The News
In the US and UK, traditionally leftwing parties are losing the long-standing support of ethnic minority citizens.
Fewer than half of non-white voters backed the center-left Labour Party at the UK’s general election in July, a trend that played out across areas with higher Muslim and Hindu populations in particular as Labour won less than half of the non-white vote for the first time on record.
And in the 2020 US presidential election, the Democrat share among Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters fell markedly, the Financial Times’ chief data reporter wrote.
SIGNALS
The Democrats’ social justice rhetoric no longer reliably resonates with non-white Americans
White progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are now more leftwing than their non-white counterparts, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch noted. The Democrats’ social justice-oriented “Great Society” rhetoric no longer resonates with upwardly mobile Latino, Black and Asian voters, a Democratic political consultant told Axios. “Democrats cannot conceive that non-white voters are anything other than civil rights voters,” a Republican consultant added. Some pundits are befuddled by Republican candidate Donald Trump’s apparent gains among Black men, for instance, but “no one should assume that Black men are permanently immune to the kind of appeals that have worked for similarly positioned white voters,” Semafor’s Kadia Goba argued.
Ethnic minorities are not a monolithic voting constituency
Talk of a single ethnic minority voting bloc risks obscuring the “stark differences” that exist between different ethnic communities, UK in a Changing Europe wrote in a recent report: For example, Hindu voters were more likely to vote Conservative in 2019 than any other non-white religious group, and British Indians and British Chinese voters tend to be more right-wing on the economy and welfare provision than other ethnic groups, while those of Bangladeshi and Caribbean descent are more left-leaning. While Labour still ultimately commands more ethnic minority support than the Conservatives, that support “could disappear very quickly” in future elections, Focal Data’s chief research officer argued.
