Demographic groups defying current trends

[ottermax]

I was thinking about Cuban-American voters and how they have had a pretty drastic rightward shift in the Trump era, which is a bit surprising given that relative to other Latino groups they are generally more educated, very urbanized, and often quite socially liberal on many issues. I could be wrong about some of these assumptions, but it got me thinking what other groups have defied the general trends of the past decade in terms of the education and urbanization divides.

Are there any other groups that are not really following the trends as we might expect?

[ProgressiveModerate]

I think a lot of it depends upon if there's a cultural externality. Some other good examples would be:

-Southern Staten Island (and a few other weird enclaves of NYC). Very white, suburban, relatively wealthy and well-educated, yet has been shifting right and has been giving Rs NUT margins. This is largely due to unique politics of groups like Italians as well as the cultural self-sorting within greater NYC.

-A lot of working class/non-college rural/exurban New England really hasn't shifted as hard right as demographically simillar communities in places like the midwest. New England just has a pretty universal culture that lends itself to liberal politics.

-On the topic of Florida, you have quite a few well educated white enclaves in greater Miami, Tampa, and Orlando that haven't shifted much left or even shifted right (though usually noticeably less so than surrounding lower college and more non-white communities).

-Las Cruces and more generally Dona Ana County in New Mexico shifting left despite being heavily Hispanic and near the border.

-Some parts of the Bay Area feel like they should've shifted left on educational polarization alone, but shifted right. Some may argue Dems were maxed out, but we've seen Dems get higher numbers out of cores like Seattle and Portland plus from 2016-->2020 the 3rd party vote share was notably reduced giving more leeway for Dems to make gains.

-Vietnamese voters in places like Garden Grove CA and Alief Houston. Similar to Cubans, they had a particularly hard shift to the right in 2020, after shifting left for the past few cycles.

I can probably think of a few more to post later.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

-Some parts of the Bay Area feel like they should've shifted left on educational polarization alone, but shifted right. Some may argue Dems were maxed out, but we've seen Dems get higher numbers out of cores like Seattle and Portland plus from 2016-->2020 the 3rd party vote share was notably reduced giving more leeway for Dems to make gains.

What parts of the Bay Area might these be?

[ottermax]

I think a lot of it depends upon if there's a cultural externality. Some other good examples would be:

-Southern Staten Island (and a few other weird enclaves of NYC). Very white, suburban, relatively wealthy and well-educated, yet has been shifting right and has been giving Rs NUT margins. This is largely due to unique politics of groups like Italians as well as the cultural self-sorting within greater NYC.

-A lot of working class/non-college rural/exurban New England really hasn't shifted as hard right as demographically simillar communities in places like the midwest. New England just has a pretty universal culture that lends itself to liberal politics.

-On the topic of Florida, you have quite a few well educated white enclaves in greater Miami, Tampa, and Orlando that haven't shifted much left or even shifted right (though usually noticeably less so than surrounding lower college and more non-white communities).

-Las Cruces and more generally Dona Ana County in New Mexico shifting left despite being heavily Hispanic and near the border.

-Some parts of the Bay Area feel like they should've shifted left on educational polarization alone, but shifted right. Some may argue Dems were maxed out, but we've seen Dems get higher numbers out of cores like Seattle and Portland plus from 2016-->2020 the 3rd party vote share was notably reduced giving more leeway for Dems to make gains.

-Vietnamese voters in places like Garden Grove CA and Alief Houston. Similar to Cubans, they had a particularly hard shift to the right in 2020, after shifting left for the past few cycles.

I can probably think of a few more to post later.

These are great; Staten Island always surprises me from a bird's eye view given its density (similar to Seattle), relatively educated population, and relative diversity. Yet it is extremely right-leaning compared to the average for all those types of communities for the reasons you've named.

Maybe the Florida pattern is a genuine explanation for the migration patterns and political sorting people have discussed but haven't really shown any evidence for.

For both Cuban and Vietnamese voters I've struggled to understand if the recent swings are more of a reversion to older patterns and they just preferred Hillary (which sounds bizarre but maybe the less polarized 2016 election gave more of these voters the freedom to voter more in alignment to existing beliefs until 2020 reinforced older polarization patterns)

[ProgressiveModerate]

I think a lot of it depends upon if there's a cultural externality. Some other good examples would be:

-Southern Staten Island (and a few other weird enclaves of NYC). Very white, suburban, relatively wealthy and well-educated, yet has been shifting right and has been giving Rs NUT margins. This is largely due to unique politics of groups like Italians as well as the cultural self-sorting within greater NYC.

