Consider This from NPR - What We're Learning About The Electorate That Made 2020 So Close

Episode Date: November 5, 2020

Early on election night, when it seemed clear that Joe Biden was underperforming with a specific group of Latino voters in the Miami-Dade County, a narrative began to take hold: the Democratic Party had failed to energize the Latino vote. But as more results came in from across Florida, they told a different story. Biden would have lost the state even if he had performed better in Miami-Dade, because of President Trump's popularity with white voters. NPR's Leila Fadel reports on Democratic head-scratching about the Latino vote, and Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch podcast talks about the enduring power of the white vote in the American electorate. Listen to more election coverage from NPR: Up First on Apple Podcasts or Spotify The NPR Politics Podcast on Apple Podcasts or SpotifyIn participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

7 a.m. in the east, and this is election night slash morning in America continues. By Thursday morning, it looked real close. Still too close to call. So close this morning in those all-important states. A nation on edge as the vote count rolls on and tensions rise. The big states to watch? Pennsylvania. Mail-in ballots are trending heavily in Joe Biden's favor. Georgia.

A razor-thin lead in this Georgia race. Nevada. It is incredibly, incredibly close here. And depending on who you ask. Arizona, 11 electoral votes, 84% of the estimated vote is in. Now, since election night, news organizations have been evaluating Arizona in different ways. Some, including the Associated Press, which NPR relies on,

called the state for Biden. Others held off. In the latest couple of batches of returns, Trump has done better comparatively over Biden. Depending on the combination, one or two states could make all the difference. Every time we get new votes, the president's lead is going down. And so again, 100,000 in Philadelphia.

And as of right now, 3 p.m. on Thursday, we still don't know the results. But we are learning a little about the coalition of voters in a few key states who made this race so close. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish. It's Thursday, November 5th. and more. Connect with your professional counselor in a safe and private online environment when you need professional help. Get help at your own time and your own pace. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist. Visit betterhelp.com slash consider to learn more and get 10% off your first month. After months of campaigning, we are finally on the cusp of knowing what happens

next in the White House and in the halls of Congress. The NPR Politics Podcast will be there with you every day with the latest results and will tell you what you need to know in these It's Consider This from NPR. 29-year-old Amanda Sandoval had never voted until this year. I woke up early. I arranged for my mom to take my kids to school, and I got there half an hour early, and I waited in line, and I voted. Sandoval lives in Nevada. Depending on how the electoral map shakes out, that state could be pivotal.

Her vote went to President Trump. So did her husband's. Now, they're self-described conservative Mexican-Americans who chose the president because, as devout Christians, they oppose abortion. They also liked his position on school choice and his promise of a better economy. It was a huge moment in my life because this election is so important. It's more important than any other election in history because it's going to dictate so much of our future. But when it comes to the future of the Democratic Party, the president's margins with non-white voters like Sandoval

have them a little bit worried. Sandoval and her husband spoke to NPR's Leila Fadal, who has this story. They're part of what may be a record turnout in Nevada. And in this purple state, Latino voters have been the backbone to every single Democratic presidential win here. Black and Asian voters are also key. And while Biden will win Black and Latino voters by landslides across the country, Trump appears to be getting more, not less support in Black and Latino voters by landslides across the country. Trump appears to be getting more, not less, support in Black and Latino communities. Both campaigns have heavily invested in courting communities of color and Latino communities in particular in Nevada. Musa Al-Gharbi is a fellow

at Columbia University's Sociology Department. It's a glaring indictment of the Democratic Party that in the midst of a recession and a major pandemic, that a lot of minority voters did not believe that their lives would necessarily be better off under Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Despite the outsized economic devastation, deaths, illnesses in the midst of this pandemic for Latino and Black communities. There's hardly a better indication of Democrats' inability to speak to ordinary people about things they care about than this, that in the midst of the milieu we find ourselves in, they still lock minority voters. Garvey says minority voters need to be treated as the individuals they are. Some conservatives, some more liberal, some who want limits on immigration.

People are less concerned at the end of the day when they're casting their ballot whether or not a politician likes them or is with it or gets it or if they're woke or not versus is this person going to make my life, is my life going to be better or worse in the next sort of four years. We really are not a monolithic group. That's Yandra Dixon. She heads Empower360. It engages and mobilizes Black

voters in Nevada. She's a Democrat that runs a nonpartisan nonprofit and believes Nevada will go to Biden because of Black and Latino voters. But she says she's a little disappointed that her party hasn't fully figured out how to really engage Black voters on issues beyond identity. And so because of that, you can get all of the turnout that you want, but you're seeing the results of not putting in the work to engage them when it's the off cycle, to inform them and educate them about issues, to make sure that you're actually connecting to the pain that they're having at the time, and you're able to turn that into democratic results. She says voters she engaged said racial justice was important because it's

been a fight every generation battles, a given. But most important to the voters she engaged said racial justice was important because it's been a fight every generation battles, a given. But most important to the voters she spoke to on Election Day were health care, education, jobs. So the political parties need to engage voters early and often on the issues that matter to them. On Wednesday, she was waiting for election results and paying poll workers and canvassers. You're so welcome. Thank you so much for everything. I appreciate it. Among them was Dante Walker. The 21-year-old almost didn't vote. He jokes that he was like the people he ended up trying to convince to cast their ballots. I don't think I would have a voice or my voice would be heard if I did vote,

or it mattered if I voted. So that's why. He describes himself as very churchy. His work to engage voters, the Lord's work. I came to my decision because I passed on my church. She said whoever spoke unity at the election is the one who's supposed to vote for. Biden was the first person who said unity. So he chose Biden. His cousin, just six months older, chose Trump.

