenge for Dems. 

And here’s my column in full:

==

Prediction: Trump is elected, and the media blame white Americans, rather than the Dems or the arrogant assumption that non-white people would always vote for them.

[hunrising]

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1750849189834022932 this thread…

well it is time for men to catch up, chop chop

[adambowielinks]

Favorite tweets: Majestic and enthralling piece of writing from @TomHale_, who was whisked away under the cover of darkness by people in hazmat suits to spend 10 days in one of China's secret Covid detention centres. He never tested positive Free to read for first 300 –> https://t.co/w4LpUc8GxJ https://t.co/PfoapEzmmZ — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) Nov 8, 2022

http://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch

[2plan22]

RT @jburnmurdoch: NEW: we’ve updated our excess mortality tracker, adding new countries and updating all locations 148k more deaths than usual across the 15 countries we‘re tracking; 54k above reported Covid deaths at the time These charts now sit with the trajectories at https://t.co/JxVd2cG7KI https://t.co/34GZPIikKc 2PLAN22 http://twitter.com/2PLAN22/status/1255610543806787585

NEW: we’ve updated our excess mortality tracker, adding new countries and updating all locations 148k more deaths than usual across the 15 countries we‘re tracking; 54k above reported Covid deaths at the time These charts now sit with the trajectories at https://t.co/JxVd2cG7KI pic.twitter.com/34GZPIikKc

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 29, 2020

[todayintokyo]

Life imitating art: a graph of COVID-19 infections and Hokusai’s great wave. Sources: @jwyg on Twitter (top) and @Frankman1000 on Twitter (bottom). The Financial Times graphs are updated daily by @jburnmurdoch on Twitter.

[3nding]

Thread by @jburnmurdoch on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

[dogsliampaynedoesntinstagram]

I think you may well follow him already, but jburnmurdoch on Twitter is the man responsible for those ft data charts and he posts a number of interesting data sets and discussions around them, so it might be worth checking him out if you haven’t already.

I do follow him anon - I really like his COVID work. It's very clear and thoughtful and makes information really accessible. I'd also really recommend following his work.

[curationmonkey]

https://ift.tt/39DWLpS

Doping_Consomme

RT @bookmark1941919: “This Is ザ・ドリフターズ on Spotify” (1 user) https://t.co/dHpt6Uq1od #Spotify #playlist 04-05 17:33

RT @lazy_post: This Is ザ・ドリフターズ on Spotify …Tags: bookmark April 05… 04-05 17:33

RT @jburnmurdoch: How does that look cumulatively?• US death toll slope shows no signs of flattening; about to shoot straight past Italy,… 04-05 14:59

RT @cherry_U2: じゃ！好き#くりすちゃんart https://t.co/jXsZonTfIa 04-05 09:40

RT @lazy_post: 「うんこちゃん/加藤純一」のSpotifyプレイリスト作りました！-DopingConsommeBlog …Tags: bookmark April… 04-05 09:24

RT @lazy_post: 小売りガリバーと独占禁止法のパラドックス-DopingConsommeBlog …Tags: bookmark April… 04-05 09:24

RT @lazy_post: そうですね！BB - ニコニコ動画 https://t.co/mmWmm58qen そうですね！BB - ニコニコ動画 ページの読み込みに時間が…Tags: b…　…φ(：3]∠)＿https://t.co… 04-05 09:23

RT @dc_pages: https://t.co/AFL5py6OWK https://t.co/IayZIyI0iI… https://t.co/DFIVg9I3VG… 全てを悟った小池百合子BB https://t.co/t6tgiBRW12…/%E5%85%A...… 04-05 07:24

RT @dernierVincent: どりふたーず☆.mp10 https://t.co/XlJ78vE3Ox #sm36621160 #ニコニコ動画 https://t.co/IzKtA6Or38 04-05 07:18

RT @ak_tch: 新聞やテレビなどのマスコミは率先して在宅勤務にして、それを大きく報じたらいいのでは。どこかが先鞭をつけないかぎり、「自分たちだけやるのはバカバカしい」と思うだけです。 04-05 07:16

