Election Demographic Snapshots

I came across a few interesting graphics about the election today—basically demographic snapshots, if you study them a bit.

First of all, the two issues that got the most people to vote for Trump were, unsurprisingly, the economy and “immigration”, meaning, open borders to change the demographics of American elections forever.

So, check out this map. The spikes show changes from 2020—the bigger the spike, the bigger the change. The first really obvious thing you’ll notice is that there NO blue spikes. None. Just a few dots that are nearly invisible. Next thing, when looking for red spikes, remember that we’re looking at the height of the spikes, not the density of red markers. With that in mind—oh my gosh! The big spikes are really obvious in the border counties of Tejas, southern La Florida, and Nuevo Mexico (even though Trump didn’t flip NM):

Please note also the fine print caveat at the bottom of the map—the AZ and West Coast areas hadn’t yet reached the 95% reporting level that was the cutoff when the map was made. I would anticipate an updated version of this map would exhibit some significant spikes in those areas, too.

In case you missed that message—Hispanic Americans are really upset about open borders. That may also play into economic issues as well, but we’ll settle for the border issue for now:

This is huge for continued GOP dominance in electoral vote rich TX. Those border counties have been heavily Dem for a long time, and the Dems flipped them to Trump—and the GOP if they have any smarts. Everyone knows that the first cut is the deepest. To break a generations long pattern of voting, the first step is what counts—it’s a psychological thing. Once that first step is taken, inhibitions are broken, and those voters may never look back. My parents—ethnic, big city, Catholics, politically involved—never voted for a Republican until 1968. After 1968 they never voted for a Dem again. As far as I know, none of their 8 children have ever voted Dem either.

Now look at this next graphic. In a way, it directly mirrors the “spike” map above, just in a different format, and with a demographic breakdown:

The biggest shifts show up at the bottom of the chart, and were: Young people (18-29), Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks. Obviously, Blacks started from the lowest point of GOP voting population, but it was a relatively significant first step. “Hispanics” and “Asians” are catchall terms for very diverse populations, but in the aggregate the shift was so big for both groups that the shift was probably valid across most of the spectrum included in each category. And now a broad swath of younger people are OK with the idea of voting Republican. Well done, Dems! The real question is, can the GOPers capitalize on this?