His family, not a monolith. And political parties need to understand that. Because even if Democrats take the overwhelming majority of Black and Latino voters, these elections come down to a few thousand votes in places like Nevada. NPR's Leila Fadl. It's hard to have a conversation about the racial makeup of this election without talking about whiteness. Take, for instance, Miami-Dade County. In southern Florida, Joe Biden struggled with some Latino voters. Early on election night, there was a lot of talk that it would cost him the state.

There have been inroads that Donald Trump has made with Cuban-American voters. And he did wind up losing it. But when more votes from across the state were counted, they told a different story about why Biden lost. Well, first of all, I think we need to clarify because it sounds like that Joe Biden lost the Latino vote in Florida, and he did not. He won the vote. So we're talking about a vote that he won. Now, did he win it by enough? Chuck Rocha is a former senior advisor to Bernie Sanders and Latino voter activist. He says the reason Biden lost Florida has less to do with the Latino vote than with the overwhelming share of white voters who voted for President Trump. White voters. Donald Trump won more of them in Florida.

So no matter how much, even if Biden would have gotten all the Cuban vote that Hillary Clinton got, we still lose the state, but not blaming it on brown people, blaming it on white people where it really lies. Now, the reason... So let's talk about the white vote and why people don't talk about it like that. I put that question to Gene Denby of NPR's Code Switch podcast. The white vote is always there, but we in the media just have a million euphemisms for the white vote. Evangelicals, soccer moms, suburban women, NASCAR dads.

White is kind of implied in American and U.S. politics. And because it's left implied, there tends to be this hyper focus after elections on the way that non-white voters behave. So right now we're hearing a lot about Biden's underperformance among Latino voters in Florida, for example, but far less about the fact that Trump won 60 percent of white voters in Florida. And white voters make up nearly two-thirds of the electorate in Florida this year, at least according to the New York Times. So Trump's viability relies almost entirely on his consistently strong white support. But because we don't talk about white people that way, we tend to focus on these sort of

marginal shifts with people of color. So what is the story that the media tends to tell? I mean, is it really looking at the white vote as somehow a cohesive voting block? Well, I mean, white voters on the top line are not a block in the way that black voters are. Black voters regularly vote for Democrats somewhere like in the mid 80s into the mid 90s in terms of percentages in presidential elections. But it's when you get under the hood that you start to see what looks more like block voting. So white evangelicals, for example, they overwhelmingly support Trump in numbers that look like block voting. Another big part of the Republican base is non-college educated whites. So Trump won almost two thirds of white voters without college degrees in 2016.

And it appears it's early, but it appears he won them again pretty handily this time. Trump also narrowly won most white voters with college degrees that time. But this year, support seems to be about even. White men broke for Trump pretty comfortably in 2016. And Trump famously, or infamously, depending on what your Twitter feed looks like, Audie, won white women in 2016 too. And again, there's some indication that Trump may have done even better with white women this time around. And that's a shift that's worth keeping an eye on as the election data becomes clearer. But when it comes to swaths of white voters, we're really talking about how big the majorities

of support for Republicans go in presidential elections, not whether they'll have the majority. Well, then let's come back to the Latino vote for a moment, right? As it's being talked about in Florida and in Arizona. Put that in the context of what you're telling us about the media and how we talk about white voters. Well, Latino is a kind of pan-ethnic term that doesn't work in a lot of conversations. We talk about this a lot on Code Switch in quite the same way that white does for electoral purposes. For one, lots of Latinos are white. So the Latinos in Maricopa County

have different, you know, familial countries of origin than the Latinos in Miami-Dade County in Florida who moved toward Trump in this election. The Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida are outliers among Latino voters who generally across the country tend to vote for Democrats. Meanwhile, for white people, it's the non-Republicans in the electorate who are the outliers, which is why Democratic coalitions need such strong turnout from voters of color to win presidential elections. The backdrop to all this, Gene, is the white vote is shrinking every year, right, in terms of its portion of the electorate. What does that mean going forward? So starting in the very next election, it looks like these younger, browner cohorts, right, the Gen Zers and the millennials, are going to outpace boomers in terms of voters in the electorate, right? The Gen Zers and the millennials are going to outpace boomers

in terms of voters in the electorate, right? In 2028, Gen Zers and millennials are going to completely dwarf the older generations entirely. And those generations are much browner. And so when you look at white support for Republicans, right, one of the things they have to grapple with is the fact that these are demographics that are much more hostile to the GOP. Younger voters are less inclined to vote for the GOP, not because young white voters are turning away from the GOP, but just because there are fewer white voters out there. And so this is going to be a really big challenge for the GOP in terms of electoral viability in some ways. And people have been saying this for a long time, but the sort of demographic realities become really, really concrete in the next two cycles.

NPR's Gene Demby. Now, if you're hearing this on Friday morning or later, you can hear more NPR coverage of the latest election results on Up First or on the NPR Politics podcast. Links to both of those shows are in our episode notes. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.