By Sean Last

Most non-White Americans vote for the democrat party. African Americans do so by the largest margins.

Hispanics consistently vote Democrat, but by lesser margins:

Asians vote democrat by about the same margin as Hispanics, but they used to be Republicans:

Still, not all non-Whites are Democrats, and in this post I am going to take a look at what variables predict non-Whites being republican. Unless otherwise stated, this is all based on data from the General Social Survey.

Demographic Variables

At every level of education, non-Whites identify on net with the Democrats. Among most groups, education has a non-linear relationship with education such that republicanism peaks among those with either 2 or 4-year degrees. A different pattern is seen among Blacks, where more education decreases republicanism up until graduate school, at which point the probability of an African American being republican doubles, nearly returning the rate seen among high school dropouts.

(These analyses are based on GSS data, where “Asian” is defined as answering the “ETHNIC” variable with any Asian country, and the other racial categories are based on the “racehisp” variable.)

We see a similar pattern, with non-Whites identifying as Democrats on net at every level, if we look at self-rated socio-economic class.

We can replicate this same basic finding once again by looking at marital status:

Religion bucks this trend, but only for Asians:

This probably isn’t very surprising since Hispanics and African Americans tend to be pretty religious in general, and they tend to be Democrats. Pew Polling has found similar results:

Political Ideology

Turning to self-rated political ideology, Hispanic conservatives are pretty split in terms of party ID, Asian and White conservatives are Republicans, and conservative Blacks overwhelmingly identify with the Democrat party.

If we look closer, we find that economic views and views on race can take on values that predict Asians and sometimes Hispanics being Republican while Christian social issues cannot.

Consider the following data on wealth redistribution and party ID, first among Whites:

Among Blacks, economic ideology makes little difference in party ID.

Economic ideology makes a big dent in Hispanic party ID, but not enough to single-handedly make them Republicans.

And then there are Asians, who do flip party based on economic ideology, but by a lesser margin than do Whites.

I checked this against voting, combing the years 2000 – 2012 together to get a sample big enough to do anything with. Here are the results for Asians (N=213)

This is fairly consistent with the party ID data. Interestingly, analyzing Hispanics (N=658) the same way implies that they actually can be made into Republicans, at least in terms of voting, by economic ideology.

Now, turning to racial politics, what we see is that right views on affirmative action and immigration can predict a switch of party among Whites and Asians but not Hispanics and Blacks.

White and Asian Americans who feel that Blacks should get no special treatment from the government are Republicans:

While the republicanism of Blacks and Hispanics is related to their views on affirmative action, even when they are totally against it they are still on net democrats:

Turning to immigration, we once again see the pattern of Asians and Whites identifying as Republicans when they take a conservative stance and other groups failing to do so.

Turning to non-racial social issues, only Whites become net republicans when they are pro-life (based on a question asking whether abortion should be legal for any reason):

The same is true when it comes to gay marriage:

Parental Ideology

It would be interesting to look at the Party ID of the children of non-White republicans. Sadly, I haven’t found that data, but we can estimate it based off of how much regression to the mean normally takes place. The reported correlation between parent and offspring party ID is around .3. This might not apply to all races, but it’s the best estimate I’ve been able to find, so that’s what I’ll use.

The GSS has a 7 point party ID scale. If a population’s mean was 3, it would have roughly equal numbers of republicans and democrats. Above three and you’d expect more Republicans. Here are the means and standard deviations by group:

Race Mean SD Asian 2.58 1.68 White 3.16 1.98 Hispanic 2.41 1.61 Black 1.31 1.49

And here is how the children of Republicans would be predicted to score, based on a .30 correlation:

Race Parent Score Child Score White 5 3.7 6 4 Asian 5 3.3 6 3.6 Hispanic 5 3.2 6 3.5 Black 5 2.4 6 2.7

As can be seen, the children of White, Asian, and Hispanic Republicans would be predicted to be net republicans. The children of even highly partisan Black republicans would still be predicted to lean Democrat.

Let’s now turn to look at each non-White race in isolation.

Asian Republicans

Before the year 2000, Asian Americans voted for the Republican party in presidential elections. To be specific, the margin by which they vote Democrat has increased by 80 points since 1992.

