Recommended Reading

This post by Paul Campus at Lawyers, Guns & Money captures something important about the asymmetric expectations that commentators tend to have of the two parties. Campos looks at the results of the 2020 election demographically, and shows how much extra credit Republicans get when they manage to eke out support from any minority.

He points out how Hispanic/Latino men voted for Biden over Trump by a 2-1 margin. White men voted for Trump by the same margin. Everyone acknowledges that the latter indicates overwhelming support for Trump. But pundits also take the former as “great” support for… Trump!

Campos’ broader argument is that the white vote simply counts more in the American political consciousness. I think that follows in a lot of ways (i.e., in how votes actually get counted) but it seems to me that his examples here point to a more complicated dynamic whereby little shifts in minority voting towards the GOP are interpreted as massively significant in a way that is generally unwarranted, and that minimizes the much greater diversity represented by the Democratic party.

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