Footnotes

 A couple of points to follow up on recent posts:

1.  My last post mentioned a question on whether you "think [name's] presidency will bring different groups of Americans together, or do you think that it will divide them?"  It had been asked early in the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but I discovered that it was also asked under Donald Trump:

                      together       divide

12/2016              37%            58%

1/2017                34%            61%

That was lower than Bush (46% bring together vs. 40% divide in December 2000) and much lower than Obama.  In January 2020, there was a similar question:  "So far, do you think Donald Trump's presidency has helped to bring different groups of Americans together, has helped to divide Americans, or hasn't it made much difference?"  17% said bring together, 54% divide, and 26% that it hadn't made much difference.  Despite the difference in response categories, it's pretty clear that he'd fallen below even the low expectations he started with, which is interesting given that assessments of Trump on many issues remained almost constant throughout his presidency.  

2.  I've seem several more claims that Republican support among minority voters in 2020 was higher than in any year since 1960.  I've forgotten the source for most of them, but Andrew Sullivan said "more non-whites voted for a Republican candidate than in any election since 1960!", which is almost exactly what he said a couple of weeks ago, down to the exclamation point.  But it still isn't true!  It seems to have originated with a tweet from Adrian Gray, who describes himself as a "Center-Right Strategist."  He's deleted the original tweet, and replaced it with what he calls "updated" figures going back to 1968.  According to those, the Republican vote among non-whites was no longer the highest since 1960, but was still high--the second highest in the period, trailing only 2004.  I had a post which said that Republican support among ethnic minorities was just average in 2020.  Why do we come to different conclusions?  First, the composition of "non-white" voters has changed--before the 1970s, it was almost equivalent to black voters--most surveys didn't even have a Latino category until the 1970s, and many didn't distinguish Asians until sometime after that.  The Republican vote is higher among those ethnic groups than among blacks, so as they grew Republican support among "non-whites" improved, even though it stayed the same or declined among each individual group.  Second, I used exit polls, which only go back to 1972.  Gray's figures seem to use the American National Election Studies to some point and then switch to exit polls.  I'm not sure of this, but I have the impression that exit polls show more Republican support among ethnic minorities than the ANES does--if that's right, then the change in data sources would also make Republican performance in 2020 look better.

But regardless of what the exact numbers are, it's interesting that this claim has come to be widely accepted.  Many people want to believe that the Democrats are the party of "elites" and the Republicans are the party of the people.  (Or maybe I should say that conservatives want to believe it and liberals are afraid it might be true).  And multiculturalism has advanced far enough so that "the people" includes ethnic minorities.  So they jump at any evidence of strong performance among non-white voters.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]