[know4life]

RT @jburnmurdoch: Now daily new deaths: • US & UK are straight lines angling upwards on a log scale. This is not good. • In both countries, over the last week every day brings ~25% more new deaths than the day before • No other countries are on that steep a trajectory at this stage of outbreak https://t.co/aXJUEGPZVr

[hackernewsrobot]

The average American has the same life expectancy as the worst part of England

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799698058035200 Comments

[dopingconsomme]

Latest case trajectories for major countries: • US cases continue to soar. Unquestionably the worst outbreak in the world Reporting from @yuanfenyang & co on whether you can trust the Chinese data: https://www.ft.com/content/4aa35288-3979-44f7-b204-b881f473fca0 … pic.twitter.com/D3quEmPUIS

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1244722153041387520

[dataandme]

undefined

😻 Love the transitions in this viz by @jburnmurdoch! ⚽️ "The top goal-scorers in elite football since 1980" https://johnburnmurdoch.github.io/projects/goal-lines/all-comps/ #dataviz #infovis https://t.co/GInLQ8KK7u

[sanjosenewshq]

Economics might take us to internet zero all by itself

Talking on the COP26 summit final 12 months, Richa Sharma, chief of the Indian delegation, was fast to stress that India had a proper to burn fossil fuels, telling delegates: “The meagre carbon finances is firstly the best and entitlement of growing nations.” This emphasis on allocating the majority of remaining “carbon area” to nations that haven’t but reaped the advantages of years of fossil-fuelled financial development is central to the local weather justice motion. However all such good intentions are quickly being overtaken by easy economics. In 2009, coal was nonetheless a pretty possibility for nations searching for reasonably priced vitality, its common prices coming in nicely beneath renewables. However by 2020, each wind and photo voltaic had grow to be far cheaper per unit of vitality. In some markets, capital-intensive new installations even labored out cheaper than current coal vegetation. In response, India’s urge for food for coal has rapidly waned. In 2019, the Worldwide Vitality Company forecast that the nation’s put in capability of coal would develop by round 80 per cent between 2018 and 2040. A 12 months later, they revised that to simply 10 per cent. Related patterns have performed out elsewhere. For one of the best a part of the previous 200 years, one rule held the world over: if a rustic’s financial exercise expanded, so did its carbon emissions. However beginning within the Nineteen Eighties with the appearance of nuclear energy, it turned more and more frequent to see nations chopping emissions whereas rising GDP. The tempo of this decoupling has now accelerated because the shift from carbon-intensive manufacturing to providers and from dirtier to comparatively cleaner fossil fuels has been supercharged by proliferating low cost renewables. In 2016, 70 nations — multiple in three worldwide — had a run of at the least 5 years by which carbon emissions declined whereas GDP grew. Inexperienced development is already right here. Even placing apart the local weather justice argument, there has lengthy been an assumption that growing nations must undergo soiled development. However right here once more the information paint a promising image. Whereas growing nations do observe an environmental Kuznets curve, the place the carbon-intensity of GDP will increase earlier than falling away once more, every successive cohort traces a cleaner path than the final. On the dirtiest level on their vitality transition, nations industrialising again within the nineteenth century needed to emit roughly 1kg of CO₂ for each greenback of GDP they produced in at this time’s cash. The following era, who industrialised round 50 years later, achieved the identical stage of growth however solely needed to burn 0.65kg per greenback alongside the way in which. The third, China’s cohort, topped out at 0.5kg, and the ultimate group — primarily nations in Africa and south Asia — are already transferring to the downward, greener slope of the transition, having peaked at simply 0.3kg per greenback. None of that is mission achieved — the world stays a good distance from internet zero. However we should always welcome the truth that funding, innovation and market forces are driving inexperienced development and falling emissions. john.burn-murdoch@ft.com@jburnmurdoch Originally published at San Jose News HQ