3. Asians, 3 percent of the electorate, have been oscillating wildly in exit polls: 73 percent to 26 percent for Obama in 2012, 50 percent to 49 percent for House Republicans in 2014. These may be small and unrepresentative samples. But note that California Asians squelched an attempt by gentry liberals, Hispanics and blacks to overturn the state’s voter-imposed ban on racial preferences in higher education.
4. Whites are constantly told they’re headed to minority status, but they were still 72 percent of voters in 2012 and 75 percent in 2014 — and they’re increasingly Republican. They voted 59 percent for Mitt Romney, the highest for any Republican presidential candidate except in the 1972 and 1984 landslides, and 60 percent for House Republicans this year.
Analysts who separate Americans into two tidy categories — white and nonwhite — assume that the nonwhite category will grow and that whites can’t vote any more Republican than they have historically. Presto, a Democratic America.
The first assumption is well founded. But Hispanics and Asians are not replicating blacks’ voting behavior, just as they haven’t shared their unique historic heritage. In some states they’re voting more like whites than blacks.
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