So, why did Asian Americans switch parties? When I first considered this question, I thought that the ethnic makeup of Asian Americans might have changed in a way that shifted them to the left. Here is how the Asian American population changed between 1990 and 2012:

In 2012, Pew Polling found the following concerning the political views of Asian Americas:

It is noteworthy that even today Vietnamese and Filipino Americans lean Democrat by less than the general public does. But none of these groups lean Republican, meaning that there has apparently been a shift to the left within each group over the last two decades.

Still, if the political orientations of these ethnicities were stable across time then demographic change that has taken place among Asian Americans would have pushed their net democrat identification 18 points higher. So, it is plausible that around 1/4 of the difference can be attributed to demographic changes, especially the increase of Indian Americans.

Another possibility is that assimilation may play a role. Pew data suggests finds that the proportion of Asian Americans who identify with either major party is higher in the second generation than the first, and the rate of Democrats relative to Republicans falls from 1.81 in the first generation to 1.65 in the second.

The majority of Asian Americans are foreign-born, and most foreign-born Asian Americans are naturalized citizens, meaning they can vote. Since 1990, a wave of immigration has increased the number of Asian Americans has increased from 6.9 million to 20.4 million. The proportion of Asian Americans who are foreign-born probably increased during that time and that probably shifted Asian Americans to the left.

It’s worth pausing here and asking why it is that Asian Americans are more republican in the second generation. According to Pew data, foreign-born Asians are slightly to the right of the US public on homosexuality, but native-born Asian Americans are way to the left. Asian Americans are to the left of the public on abortion, too, and this is especially true of native-born Asians. Relative to the general public, Asians are also more in favor of bigger government, but this is less true (though still true) of native-born Asian Americans. Thus, it seems that economic views may be what pushed Asian Americans to the right in the second generation. This would be in line with data reviewed earlier showing that economic views had a larger effect than social views on Asian American party ID.

Another possible factor is education. Maybe, college turns people into Democrats, and more Asians have been going to college lately, and so they have been shifted to the left. Moreover, maybe the power of college to push people to the left has increased too.

One problem with this explanation is that, as we’ve already seen, the republicanism of Asian Americas peaks among those with a 2-year degree.

Still, maybe the shift leftward has been more substantial among Asians who go to college. So, I checked that:

I have no idea how to make sense of this and assume it’s a fluke. There has been a considerable shift to the right among Asian Americans with 2-year degrees and a moderate change to the left among those with a bachelor’s degree, graduate degrees, and no high school degrees. Among those with high school degrees, there hasn’t been much change at all. At least, according to this data set, which is probably wrong due to splitting the sample into ten categories.

Another problem with the education hypothesis is that Asian American educational attainment didn’t change much in the 90s, a period which saw a significant change in their voting pattern.

So, Asian Americans moved to the democrat party at a time when their educational attainment was relatedly stable, and there was no clear shift to the left particularly among Asian college students. So much for education.

Here’s another idea: Asian Americans come from non-Christian countries, in recent decades the GOP has become more explicitly Christian, and this drove away Asian Americans. We saw some support for this already, highly religious Asian Americans are equally likely to identify as Republicans or Democrats. (And yes, most religious Asian Americans are Christians, but they have more non-Christians than other groups do.)

The GSS has a question that asks participants to rate how much they like protestants on a scale of 1 to 100. I found that 26% of Asian Americans who gave a rating of 50 or less identified as Republican. Among those who gave a rating of 51 or more, 59% identified as Republican. That seems like pretty good support for the hypothesis, but the sample size was small: only 67 Asian Americans answered all the questions necessary to be included in the analysis.

Further support for this hypothesis comes from Pew data showing that Christian Asian Americans identify, on net, as Republicans:

This is interesting since being right wing on social issues doesn’t push Asian Americans to the Republican side of the isle. Given this, Christianity is probably more a proxy for assimilation, and possibly a factor that lessens a negative response to the particular version religiosity of evangelical Republicans.

Having light skin color also correlates with republicanism among Asian Americans, but even very light skinned Asian Americans are net democrats.

So, the following things predict an Asian American being a Republican: having republican parents, being a Christian, being anti-wealth redistribution, and being anti-affirmative action.

