New Census Data: Demography is Still Not Destiny

This is a transcript from a monologue on my radio show. Subscribe to my newsletter here for only $7/month.

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If you read media reports about the 2020 Census data, what you will find is that the nation's rural parts are shrinking in population and urban parts are growing, but overall the country's population is not growing that much, and the country's population to the extent it's growing is overwhelmingly non-white and immigrant.

The media, you need to understand that, and I had to research this way back when for a report I wrote when I was in college. Or was it law school? Now I can't even remember. What I do remember is that in 1972, the Richard Nixon reelection was when the media first latched onto the idea that demography was destiny and at the time it was not the immigrant population, it was the African-American population. As more black people were born in this country, the Republican party would be reduced and eventually eliminated.

It has been a matter of media dogma since the mid '70s that as the white population of this country shrank, the Republican party's chances of ever winning would go away unless they adopted a slate of liberal policies and became essentially the Democratic party.

Now, the problem with this is that it's not actually so. The problem with this is that the media, dogmatically, and it is a level of dogma. The media level of dogma here is that there's no future for the GOP. The media has been willfully hoping to get rid of the GOP for some time and the latest census data, with a long line of census data shows we're a majority. We're a majority-minority country, or we're almost there. White people are fading away. In fact, you've got to have lines drawn. For example, Atlanta, Georgia, where I am, that it is now a majority-minority urban area.

And the Republican party is going to collapse because it can't attract nonwhite voters, except that ignores 2020. And it ignores something even more important that doesn't get talked about. Now, the reason it doesn't get talked about is because the media itself does not understand what it's dealing with. The media itself genuinely doesn't understand the nature of the demographic shift, in large part because so much of the media in this country parrots Democratic talking points, and there's a book, what is it? Teixeira, Ruy Teixeira? Yeah, Ruy Teixeira, that's it. He writes for the Center for American Progress. And Ruy Teixeira has essentially become the Democratic demographic prognosticator that the media loves.

He's written a number of books on red states and blue states and the emerging Democratic majority. It got a lot of attention back in 2002. And essentially his claims are that as the United States becomes non-white, conservatives fade and Republicans fade, and the media has gravitated towards it ever since.

And they embraced this willfully over time. And you hear that well, we're going to become more inclusive and more progressive as a result. But it's not really true. I want to read you, and I'll keep his name out of it, he wouldn't want me to bring his name into it, he doesn't mind me reading these things, but I want to read you what a friend of mine sent me.

Demography news is always interesting and just as always poorly reported. The flurry of news stories across the past 24 hours on the 2020 Census outcomes are case in point. The narrative throughout is the same in each, people of color on the rise, Whites are on decline. But the people of color, it's always the phrase they use, or nearly, always the phrase they use, primarily responsible for the change are Hispanics. And here's where it gets complicated.

You know what? I don't have to read what he says because he and I think along the same lines here. You know what Hispanic is? Hispanic is not a race. Hispanic is not a race. It's an ethnicity. If you are political, if you're a partisan, you'll say Latino. If you are a nutcase, you will say Latinx, but it's Hispanic culture. Hispanic voters overwhelmingly say they prefer to use Hispanic, even as white academics use Latino. But Hispanic voters are not a race. Hispanic voters are Venezuelan. They're Argentinan. They're Nicaraguan. They're Guatemalan, they're Honduran, El Salvadorian, Mexican, Costa Rican, Bolivian, Peruvian, Chilean, Argentinian. They're not a race. They're an ethnic group of people.

And guess what? Guess what? Guess what the data shows. Most of them view themselves as white people. White people. In fact, in 2020, Donald Trump won South Texas Mexican-Americans and Florida Hispanics. He over-performed, I guess I should say. In many counties in South Colorado, the most Hispanic counties in South Colorado, Donald Trump won them. He was the first Republican since George W. Bush to win those counties. In South Texas, Donald Trump made massive inroads with Hispanic voters. The Republicans themselves did. The Republican party, not just Trump. Republicans did.

