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By David French
Opinion Columnist
America will always be divided. There is no way to gather more than 300 million people from every race, faith and ethnicity across the globe, place them in one nation together and expect anything like unanimity on important religious, cultural or political issues. The real question is whether our divisions are sustainable or potentially fatal.
That might be the central question of the current political moment, and it’s against that backdrop that we should evaluate the meaning of several recent reports that American politics might be undergoing a racial realignment of sorts. Looking at electoral results and polling trends, there is evidence that voters of color are trending Republican.
According to 2016 exit polls, for example, Donald Trump improved on Mitt Romney’s performance with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters in 2012, and then he did better again in 2020 — despite losing the popular vote by a much greater margin in 2020 than he did in 2016. How did this happen? He did better with voters of color, but that was offset by a worse performance with white voters. He won the white vote by 21 percent against Hillary Clinton. Against Joe Biden, his margin narrowed to 17 points. Put another way, the racial gap narrowed in both directions. A higher percentage of minority voters voted for Trump, and a higher percentage of white voters voted for Biden.
Recent polling data indicates that this trend may well be continuing. As my colleague Tom Edsall notes in a fascinating column analyzing the evidence for and against a racial realignment in partisan politics, the aggregated polling data shows that “among Black voters, Biden led Trump by 55 points (73-18), far less than his 83-point margin in 2020. Among Hispanics, Biden led by six points (48-42), compared with a 24-point advantage in 2020.”
My purpose is to try to answer the inevitable next question. If the realignment is real, what does it mean? In the short term, even a slight racial realignment may make it more difficult for Biden to defeat Trump, but in the long term, any realignment that moves our democracy from identity-based division to idea-based disagreement is healthy for the United States.
If you look across American history and if you survey the world, you’ll see the pernicious effects of separating citizens on the basis of identity, broadly construed. Whether it’s Sunni versus Shia in Iraq, Catholic versus Protestant in Northern Ireland, the class-based purges of various communist revolutions, the antisemitism of Nazi Germany or the Tutsi-Hutu clashes in Rwanda, identity-based divisions dehumanize opponents and incentivize collective punitive action.
America’s identity divisions have largely clustered around race, but events like the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1844, in which nativist Protestant mobs attacked Catholic churches and Irish American immigrants, indicate that other identity characteristics can trigger violence, as well. Identity politics are uniquely vulnerable to that zero-sum messaging: me and mine versus you and yours.
But when fundamental ideas are at stake, there is an opportunity for persuasion. It’s nonsensical to think about trying to talk someone out of his race or class (religion can also become an identity far more than an idea), but you can talk someone into your favored welfare policy or your favored foreign policy.
To put it another way, when ideas trump identities, hatred becomes an obstacle to success because it interferes with your ability to persuade. When identities trump ideas, hatred is an asset. Whipping up fear and hatred of the other is the shortest route to political success. The more fear, the more hatred, the better the turnout.
There are times when defensive identity politics are both prudent and necessary. When the South’s white majority mobilized against its Black minority, group solidarity among Black citizens became a matter of survival. But even then, the civil rights movement couldn’t succeed unless it persuaded a sufficient number of Americans of an idea: that the Declaration of Independence meant what it said, that all men and women are created equal and that we all possess unalienable rights.
Let’s return to America’s potential racial realignment. There is evidence that it’s being driven by ideas, but there’s also a kernel of concern that it might also be driven by identity — specifically, the religious identity of nonwhite Democrats.
First, let’s deal with the evidence that ideology is driving the realignment. As Edsall notes in his piece, “detailed election study data breaking down voting trends by race, ethnicity and ideology shows that the defections of Black and Hispanic voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party are heavily concentrated among those who describe themselves as conservative.” Trump won a substantially greater share of conservative Black, Hispanic and Asian voters in 2020 than he won in 2016.
Writing in The Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr. sums up the ideological change theory nicely: “So we increasingly have a Democratic Party of people of all races with more liberal views on racial issues — and a Republican Party that has the voters (white and of color) with conservative views, including on racial issues.”
But the racial realignment doesn’t necessarily mean the end of identity politics. We’d be no better off if we substituted religion for race as the central division in American politics. And make no mistake, there is a “God gap” in American politics. According to data from the Pew Research Center, nonwhite Democrats on average possess religious beliefs that are much more like those held by Republicans than those held by white Democrats.
Pew reports that 72 percent of white Republicans and 60 percent of nonwhite Republicans “believe in God as described in the Bible.” Sixty-one percent of nonwhite Democrats agree, but only 32 percent of white Democrats have the same belief. That distinction represents a significant culture clash within the Democratic coalition. For every white atheist progressive posting scornfully about Christianity online, there’s a Black Baptist reading her Bible every day.
The historic connections between Black voters and the Democratic Party are deep enough that the religious distinctions are less important than they are for other voting blocs, most notably Hispanic Americans. Not only do Hispanic voters possess dozens of different national cultures — Mexicans are not Cubans, Cubans are not Venezuelans, and so on — they also have different histories in and with the United States, and they have distinct religious experiences. Namely, South Americans and the Hispanic population in the United States are in the midst of a religious upheaval, with millions leaving the Catholic Church to become evangelical or Pentecostal.
Smart observers saw this coming. My newsroom colleague Jennifer Medina wrote a report in 2020 noting that conversations with “Hispanic evangelicals around the country over the course of the year make clear that religious identity is often a more fundamental part of their political affiliation than ethnic identity.” While “Hispanic evangelicals make up a small slice of the electorate,” Medina wrote, “they are a key to Mr. Trump’s consistent support from roughly one-third of Hispanic voters, particularly in battleground states including Florida and Arizona.”
Indeed, the emerging religious identity of Hispanic voters is another reason to be wary of Christian nationalism. As I wrote last month, religious identity politics is a fundamental element of Christian nationalism, and the notion that Christians must rule can be every bit as divisive and dangerous as saying that “whites must rule.”
I don’t want to overly idealize ideological disagreement. We know that debates over policy can be intense and emotional. The stakes are high. At the same time, those debates are the lifeblood of a democratic society. No person, no party and no movement possesses all truth and has all the answers to our complex political and cultural problems. It’s through the combination of experience and debate that we refine our ideas and adjust our policies.
Debate can serve to humanize our opponents in a way that identity politics never does. By hearing other people’s thoughts, we learn more about their hearts — and we can potentially see the good intentions that are never apparent when a person is deprived of individuality and clustered in a group that codes as “other” or, worse, “enemy.”
We don’t know for sure whether a racial realignment in partisan politics is underway. The signs are there, but it may take a decade or more to determine if the present polling represents a blip or a trend. In the meantime, it should give us a degree of hope. The most dangerous divisions in American history have clustered around race, and if that reality does change — and if voters of all races feel welcome in both major American political parties — then even this dark political moment may contain the seeds of truly positive change.
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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