By John Ray (@johnlray)

In this post we look at the 2016 and 2018 behavior of US voters, and compare some of their attitudes on race based on our What The Hell Happened project. While in previous posts we created full breakdowns by 2012-2016-2018 vote, here we simplify by focusing on who switched from 2016 to 2018 -- largely due to sample size concerns, but also for simplicity. In our survey (full dataset and codebook available here), including weighted counts, we had:

1,343 voters who voted Democrat in both 2016 and 2018 ( Dem-Dem )

1,252 voters who voted Republican in both 2016 and 2018 ( Rep-Rep )

285 voters who didn’t vote or voted third party in 2016 and voted Democrat in 2018 ( Other/NV-Dem )

205 voters who didn’t vote or voted third party in 2016 and voted Republican in 2018 ( Other/NV-Rep )

89 voters who voters who voted Republican in 2016 and Democrat in 2018 (Rep-Dem)

Even considering only two cycles of data rather than three, we still don’t really have enough voters who flipped from Democrat to Republican from 2016 to 2018 (just 36, all told), so we’re going to exclude them for now.

This post focuses on certain measures of race and shows that voters who swung from the Republicans to the Democrats from 2016 to 2018 are much closer to the GOP on race issues than to the Democrats. This is important for Democrats to know because the Republicans will have an outspoken racist at the top of the ticket in 2020. We’ve proposed some policy-based ways forward here, but whatever the way forward is, Democrats must be prepared for a voting middle that is significantly worse on race than we might hope.

We included several measures in our survey that tap directly into racial animus, and several items that tap into so-called “cultural values” that we know correlate highly with views on race. One of those is views on the Confederate flag. Specifically, in our survey, we asked voters:

Which of the following is closer to your view regarding the Confederate flag?

<1> The Confederate flag is mostly a symbol of Southern heritage and culture

<2> The Confederate flag is mostly a symbol of slavery and white supremacy

<3> Don't know

Overall, voters were narrowly split on this: About 44 percent of respondents said it is mostly a symbol of slavery and white supremacy, 48 percent said it was a symbol of Southern heritage, and about 8 percent said they were unsure (For context, 8 percent is roughly normal for an item of this kind). But among voters who switched from Republicans to Democrats in 2018, their views were much closer to traditional Republicans: 72 percent of Rep ‘16 to Dem ‘18 voters felt it was a symbol of Southern heritage, which is statistically equivalent to the 62 percent of those who didn’t vote in 2016 or voted for a third party in 2016 to voted for a Republican in 2018, and slightly below the 90 percent of loyal Republicans who said it was a symbol of Southern heritage.

Democrats were the opposite: 81 percent of loyal Democrats recognize the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery and white supremacy, as do 66 percent of those who didn’t vote in 2016 or voted for a third party in 2016 and voted Democrat in 2018. Those quantities are well outside the confidence intervals needed to assert that Democrats and non-voters or third party voters turned Democrats are different from Rep-Dem voters on the question of the Confederate flag.