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| FILE - This Nov. 6, 2012 file photo shows voters lined up in the dark to beat the 7:00 p.m. deadline to cast their ballots at a polling station in Miami. It's not just the economy. It's the demographics _ the changing face of America. The 2012 elections drove home trends that have been embedded in the fine print of birth and death rates, immigration statistics and census charts for years. America is rapidly getting more diverse. And, more gradually, so is its electorate. Non-whites made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, up from 21 percent in 2000, and much of that growth is coming from Hispanics. |
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not just the economy, stupid. It's the demographics - the changing face of America.
The
2012 elections drove home trends that have been embedded in the fine
print of birth and death rates, immigration statistics and census charts
for years.
America is rapidly getting more diverse, and, more gradually, so is its electorate.
Nonwhites
made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, compared with 20
percent in 2000. Much of that growth is coming from Hispanics.
The
trend has worked to the advantage of President Barack Obama two
elections in a row now and is not lost on Republicans poring over the
details of Tuesday's results.
Obama captured a
commanding 80 percent of the growing ranks of nonwhite voters in 2012,
just as he did in 2008. Republican Mitt Romney won 59 percent of
non-Hispanic whites.
Romney couldn't win even
though he dominated among white men and outperformed 2008 nominee John
McCain with that group. It's an ever-shrinking slice of the electorate
and of America writ large.
White men made up 34 percent of the electorate this year, down from 46 percent in 1972.
"The
new electorate is a lagging indicator of the next America," says Paul
Taylor of the Pew Research Center. "We are midpassage in a century-long
journey from the middle of the last century, when we were nearly a 90
percent white nation, to the middle of this coming century, when we will
be a majority minority nation."
Another trend
that will be shaping the future electorate is the stronger influence of
single women. They vote differently from men and from women who are
married. Fifty-four percent of single women call themselves Democrats;
36 percent of married women do.
With women
marrying later and divorcing more, single women made up 23 percent of
voters in the 2012 election, compared with 19 percent in 2000.
The changing electorate has huge implications for public policy and politics.
Suddenly, immigration overhaul seems a lot more important, for one thing.
Ask
white voters about the proper role of government, for another, and 60
percent think it should do less.
Ask Hispanics the same question, and 58
percent think the government should do more, as do 73 percent of
blacks, exit polls show.
You can hear it in
the voice of Alicia Perez, a 31-year-old immigration attorney who voted
last week at a preschool in Ysleta, Texas.
"I trust the government to take care of us," she said. "I don't trust the Republican Party to take care of people."
Sure,
the election's biggest issue, the economy, affects everyone. But the
voters deciding who should tackle it were quite different from the
makeup of the 1992 "It's the economy, stupid" race that elected Democrat
Bill Clinton as president.
Look no further
than the battleground states of Campaign 2012 for political
ramifications flowing from the country's changing demographics.
New
Western states have emerged as the Hispanic population there grows. In
Nevada, for example, white voters made up 80 percent of the electorate
in 2000; now they're at 64 percent. The share of Hispanics in the state
electorate has grown to 19 percent; Obama won 70 percent of their votes.
Obama
won most of the battlegrounds with a message that was more in sync than
Romney's with minorities, women and younger voters, and by carefully
targeting his grassroots mobilizing efforts to reach those groups.
In
North Carolina, where Romney narrowly defeated Obama, 42 percent of
black voters said they had been contacted on behalf of Obama, compared
with just 26 percent of whites, exit polls showed. Obama got just 31
percent of the state's white vote, but managed to keep it competitive by
claiming 96 percent of black voters and 68 percent of Hispanics.
Young
voters in the state, two-thirds of whom backed Obama, also were more
often the target of Obama's campaign than Romney's: 35 percent said they
were contacted by Obama, 11 percent by Romney. Among senior citizens,
two-thirds of whom voted Republican, 33 percent were contacted by Obama,
34 percent by Romney.
Howard University
sociologist Roderick Harrison, former chief of racial statistics at the
Census Bureau, said Obama's campaign strategists proved themselves to be
"excellent demographers."
"They have put
together a coalition of populations that will eventually become the
majority or are marching toward majority status in the population, and
populations without whom it will be very difficult to win national
elections and some statewide elections, particularly in states with
large black and Hispanic populations," Harrison said.
One
way to see the trend is to look at the diversity of young voters. Among
voters under 30 years old this year, only 58 percent are white. Among
senior voters, 87 percent are white.
Brookings
Institution demographer William H. Frey says policymakers and
politicians need to prepare for a growing "cultural generation gap."
"Both
parties are getting the message that this is a new age and a new
America," says Frey. "Finally, the politics is catching up with the
demography."
Just as Republicans need to do a
better job of attracting Hispanics, says Frey, Democrats need to do more
to reach out to whites.
The face of Congress is changing more slowly than the electorate or the population, but changing it is.
House
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California was happy to highlight the
news that for the first time in history, more than half the members of
her caucus next year will be women, black, Hispanic or Asian. She said
it "reflects the great diversity and strength of our nation."
House
Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, whose caucus is far more white and male,
said Republicans need to learn to "speak to all Americans - you know,
not just to people who look like us and act like us."
Former
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the GOP's most prominent
black women, said the party needs to understand that "the changing
demographics in the country really necessitate an even bigger tent for
the Republican Party."
"Clearly we are losing
important segments of that electorate and what we have to do is to
appeal to those people not as identity groups but understanding that if
you can get the identity issue out of the way, then you can appeal on
the broader issues that all Americans share a concern for," she said.
All sides know the demographic trends are sure to become more pronounced in the future.
In
the past year, minority babies outnumbered white newborns for the first
time in U.S. history. By midcentury, Hispanics, blacks, Asians and
multiracial people combined will become the majority of the U.S.
Since
2000, the Hispanic and Asian populations have grown by more than 40
percent, fueled by increased immigration of younger people as well as
more births.
Currently, Hispanics are the
largest minority group and make up 17 percent of the U.S. population,
compared with 12 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Asians. Together
minorities now make up more than 36 percent of the population.
Hispanics
will make up roughly 30 percent of the U.S. by midcentury, while the
African-American share is expected to remain unchanged at 12 percent.
Asian-Americans will grow to roughly 8 percent of the U.S.
"The
minorities will vote," said demographer Frey. "The question is will
their vote be split more across the two parties than it was this time?"
For both Republicans and Democrats, he said, the 2012 election is a wake-up call that will echo through the decades.
