Kevin Drum has a rather strange post up about California and Proposition 187. He argues as follows:
Here’s what California has looked like in presidential elections over the past 35 years:
Unless I made a mistake somewhere, Prop 187 had precisely zero effect. As the non-white population of California rose, the Democratic share of the presidential vote rose in almost perfect tandem. After 1994, it continued growing at the same rate as ever.
This is just the presidential vote, and maybe things are different in other contests. But I’d be interested to see someone take a more detailed look at this. The real lesson here seems to be that Donald Trump’s racist blatherings are likely to have no effect at all on the Republican Party. Non-whites don’t like Republicans, and will go on not liking them.
Bottom line: Extra doses of racism probably don’t hurt Republicans. Minority voters already know the score, so they don’t care much. Until the Republican Party actively goes after the racism in its ranks and actively tries to appeal to non-white voters, it doesn’t matter much what else they do.
I say this is a strange post because Drum is a liberal Democrat, and this is more of a Steve Sailer-ish point to make. Indeed, if Drum is correct, then not only was Prop 187 not the cause of Republican decline in California, but serious immigration restriction remains absolutely essential to saving the GOP nationally. Which it may be! But it’s funny to hear Drum implicitly making that case.
But it’s also strange because, atypically for Drum, he doesn’t look at comparative data. So let’s look at some. Here’s Texas:
It looks like perhaps there was nothing inevitable about what Drum observes about California politics. The non-white (including Hispanic) share of Texas’s population grew at a somewhat slower rate than did California’s, but not a dramatically slower rate. But the partisan balance has shifted almost not at all since 1980, bouncing between 35% and 45% Democratic, with the remainder going to the Republicans (except in 1992 and 1996 when iconoclastic Texas native Ross Perot nabbed a chunk of the vote as well).
That doesn’t mean that Proposition 187 made the difference in the trajectories of the two states. I’m inclined to believe that a wide variety of factors are relevant in assessing the different political trajectories of the country’s two most populous states. But all Drum can conclude from his graph of California is that Proposition 187 did nothing to keep California Republican in the face of a monotonically increasing non-white percentage of the population, while something else has worked for the GOP in Texas in the face of a similar demographic tide.
If you look under the hood, what I suspect you’d see is that non-Hispanic white voters in Texas vote overwhelmingly Republican, and that they have trended more Republican over time, while non-Hispanic white voters in California are far more divided between the parties. As a secondary factor, I’d expect you’d see more Hispanic Republicans in Texas than in California. Teasing out cause and effect for both factors is tough, but the “bottom line” is probably just that Texas is a much more conservative state, across the board, than California is. And it was a much more conservative state in 1980 as well. It’s just that the partisan implications of that difference have shifted, such that California, once a Republican state (it voted Republican in every election from 1952 through 1988, except for the 1964 Johnson landslide), has become solidly Democratic at the Federal (and, frankly, state) level, while Texas, once a swing state (it went for the winner in every election from 1948 through 1980 except for the squeaker in 1968) has become solidly Republican (also, at both the state and Federal levels).
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Texas was Trump’s worst large primary state. He got 26.7% of the vote there, versus 45.7% in Marco Rubio’s Florida and 35.6% in John Kasich’s Ohio (not to mention winning pluralities in Michigan, Illinois, Georgia and North Carolina, and majorities in New York and Pennsylvania, just to round out the top 10 states by population). Whatever is working for the GOP in demographically-changing Texas seems to be limiting the appeal of Trumpism.
But the story is different in other states undergoing rapid demographic change – particularly Florida, where, as noted, Trump earned 45.7% of the vote in a vigorously contested multi-candidate primary where one of his opponents was a native son. If you want a state to watch for the medium-term impact of Trump’s campaign, this is the one. Florida has been a swing state for the past 40 years, voting for the winner in every election since 1976 except for 1992, and voting by fairly close margins in every election in this century. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white proportion of the population has dropped by about 20 points, from roughly 75% to roughly 55%, since 1980.
Florida right now is about where California was in 1994. If, after this election, Florida trends increasingly Democratic, will that validate the thesis of Proposition 187’s critics? Or will it vindicate the immigration restrictionists? How would one know who is right – at least with regard to the politics?