Hispanic Republicans

So, a search for republican Hispanics is obviously going to start with Cubans.

Cubans have been becoming less Republican with time:

In fact, Pew reports that “Over half (56%) of Cubans ages 18 to 49 identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party compared with 39% of those 50 years and older. Conversely, older Cubans tend to identify with or lean toward the Republican Party more than younger Cubans, by 44% to 23%. Even so, the share of older Cubans who are Republican has declined over time. In 2002, among all Cubans, some 68% who were 50 and older said they identified with or leaned toward the Republican Party.”

Still, the majority of Floridian Cubans voted for Trump:

So, Cubans are Republicans, but might not be for long.

Cubans are often thought to be republican due to their experience with communism. That might be true, but it isn’t self evidently true. Immigrants from other communist nations, including the former USSR, typically vote democrat.

Another, not mutually exclusive, explanation is that Cubans lean republican due to their high levels of European admixture. There is a weak -.18 correlation between how White a Hispanic country is and how democrat immigrants from that country are. This would predict a difference in democrat advantage of 22 points if a population went from 0% White to 100% White, suggesting that it cannot explain the majority of the difference between Cubans and other Latin American groups.

Among Hispanic Americans, there is a negative correlation between skin darkness and republicanism too.

However, even the lightest skinned Hispanics seem to slightly lean democrat. So European admixture may play an important role in Hispanic party ID, but, so far as I am able to tell, it alone can’t make Hispanics republican.

Since Hispanics who want immigration reduced by a lot are still net Democrats, it would be surprising if Hispanics became Republicans when they got the change to vote for a pro-immigration Republican. Data bares out that this does not happen. This can be seen by comparing Pete Wilson of California and Geroge Bush of Texas, two governors who, in the 1990s, were seen as taking opposite approaches on how the GOP should deal with Hispanics. Both candidates lost Hispanics by similar margins, and while Wilson’s push to deny welfare to illegal immigrants seems to have pushed Hispanics in CA to the left, they were net Democrats before that (Monogan and Doctor, 2017).

Similarly, analyses of support for congressional candidates based on their NumbersUSA grade finds that Hispanics are no more likely to vote for Republicans when they are pro-immigration (Hawley, 2013). (A is very anti-immigration, F is very pro-immigration).

The same study found that, as the GSS data would predict, White support for Republicans was predicted by their immigration stance with anti-immigrant republicans receiving more of the White vote.

So much for that. How about assimilation? According to Pew, US-born Hispanics lean Democrat by less than foreign-born Hispanics, but they are still democrats by large margins. When I looked at GSS data, I found the opposite pattern, but in either case, both groups are overwhelmingly democrat.

Sometimes, people worry that Hispanics who assimilate well stop self-identifying as Hispanic. To try and get around this, I looked at party ID among those who claimed their ancestors came from a (non-European) Spanish country by the number of grandparents a person born outside the US a person claimed to have.

Grandparents Born Abroad 0 1 2 3 4 Democrat 74.10% 65.60% 71.70% 69.20% 74.10% Republican 25.90% 34.40% 28.30% 30.80% 25.90% N 250 101 258 94 1406

As can be seen, no column has a Republican majority. As can be seen, we find the same thing if we switch to self-identified Hispanics:

Grandparents Born Abroad 0 1 2 3 4 Democrat 68.8% 62.1% 73.1% 55.2% 73.9% Republican 31.2% 37.9% 26.9% 44.8% 26.1% N 222 70 175 63 988

So, that’s it for Hispanics. Being Cuban predicts them being republican, unless their young, and being economically right wing sometimes predicts them voting Republican, even if they don’t identify as a Republican.

Black Republicans

Black people have been voting for the Democrats since 1936.

It is worth noting that this is during a period in which many Democrats defended segregation and that FDR himself as president refused to back anti-lynching laws. In 1932, Blacks did not vote for FDR, who at that time ran on a free market message. So, this switch can plausibly be attributed to Blacks being pro New Deal.

Black support for the democrat party fell in the 50s. This might be because the New Deal was over, or it might be because Eisenhower established a supreme court that banned segregation and then marched the national guard into the South to enforce this ruling. It might be both. Or it might be about something else entirely.

