GOP Shouldn’t Panic If Whites Become a Minority

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But it’s a mistake to see blacks, Hispanics and Asians as a single “people of color” voting bloc. The 2010 exit poll shows that the Republican percentages in the vote for the U.S. House were 60 percent among whites, 9 percent among blacks, 38 percent among Hispanics and 40 percent among Asians.

Simple arithmetic tells you that Hispanics and Asians vote more like whites than like blacks. The picture is similar in the 2008 exit poll.

Moreover, while blacks vote similarly in just about every state, there is wide variation among Hispanics. In 2010 governor elections Hispanics voted 31 percent Republican in California, 38 percent Republican in Texas and 50 percent Republican in Florida (where Cubans are no longer a majority of Hispanics).

As RealClearPolitics senior political analyst Sean Trende has written, Hispanics tend to vote 10 to 15 percent less Republican than whites of similar income and education levels. An increasingly Hispanic electorate puts Republicans at a disadvantage, but not an overwhelming one.

The same is true of Asians. In 2010 Democratic Sen. Harry Reid got 79 percent from Asians in Nevada, where many are Filipinos. But the Asians in Middlesex County, N.J., most of whom are from India, seem to have voted for Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2009.

The 2010 census tells something else that may prove important: There’s been a slowdown of immigration since the recession began in 2007 and even some reverse migration. If you look at the census results for Hispanic immigrant entry points–East Los Angeles and Santa Ana, Calif., the east side of Houston, the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago–you find that the Hispanic population has dropped sharply since 2000.

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Past mass migrations, which most experts expected to continue indefinitely, in fact ended abruptly. Net Puerto Rican migration to New York City stopped in 1961, and the huge movement of Southern blacks to Northern cities ended in 1965. Those who extrapolate current trends far into the future end up being wrong sooner or later.

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American blacks do have common roots in slavery and segregation. But African immigrants don’t share that heritage, and Hispanics come from many different countries and cultures (there are big regional differences just within Mexico). The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon and in between.

{snip} By today’s definitions we’ll become majority nonwhite a few decades hence.

But that may not make for the vast cultural and political change some predict. Not if we assimilate newcomers, and if our two political parties adapt, as we and they have done in the past.