Minorities Moving Right

President Donald Trump’s return to power earlier this month was remarkable—among other reasons—for the breadth of the coalition that powered it. As Armin Rosen has documented for Tablet, by many measures Jews swung toward Trump, particularly in pivotal precincts. But they were just part of a minority-group wave: Exit polling and precinct analysis suggest large increases in the Black, Hispanic, and Asian vote for Trump.

Although Trump did not win outright majorities of any of these groups, Harris’ underperformance still marks a remarkable shift. The president slandered as a racist and antisemite outperformed prior Republicans among minorities of all types: Why?

One easy answer, of course, is the uniform rightward swing of the electorate, fueled by anger over inflation, an uncontrolled border, and Harris’ barely hidden far-left views. And future elections will probably see some bounce back.

But this argument misses the longer trend: Minority voters, once Democratic stalwarts, have been inching toward the GOP for decades. As the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has showed, the GOP share of the nonwhite vote has been rising on and off since the 2000s. That mirrors trends among Jews: Over the past several elections, the Democratic share of the Jewish vote has shrunk, from around 80% in the 1990s and 2000s to around 70% in the 2010s and 2020s.

As the Jewish demographer Milton Himmelfarb famously wrote, Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. If Puerto Ricans and Jews are both moving right, though, then maybe they’re moving right for similar reasons. Explanations that rely on Democratic antisemitism or affection for socialism are special pleading. The neater explanation is that the same social forces are pushing Black, Hispanic, Jewish, and other minority voters toward the Republicans.

Why are minority groups moving right? As a body of political science argues, the answer is the breakdown of the social institutions that kept them voting for group over ideology. Among Jews, a similar, albeit reversed, phenomenon might be happening: The collapse of Jewish communal life might be giving Jews permission to break from the old ideological consensus.

If that’s true, though, it has profound implications for the political future—of the Jews and everyone else.

In a sense, the question is not why minority voters are moving right, but why they have stayed left for so long. After all, Black and Hispanic Democrats are more moderate ideologically than their white Democrat peers. And the ideological gap between white and nonwhite Democrats has only grown in recent years—implying Black and Hispanic voters should be more willing to swing between parties. Yet in 2020, for example, 60% of Black voters who identified as conservative voted for Joe Biden, compared to 9% of white conservatives. Why?

The conventional explanation for this phenomenon is what political scientists call “linked fate,” the tendency of group members to see their individual well-being as linked to the overall well-being of the group, and so to consider group interest in making electoral decisions. Even if a Hispanic voter would prefer conservative policies, for example, she may still vote for the Democrats under the theory that Hispanic group interest is served by doing so. Such thinking is most common among Black Americans, but has been shown to explain Latino voting behavior as well.

The sense of linked fate, though, is in part socially constructed. Minority voters don’t consider their fates to be linked in a vacuum—they reach that conclusion thanks, in part, to the work of social institutions. In their recent book Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird look specifically at Black political identification, including with the Democratic Party. They argue that Blacks’ lopsided support for Democrats is driven by social pressure from the broader Black community.

“The steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks,” White and Laird write, “means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance with these group expectations.” They show in survey evidence and experiments that Black voters change their behavior when around other Black people—a proxy for the effect of social pressure in general. This “social constraint” strategy helps ensure that Black voters vote their racial identity, even when doing so is apparently at odds with their ideology.

Though it may sound unusual, this is a perfectly rational political strategy for minority groups in a large, pluralistic democracy. Being able to deliver lopsided group margins is one way a minority group’s leaders can curry favor with a party. Indeed, White and Laird identify tendencies toward social constraint among “Southern whites, white evangelical Christians, trade union members, and certain localized racial and ethnic groups.” Social constraint is not necessarily an exception—to the extent that any group has its own political interests, it has a reason to suppress dissent in the ranks.

Can the “social constraint” model explain Jewish voting patterns? As I’ve argued previously, one way to understand Jews’ strong support of Democrats is our unusually strong ideological commitments. Since at least the 19th century, Jews in America have been more left wing than the general public. And they associate those values with their identity. When asked by Pew what things were most essential to being Jewish, a majority of respondents listed “working for justice/equality” as a key component of their identity, with an even larger majority among the non-Orthodox.

But ideology, like partisanship, can be socially constructed. Jews have a strong sense of in-group identity, with 85% saying they have “a great deal” or “some” sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Most Jews have at least some close friends who are Jewish; 29% say all or most of their close friends are Jewish. And Jews are highly concentrated geographically, with roughly half of American Jews living in the New York, Los Angeles, Miami, or Philadelphia metropolitan areas alone.

Collectively, those facts suggest that—like Blacks, and other ethnic minorities—Jews’ “kinship and social networks tend be populated by” other Jews. Even in the non-Orthodox world, a Jewish person’s interactions with both fellow Jews and Jewish institutions may serve to reinforce his ideological commitments. After all, what right-leaning Jew has not been once or twice told his views are a shanda?

If social pressures produce in-group conformity among minority voters, then it stands to reason that they produce ideological conformity among Jews, too. But what happens to that conformity when the social pressures start to break down?

