2013-03-10

The downside of diversity: all against all

One constant theme since the 2012 election is how the Republican party needs to change to adapt to the changing demographics of America. But as this op-ed in the WaPo reports, it's the Democrats who face the bigger challenge because society will not only fracture only white/non-white lines, but across all racial and ethnic divides.

How the demographic shift could hurt Democrats, too
The results were clear. After coming into contact, for just minutes each day, with two more Latinos than they would otherwise see or interact with, the riders, who were mostly white and liberal, were sharply more opposed to allowing more immigrants into the country and favored returning the children of illegal immigrants to their parents’ home country. It was a stark shift from their pre-experiment interviews, during which they expressed more neutral attitudes.
Why is the Northeast and upper Midwest white, yet vote for Democrats? They have far lower levels of immigrants and minorities: they are some of the whitest states in America.
In a more recent example, the city of Chicago began a massive effort in 2000 to overhaul its public housing. Large and notorious housing projects, such as Cabrini-Green, were demolished, and their residents were relocated. More than 99 percent of the relocated residents were African American. The outcome of the effort was the reverse of my experiment in Boston — rather than coming into contact, groups were separated.

Did that separation result in more liberal political views? Voting patterns among white residents living near these projects before and after their demolition showed that it did. After their African American neighbors left, fewer white residents turned out to vote, and voters became less likely to choose Republican candidates, whom they had previously supported at higher levels than had residents in other parts of the city. It seems that the contact with African Americans had politically mobilized whites in Chicago, similar to how Southern whites were mobilized in the 1930s.
There's evidence going both ways: culturally different newcomers move in and the natives organize politically and become more politically uniform in their voting. Culturally different groups move out (the area becomes homogeneous) and voting patterns become more diverse.
To explore whether there was a similar effect among minority voters, in 2008 I conducted an experiment in which I sent a letter to African American voters just before an election in Los Angeles. The content of the letter was simple: It reminded people to vote and included a map noting how often people on their block voted compared with a nearby block. In some randomly selected cases, the comparison block consisted of African American residents; in others, it was largely Latino. When the letter pointed to a majority-Latino block, African Americans were significantly more likely to vote, suggesting that they were concerned about political competition with Latinos — even though both groups vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

In that same year, I examined the voting of Latinos in Los Angeles and found that those who lived near predominantly African American neighborhoods were far less likely to vote for Obama than Latinos who lived farther away — suggesting that contact with their African American neighbors may have prompted them to vote against an African American candidate.

As different groups come
How will this all play out during periods of increasingly negative social mood? Not well. This is why the media and political left in America are determined to promote an anti-white agenda, with an anti-white media blitz. If they can keep the hate united along Democrat/Republican lines, they can continue to win easy political victories. If it break out, as social mood suggests, then there will be a major split among the Democratic party. It may not result in political losses, but it could make the country impossible to govern.

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