Why Demographics Are Usually a bad Sign of Destiny in Politics
Demographics is destiny? It’s an old expression first coined by French philosopher Auguste Comte which is used a fair bit in political science.
Especially in the US the UK we heard a lot about the thesis that change in demographics will affect politics and it leads to some kind of ‘‘already-written’’ political destiny. There are reasons to doubt this thesis being applicable to politics because voters are not robots and political coalitions change too being on specific events.
It’s difficult to find good evidence anywhere of this change happening like some kind of magic formula and this is why these predictions usually end on the dustbins of history.
Here are a few examples:
US Politics: Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. But he was able to remain ahead in some states (like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas) and keep it close (like in Arizona or Georgia) because he surged among Latino and Asian Americans both living in urban, suburban, and in rural areas. African-American voters under 50 also had a positive swing to Trump from 2016. The reason why Biden won is mainly that enough middle-class/upper-middle-class white suburban voters voted for him.
This makes you wonder something for the future, if the Republican Party has in the future a candidate which can connect even better with minorities - could the GOP win back states like Nevada, New Mexico, or Colorado (at least for gubernatorial elections) because it’s getting more Hispanic with time? As per my initial thesis, I don’t think that demographics is destiny but it’s a myth to think that Latinos/African Americans who are culturally conservative (which is not a small number) won’t turn away on the Democratic Party.
United Kingdom: The 2019 election in the UK told us one thing. Even if demographics are changing in the UK and Brits under 50 tend to vote Labour at a high ratio especially since 2017, the Conservative Party was able to get a new part of a coalition which was similar to what Labour had in the 1960’s which is the culturally conservative/pro-Brexit/populist working classes.
The Labour Party is nowadays the party of the educated middle-classes and ethnic minorities (but not all ethnic minorities vote Labour in the UK), both these groups are very concentrated geographically in the UK. I don’t know if this will hold, but Brexit could mean a realignment in British politics, where the working classes in England and Wales vote Conservative and the middle classes vote Labour.
The issue with the British Labour Party is that the party needs to veer to the One Nation-like policies to win power but doing so risk creating problems for those in the party who are either very left-wing or who are hyper-progressives. And the party membership is composed of very, very left-wing people - perhaps less than during the Corbyn era but they are loud.
Quebec Independence Movement: The late pro-independence Quebec premier Bernard Landry had a theory that a decade after the 1995 referendum, the yes side would win a Quebec independence movement because the yes vote in 1995 was relatively young in demographics. This was another example of a missed prediction which failed because the PQ went in the wilderness after winning a weak minority government in 2012 and losing in 2014 and becoming marginal in 2018 being eaten by both the centre-right ‘‘soft’’ nationalist CAQ and the left-wing Québec Solidaire.
The opposite of Mr. Landry vision happened, nowadays less and less of the youth in Quebec support Quebec independence, and the ‘‘old’’ party of Quebec independence (the Parti Québécois) is the rump Eastern Quebec party right now when Québec Solidaire is eating all the left-wing progressive, eco-socialist, pro-independence vote.
Ontario: Ontario is a good example of how things can change really rapidly in Canadian politics especially provincially. Nobody would have expected before 2018 that the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario would win a majority *because of* of an incredible swing among new Canadians in the Greater Toronto area while the more ‘‘white bread’’ urban areas in Ontario would vote for the centre-left New Democratic Party considering the toxicity of the Ontario Liberal Party brand back in 2018. Was it because of Doug Ford personal Suburban Toronto brand? Perhaps. But the pattern was seen before but not to a point where the quasi-totality of Toronto suburbs swung with huge swings to the Ontario PC Party in one election.
Politics is said to be the art of the possible - and this art of politics makes it possible that pundits tend to overthink themselves too much by being completely wrong sometimes in their future predictions. This is why I don’t think it’s wise to predict politics only based on demographical trends but only on the fact that voters are not static.
It’s not my type to ask for money - but if you want me to write more often - giving a small monetary gift for a coffee/a beer/a book would be appreciated as a sign of gratitude. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/mvail is the easiest way to go. Thank you for your help and anything that you could give will be well appreciated. Even if you give a minimal amount it will be well appreciated as a token of appreciation.