Even before the Democrats witnessed the extent of their wipeout on Tuesday, they were telling themselves (and everyone else), that their defeat was baked in due to the nature of the midterm electorate. The average midterm voter was older and whiter – and to many Democrats, that’s enough to ensure complacency about 2016.
Curious as to the numbers, I compared the 2012 and 2014 exit polls, not just for the ethnic and age distribution, but for how voters within those groups voted. They should give the Democrats some pause.
Yes, the white vote rose (slightly) from 2012 to 2014, while the African-American and Hispanic vote fell slightly, but Republicans also did better within the minorities who voted. The African-American Republican vote rose from 6% to 10%; among Hispanics, the number rose from 27% to 36%. The greatest shift came among Asian-Americans, among whom Republicans actually did worse than among Hispanics in 2012 (26-73). In 2014, Asian-Americans actually went narrowly for the GOP (50-49), a two-decade first.
The age numbers tell a similar story: while voters under 30 were a smaller slice of the whole electorate in 2014, the GOP deficit within the group was cut in half. Among voters between 30 and 44, Republicans nearly tied (they were 7 points down in 2012).
How important are these shifts? To find out, I took the aforementioned ethnic results from 2014 and plugged them into the 2012 exit poll. The result: an electorate that looked like 2012 but voted like last Tuesday…would give the Republican nominee for president a 3-point edge in the popular vote. That would have been enough to flip seven states and 99 electoral votes.
Of course, that didn’t happen in 2012, and there’s no guarantee it happens in 2016. However, it should remind Democrats (and Republicans) that demography isn’t destiny if the people don’t cooperate.