If you wanted to pack the history of the 21st century thus far into a single sentence, you could do worse than “20th-century social institutions collapsed.” As political scientist Robert Putnam has repeatedly argued, Americans have seen a steady decline in “social capital,” the network of interpersonal relationships that provide them informal means of individual security and advancement. The families, churches, and community groups which sustained that capital are in more or less continuous decline. That decline, though, has meant not just a reduction in the available stock of social capital, but also in those institutions’ ability to shape behavior—in their ability to impose social constraint.

A number of forces have reduced the power of social institutions. One is rising wealth. As individuals become richer, their need to depend on others for informal aid declines. Decades ago, the political scientist Ronald Inglehart identified a transition across Western democracies to a “post-material” politics that puts greater emphasis on ideological interests as material needs become less salient. Such post-materialism is represented in much of today’s “culture war,” for example. And it helps explain why groups historically less well-off—Blacks and Hispanics—might be willing to shed their sense of shared fate as they grow richer.

A second reason, particularly relevant to the fate of political coalitions, is the declining power of the parties. Between the Jackson administration and the mid-1950s, American political life was dominated by loose coalitions of local machines that collectively negotiated the direction of the country—and brought voters into line with their direction. But beginning with the Democratic Party’s reforms after 1968, both the Republicans and Democrats have yielded power directly to voters, in turn reducing the ability of those local machines to tell voters what to do.

A third, of course, is the downward spiral of mainline religion. As churches have shuttered, their ability to act as venues for the enforcement of community norms has also declined. Among Jews, that’s taken the form of the slow but steady bifurcation of the population into Orthodox and irreligious, with the large Reform/Conservative mainline in the middle slowly dwindling.

Lastly, historical distance may explain a drop in the sense of linked fate which undergirds social capital. For Black Americans, the shared memory of the civil rights era has helped to encourage political solidarity. For Jews, the equivalent is probably the Holocaust. But as these events recede into the past, a greater and greater share of these groups will not remember them, yielding a decline in their power to produce social constraint.

All of these, though, are long-run trends, while declining minority support for Democrats is more recent. Falling social capital may have been the primer, but the actual trigger was almost undoubtedly the rise of the internet and social media.

Rates of internet access and social media use have increased steadily over the past decade. With them have come alternative venues for the formation of social capital. Once forced to sort geographically and ethnically, Americans now can engage in a technologically mediated search for the peer group most in line with their preferences, rather than having their preferences determined by their peer group.

This sorting can have second-order effects, too. The increasing ideological capture of the Democratic Party by a minority of far-left activists is likely downstream of these activists’ formative experiences in online communities like Tumblr. At the same time, this group’s domination of the party helps drive away moderate and conservative voters previously aligned on identity—who can now turn, instead, to their own communities of ideology.

Writing just before the election, Tablet Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sketched a picture of the shifting lines in the Jewish community. As Newhouse writes, American Jews used to be organized by a set of overlapping affiliations, including denomination, subethnicity, and geography. “As a system, it was layered and messy, but it had internal logic.”

However, Newhouse writes, “this entire world, and all of its categories, is in the process of disappearing.” In its place, she identifies a new, fundamental split, between those uncomfortable with their Jewish identity—at odds as it is with new demands from other identities—and those who have, particularly in the wake of Oct. 7, seized more firmly upon their Jewishness in all its messy complexity.

These categories do not perfectly overlap with the 70% of Jews who preferred Harris and the 30% who backed Trump. And it would be wrong to call the realignment Newhouse identifies merely a political realignment. But the split does seem like a 70/30 divide. And if the foregoing analysis is accurate, that divide mirrors the growing divide within other once politically uniform communities. After all, as the world of “layered and messy” institutions has withered away, it stands to reasons that Jews, like other groups, have replaced it with one where the lines are drawn far more starkly.

This phenomenon does not seem to be restricted to Jews. Young Black and Latino men appear, in particular, to be selecting their ideological commitments over their ethnic identities—identities which have since at least the New Deal been forced by social constraint into a certain politics. And more broadly, political identity has for many groups become more important than ethnic identity, creating within-group divides along ideological lines.

Jews, by contrast, were once socially constrained into a uniform ideological composition. But the decay of Jewish social institutions, and the rise of alternatives thanks in no small part to the internet, has forced an inversion: Jews of all stripes are forgoing socially imposed ideological commitments so they can adhere to their ethnic identity.

There are, of course, both positive and negative implications of this development. The steady decline of community since the middle of the 20th century has been rightly identified as a source of major social ills. So has the rise of social media. Liberal Jews of all stripes routinely bemoan the decline of mainline Judaism—although nobody can seem to really say what to do about it. The world of ethnic affinity, for all of its problems, was a less polarized world for a reason.

At the same time, insofar as these phenomena are freeing Jews and Blacks and Latinos and everyone else to think differently, there is some palpable upside. If voters are more up for grabs because their groups have less control over them, politicians may need to move closer to the median view to compete with them, forcing a degree of moderation in the process.

The big picture, though, is that no matter which group we are talking about—Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and so on—there are no more guaranteed partisan voters. The “coalition of the ascendant” is no more; a very different politics will have to replace it.