In any case, Black support for the democrats skyrocketed in 1964. This isn’t surprising since national support for democrats skyrocketed in 1964. But, unlike the national vote, the Black vote did not return to where it was before 1964 as the years moved on.

Again, it’s worth noting that the Republican party was not especially associated with racism at this time. Southern Democrats were. And sure, Goldwater opposed the civil rights act on libertarian grounds, but the Republican party as a whole voted for the bill by a larger margin than did the Democrats. The Nixon administration, which Blacks voted heavily against, expanded affirmative action and required government officialsto hire non-Whites rather than Whites.

In the 1970’s, the GSS asked the following question:

Which party, the Republican or the Democratic, do you feel will do more to help blacks in the next few years, or do you think there isn't much difference between the two?

This question was asked to 170 Blacks. Only 3 answered with the Republican party, and of those three, two, or 66% of them, self-identified as Democrats. There were 45 Black respondents who said that there wasn’t much of a difference, and 38, or 83%, of them, identified as Democrats. And then there were the 122 respondents who said the democrat party, of which 97% identified as Democrats.

We also saw, above, that opposing affirmative action doesn’t make Blacks into Republicans, nor does opposing welfare in general.

We see the same thing if we look at party ID among Black Americans by their attitude towards school busing aimed at desegregation. (A policy which, according to the GSS, most Blacks favored and most Whites opposed.)

View on Desegregation Busing Favor Oppose Democrat 90% 89% Republican 10% 11% N 1314 985

We see the same thing once again if we look at Black part ID by views on segregation.

Should Whites have to right to segregate? Agree Strongly Agree Slightly Disagree Slightly Disagree Strongly Democrat 86% 85% 82% 91% Republican 14% 15% 19% 9% N 75 113 174 1267

It is also worth noting that Nevin (2017) found that Republicans running Black candidates didn’t make much of a dent in the Black vote either.

Astonishingly, Kidd et al. (2007) studied a congressional race between a Black Democrat and a Black Republican and found that even Blacks who self-identified as Republicans only voted for the Black Republican 12.3% of the time. Views on gay marriage and abortion weren’t predictive of Black voting, and to get the probability of voting Republican over 50%, Kidd et al had to restrict their analysis to Blacks, in a race featuring a Black Republican, who self-identified as Republicans, and who self-identified as evangelic Christians, and who supported the Iraq war, of whom 65% voted Republican.

Now, when I read this I was pretty surprised by the idea that Black Republicans would on net vote for Democrats. So, I went to the GSS to check, and these are small samples, but they do show that Black people who self ID as Republicans also report voting for the Democrat, on net, in 6 of 12 US presidential elections.

Year Democrat Republican N 2012 82% 11% 13 2008 68% 32% 27 2004 18% 76% 34 2000 35% 64% 36 1996 62% 28% 48 1992 49% 42% 48 1988 20% 80% 33 1984 30% 65% 26 1980 78% 18% 23 1976 69% 26% 22 1972 36% 64% 33 1968 47% 53% 14

Finally, there’s skin color, which has basically no relation to party ID among blacks:

It does, however, have a relationship with ideology, with darker skin predicting more conservative views.

But, as we’ve already seen, conservative Blacks overwhelmingly democrats, so this doesn’t translate to party ID, which itself only translates moderately to voting.

In sum, there are no variables I know of that predict Black people becoming republicans. Of course, there are Black Republicans, but I have no idea why Black Republicans are Republicans.

Jewish Republicans

Most Jews self ID as White, but they also identify strongly as Jewish. And they are the oldest democrat voting block. Given this, I thought it was worth mentioning that Orthodox Jews are Republicans.

Conclusions

There are a variety of variables that predict non-Whites being republicans. This is especially true of Asian Americans and totally untrue of Blacks. Economic ideology seems especially predictive of partisanship among non-Whites. Religious social issues don’t matter, but religion itself does, at least for Asians and Jews. Right-wing views on race predict Asians being republican, but not Hispanics or Blacks. Due to regression to the mean, it is probable that the children of the rare Black Republican are, on average, Democrats. This is not so for Hispanics and Asians.