If demography were destiny, I'm reading from my friend's email, again, if demography were destiny, what demographic change would actually most likely guarantee a Democratic future? It's not a majority non-white America packed with people who believe in God, two sexes, family, roots, and big pickup trucks. It would be in America run by and for upper income whites, non-religious, childless, and rootless. Like the one we have now. And that's ultimately it. And that's what you have to understand here.

As our country grows more Hispanic, it will grow more conservative. And the Democrats don't believe that because the loudest Hispanic voices in the country that the Democrats and the media have elevated onto the national landscape for punditry and talking head class, they are progressive. But your average Hispanic immigrant to this country is not. And your average Hispanic immigrant to this country, the longer they stay here identifies as white. I've got a friend of mine who is one of the biggest Democratic consultants in the world. You all know him, I'm going to leave him out of this because he'll get hate mail. Both for being a friend of mine and for saying what I'm about to say.

He worked for multiple presidents. He's worked around the world and he says he's never understood why Republicans were so anti-immigrant in his framing. Now we can argue that we're not anti-immigrant, we're anti-illegal immigrant. We want people to follow the law to come here. But in his mind, he warns Democrats all the time they've got to be careful of this issue. Why? Because the longer an Hispanic family stays in the United States the more likely they are to identify as white and Republican.

You have to get to the third generation of Hispanic immigrant family to see them become more progressive, and even then not too much. In fact, the most conservative of the Hispanics are the non-Catholic Hispanics. The Protestant Hispanic immigrant to this country is overwhelmingly conservative and considers themselves white. And the whole idea of a white or a black Hispanic is very new. It was George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin situation, where the shooter was classified as a white Hispanic? Looked Hispanic to me, I didn't realize there was such a thing until then, that the left makes such a big deal out of classified black and white Hispanics. Or now, what's the movie, the Lin-Manuel Miranda movie that came out, In The Heights, or whatever and it got attacked by the New York Times for not having enough Afro-Latino representation, whatever the hell that is.

Apparently, it's people from the Dominican Republic, Haiti and the like, I guess. It's a big deal. Y'all, the average Hispanic voter in this country doesn't view himself as anything other than a white person. And they're conservative. The Democrats so internalized, beginning, and again, this started in 1972. It started in 1972 that demography is destiny and the days of the Republican party are coming to an end. When Richard Nixon rebounded as president, remember Pauline Kael, the New York Times critic said no one she knew voted for Nixon. How could this be?

The elite in this country doesn't know people who vote Republican or conservative, generally. They think because they don't know anyone clearly the Republicans are the minority, and clearly, the data shows as white people become less and less a part of this country, the Democratic party's on the rise, except Hispanic people tend to view themselves as white.

This goes back again to my friend's email here. Lots and lots of Hispanics are and consider themselves to be white. It's well-known, less well-known but possibly driving this outcome, is politicized Hispanics who have dropped a prior white self-identification for a putatively non-white Hispanic one so bundling in white Hispanics who tend, by the by, to socially and politically behave like non-Hispanic whites, in aggregate. What's the actual white population of the United States? We don't actually know. The media's not telling us.

But we know that the media is wishfully thinking that because of demographic changes in this country, the days of the Republican party are at an end, and it's not really true. Did you see what Donald Trump did? Donald Trump lost, not because the election was stolen, I'm sorry. He lost because he lost upper-income white people. He held white women, which all the polling said he couldn't do in the exit polls, the actual counting of how people voted, the exit polls show Donald Trump lost white men. Typically upper-income white men who hated Hillary went with Joe Biden, but he made gains with Hispanic voters and young black men. Why? He got them out of jail, he got them jobs, he kept them safe. That's just the reality. And the media continues to ignore that reality at its own peril. And that's really not a bad thing for the future of the GOP because they'll never see it when the GOP takes over.