Black People Are Less Wed to the Democrats

Is the decline of religion part of the reason?

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I just can’t quit Twitter. I really want to. It’s such a time suck and usually it gives me nothing more than high blood pressure. But, despite all the dumb changes that Elon has made to the platform, it is still the place for public discourse on the internet and nothing has even close to dethroning it. Which means I’m stuck scrolling for a few minutes each day to get a sense of what people are talking about and what they are interested in.

Well, the week of Thanksgiving I saw this fascinating tweet from Nate Cohn who is the chief political analyst at the New York Times. He has access to data that the Times collects that are not released to the general public.

Here, he finds that the political partisanship of African-Americans has shifted really noticeably in the last couple of years. For decades the Black vote has been overwhelmingly for the Democrats - usually in the 85% to 90% range. Well, new data from the Times finds that the share of Black voters who identify as Democrats has dropped to just 73% - that’s a twelve point drop since 2020. At the same time the Republican share has basically doubled from 8% to 17%.

That’s a big deal. The Democrats need to run up the score with Black voters because they are not doing well with white voters in recent elections. That’s especially true among white Christians with low levels of education and low church attendance, as I wrote here:

So, I had to dig into this Democratic defection among African-Americans. Do I see the same thing in the data I have access to? And, beyond that, is this a phenomenon that is tied to Black Protestants? Black nones?

Okay, this is the partisanship composition of Black respondents to the Cooperative Election Study. It’s conducted annually in October/November and has a really large sample size. In short - I do see what Nate Cohn reports. But this data indicates that the movement away from the Democrats actually began between 2016 and 2020 - not just since the election of Joe Biden.

The share of Black folks who were Democrats was 83% in 2016. That’s pretty much in line with the historical numbers. Then, it dropped to 75% in 2020. Then, in just the next twelve months it declined to only 68% then it stayed there in 2022 at 67%. A sixteen point drop between 2016 and 2022. That’s not small potatoes.

However, I do fell it necessary to point out where these Democrats have gone. It’s not like all them pledged allegiance to the GOP. The Republican share did increase from 6% in 2016 to 11% in 2022. But the bigger numeric shift is toward Independents. They were 11% in 2016 and 22% in 2022. So it looks like Independents gained about 2/3 of the Democrat defectors and Republicans got the 1/3.

This is the kind of result that demands a peek below the surface, though. So, I broke the Black sample into Protestant/Catholic, Nones, and those from another religious tradition (basically anything that is not Protestant/Catholic).