I haven’t done that much analyzing or forecasting of election results in recent years.
One reason is because the competition got so much better, as the insightful Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman also noted this week:
Analysis of tonight’s election results (and why I don’t need to do it anymore)
Back in the 2000s, Dr. Gelman and I had a very interesting discussion of the model I developed after the 2004 election.
But the quality of quantitative analysis by full-time professionals like Nate Silver quickly improved.
But my lack of engagement over the last two years was specifically caused by the fact that my basic model, which had served me well since 2004, suddenly stopped working in 2024 when Hispanics, Asians, and black men moved sharply toward Trump, more than making up for a steady decline of the GOP in the nice white suburbs.
I’d long argued that Democrats have a simple grand strategy built around demographic trends: since nonwhites vote Democratic more than whites do, the Democrats favor more nonwhites and fewer whites in the electorate.
One obvious method of concocting more nonwhite voters is through immigration, the much-denounced Great Replacement “conspiracy theory.”
Democrats are shocked, shocked by the slur that they favor more open borders for pragmatic reasons of long-term electoral self-interest. “No,” they try to explain to hate-filled Republicans, “We want more immigrants because we, just like immigrants, are Good. The fact that immigrants vote for us is merely further proof that you are Bad.”
As far as I can tell, many Democrats truly believe that it’s merely a lucky (although of course well-deserved) coincidence that the immigration policy they favor due to its inarguably superior morality just happens to also favor the long-term success of the Democratic Party.
Other time-tested methods of getting more nonwhites and fewer whites include discouraging through environmental policies the building of houses in the suburbs (American whites don’t breed well in urbanity).
And Democrats encourage Flight From White by giving affirmative action benefits to those who self-identify as belonging to The Diverse.
One much overlooked method is socially constructing more diversity by rejiggering Census categories to let marginal Caucasians escape the disprivileges of whiteness, such as the Carter Administration liberating South Asians from the Caucasian race, and both the Obama and Biden Administrations attempting to free Middle Easterner & North Africans from the ignominy of being white on the Census.
Here’s the 2020 Census form, on which it’s evident that Middle Easterners (e.g., Lebanese) and North Africans (e.g., Egyptians) are supposed to check the white box:
In contrast, here’s the current plan for the 2030 Census, as announced by the Biden Administration in 2024, featuring the long-planned jailbreak from whiteness of Middle Easterners and North Africans:
Also, you’ll note that the old one-drop of blood rule is still in effect for defining nonwhiteness in 2026. Nobody is terribly sure how little nonwhite ancestry is too little to disqualify you from self-identifying for affirmative action benefits.
For instance, Senator Elizabeth Warren justified her identifying as an American Indian (and nothing else for awhile) on official forms used for affirmative action purposes by releasing a report by a Stanford geneticist declaring her to be between 1/64th and 1/1024th Amerindians.
Woo-hoo!
Similarly, the Great Awokening was largely the moral rationalization of the things you need to do to pull off the Great Replacement.
You want more immigration and more affirmative action because you want fewer white voters? Well, Wokeness explains why whites deserve to have it coming, those racist bastards.
But then in November 2024, Democrats were rocked by how relatively badly they had done among nonwhites (while Kamala did fine among the more prosperous type of whites).
This was particularly disheartening to Democrats, much more so than losing would have been because lowbrow whites united around Trump.
The reason Democrats must import millions of ringers to vote for them and give them special privileges for being nonwhite is because nonwhites and Democrats are Good.
But if nonwhites vote for Trump, well …
Was this the New Normal? Or could it even be the beginning of a long trend in which Democrats would continually do worse among nonwhites?
Democrats really believe this sort of thing, that they are Good because they favor nonwhites who are Good, so they were paralyzed at responding to the Trump administration’s offensive against affirmative action. If lots of nonwhite Americans believe that all Americans should be treated equally … well … uh … does not compute.
Or was 2024 a one time fluke due to inflation while Democrats went nuts during the Great Awokening over women, blacks, and, especially, transgenders?
Well, here is the NYT’s guess at 2020 vs. 2024 vs. 2026:
Paywall here.