-A lot of working class/non-college rural/exurban New England really hasn't shifted as hard right as demographically simillar communities in places like the midwest. New England just has a pretty universal culture that lends itself to liberal politics.

-On the topic of Florida, you have quite a few well educated white enclaves in greater Miami, Tampa, and Orlando that haven't shifted much left or even shifted right (though usually noticeably less so than surrounding lower college and more non-white communities).

-Las Cruces and more generally Dona Ana County in New Mexico shifting left despite being heavily Hispanic and near the border.

-Some parts of the Bay Area feel like they should've shifted left on educational polarization alone, but shifted right. Some may argue Dems were maxed out, but we've seen Dems get higher numbers out of cores like Seattle and Portland plus from 2016-->2020 the 3rd party vote share was notably reduced giving more leeway for Dems to make gains.

-Vietnamese voters in places like Garden Grove CA and Alief Houston. Similar to Cubans, they had a particularly hard shift to the right in 2020, after shifting left for the past few cycles.

I can probably think of a few more to post later.

These are great; Staten Island always surprises me from a bird's eye view given its density (similar to Seattle), relatively educated population, and relative diversity. Yet it is extremely right-leaning compared to the average for all those types of communities for the reasons you've named.

Maybe the Florida pattern is a genuine explanation for the migration patterns and political sorting people have discussed but haven't really shown any evidence for.

For both Cuban and Vietnamese voters I've struggled to understand if the recent swings are more of a reversion to older patterns and they just preferred Hillary (which sounds bizarre but maybe the less polarized 2016 election gave more of these voters the freedom to voter more in alignment to existing beliefs until 2020 reinforced older polarization patterns)

I genuinely believe Florida is somewhat of a self-fufilling prophecy. It's become a bastion for the modern GOP, so many Dems purposefully or subconsciously never consider Florida as a place to live or look for work while many on the GOP have a possibly irrational bias towards moving to Florida.

For Cubans and Vietnamese, I think it was strongly based on the main messages of the campaign both cycle. In 2016, Trump if anything was seen as more of threat since his rise was somewhat akin to how we've seen socialist and populists leaders rise, and in many ways his campaign message broke from traditional small government Republican policies. However by 2020 during COVID Trump was pretty consistently the anti-establishment/ "pro-freedom" candidate whereas Democrats were the ones advocating for more Government intervention. For these voters, any perception of more government intervention is powerful given their backgrounds.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

For both Cuban and Vietnamese voters I've struggled to understand if the recent swings are more of a reversion to older patterns and they just preferred Hillary (which sounds bizarre but maybe the less polarized 2016 election gave more of these voters the freedom to voter more in alignment to existing beliefs until 2020 reinforced older polarization patterns)

I genuinely believe Florida is somewhat of a self-fufilling prophecy. It's become a bastion for the modern GOP, so many Dems purposefully or subconsciously never consider Florida as a place to live or look for work while many on the GOP have a possibly irrational bias towards moving to Florida.

For Cubans and Vietnamese, I think it was strongly based on the main messages of the campaign both cycle. In 2016, Trump if anything was seen as more of threat since his rise was somewhat akin to how we've seen socialist and populists leaders rise, and in many ways his campaign message broke from traditional small government Republican policies. However by 2020 during COVID Trump was pretty consistently the anti-establishment/ "pro-freedom" candidate whereas Democrats were the ones advocating for more Government intervention. For these voters, any perception of more government intervention is powerful given their backgrounds.

I wonder if different immigrant waves voting differently also matters here. Can't find the posts to quote ATM, but I remember seeing post-2010 Cuban immigrants are a lot more R than previous generations, at least in South Florida. With Vietnamese enclaves in SoCal, it looked like Biden slightly exceeded HRC's raw vote totals so the R swing was entirely due to Trump gaining raw votes. As much as I'd like to blame right-wing disinformation on social media and Trump's stimulus checks, older and foreign-born Vietnamese voters are relatively receptive to anti-China fear mongering compared to people my age who I would've gone to school with. (idk if this effect is stronger than with say Koreans, Filipinos, or Indians but it's definitely a staple of Epoch Times affiliate rhetoric)

[Associate Justice PiT]

-Some parts of the Bay Area feel like they should've shifted left on educational polarization alone, but shifted right. Some may argue Dems were maxed out, but we've seen Dems get higher numbers out of cores like Seattle and Portland plus from 2016-->2020 the 3rd party vote share was notably reduced giving more leeway for Dems to make gains.

What parts of the Bay Area might these be?

     I'm curious to hear the answer to this too. I have a couple of different hypotheses about what is happening, which are ultimately contingent on where exactly this phenomenon is occurring.