Steve Sailer Must Be Chuckling

Recall that some little time ago, way back in December, I referenced Dem ueber strategist Ruy Teixeira’s concerns about The Democrats’ Hispanic Voter Problem (It's Not As Bad As You Think—It’s Worse). Today at American Thinker is an article that notes that Teixeira has added another demographic to his worry list: Asians. Please don’t ask me to define that—it’s Teixeira’s chosen term, and I certainly can’t compete with Teixeira when it comes to politically demographic designations. Even if I wanted to.

Teixeira, of course, is the co-author of the 2002 political forecasting sensation, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Teixeira foresaw, back then, an inevitable Dem wave of the future composed of Woke Whites and tagalong non-whites that would submerge deplorable normal Whites. Trump’s stunning 2016 victory came as a splash of cold water in the face of those expectations, and the ensuing five to six years (depending on how you choose to count), despite the ruling elite’s removal of Trump from the White House, has only seen that previous happy scenario further trashed. What went wrong? In an acronym, BLM.

Recall that Teixeira wrote about the “Hispanic” voter problem, while also referencing the Asian problem en passant—some excerpts (it’s a detailed and interesting article in its entirety):

Turning to the nature and size of recent Hispanic shifts against the Democrats—it’s not as bad as you think, it’s worse. Here are ten points drawn from available data about the views and voting behavior of this population. Read ‘em and weep.

…

4. In Texas, perhaps the Democrats’ most prized target for their theory of the case, Biden’s ratings among Hispanics have been dreadful. …

5. In the hotly-contested 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, …, Democrat Terry McAuliffe actually lost the Latino vote and also lost ground among black and “other race’ (chiefly Asian) voters. …

…

7. Latino shifts toward Trump were widely dispersed geographically. Hispanic shifts toward Trump were not confined to Florida (28 points) and Texas (18 points) but also included states like Wisconsin (20 points), Nevada (18 points), Pennsylvania (12 points), Arizona (10 points) and Georgia (8 points).

…

10. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrats have seriously erred by lumping Hispanics in with “people of color” and assuming they embraced the activism around racial issues that dominated so much of the political scene in 2020, particularly in the summer. This was a flawed assumption. ...

…

Consistent with this, Latino voters evinced little sympathy with the more radical demands that came to be associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. … The findings about relatively positive Hispanic attitudes toward police have been confirmed by poll after poll, as concern about crime in their communities has spiked.

…

Clearly, this constituency does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and its supposed intrinsic racism and white supremacy. They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns. Democrats will either learn to focus on that or they will continue to lose ground among this vital group of voters.

So, this time around Teixeira concentrates on Asians. And, not surprisingly, he finds similar dynamics at work within that highly diverse demographic. Teixeira begins by detailing the rapid shift in Asian voting sentiment during the past two years. Up until 2020 Asians had been heavily and safely Dem:

The Asian vote in 2020 was a relative bright spot for Democrats in that, unlike other components of the nonwhite vote, Democrats’ Presidential margins compared to 2016 suffered only a tiny decline …

But even so there were signs of trouble ahead:

However, even in 2020 there were troubling signs of attrition in Asian support for Democrats. The Asian vote for Democratic Congressional candidates weakened in some key races, particularly in California. And in Presidential voting in New York City, the very fast-growing Asian population in Queens swung strongly toward Trump. …

And, yes, just as with Hispanics, matters have only gone downhill since then—notably in NYC mayoral voting and in the VA elections.

What’s going on? It turns out, says Teixeira, that Asians are no more likely to identify primarily as “people of color” than are Hispanics. As a result, Dem policies that have attempted to sell hard Left policies through the prism of racialist CRT theory—as popularized in the public consciousness by BLM—have backfired bigly. Asians, like Hispanics, are realizing that their core concerns are not reflected in the Dem party platform:

So what’s going on? Why are these voters slipping away from the Democrats? One problem is that Asians are worried about public safety and leery of a Democratic party that has become associated with “defund the police” and a soft approach to containing crime. Another is that Asians, like Hispanics, are a constituency that does not harbor particularly radical views on the nature of American society and how it must be remade to cleanse it of intrinsic racism and white supremacy, a viewpoint increasingly identified with Democrats. They are far more interested in how they and their families can get ahead in actually-existing American society.

Note the way in which Teixeira dances around the real issue: What concerns are actually reflected in Dem viewpoints? Who are these people who are driving Dem policy proposals?

Which brings us to the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats are becoming increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools—all areas where Asian children have excelled.

It does not seem mysterious that Asian voters might react negatively to this approach. In fact, it would be mysterious if they didn’t.  James Hohmann of the Washington Post captured the drawbacks of the current Democratic approach well in a recent column:

Efforts to lower academic standards and scale back educational opportunities in the name of racial equity are backfiring on liberals from coast to coast, including in the bluest big cities in America. …

The Virginia governor’s race shows the issue’s potency. While much has been made of Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s emphasis on critical race theory, the Republican also promised to fight against weakening standards for magnet schools. ...

It seems obvious that where this approach will really kill Democrats is among Asian voters. One might wonder how the Democrats did not see this coming. And now they're starting to reap what they sowed. The results summarized above, barring a Democratic change of course, are likely just the beginning.

A few points on the entire range of issues presented by Teixeira.

First, how do you suppose Asian parents are reacting to the Covid Regime’s approach to education, which in large Blue cities still boils down to shutting down the schools at the behest of unionized government teachers who don’t actually want to teach? Beyond that:

1. Regarding Youngkin’s emphasis on CRT in the schools v. the fight against weakening standards, I’m going to suggest that Asians see these two issues as intrinsically linked. Inseparable.

2. Regarding the “public safety” issue that Teixeira says has Asians worried, it’s not exactly a secret that this Asian concern has intensified in a special way since the Dem open embrace of all things BLM. Obviously widespread and unpunished criminality is bound to be a losing proposition in communities that value order and hard work. However, it’s also no secret—despite Left’s narratival effort to blame Trump—that in Blue city after Blue city across the country Asians are being specifically targeted by BLM empowered Black criminals, just as in certain cities identifiably Jewish persons are being targeted for attack. Asians get what’s going on and are no more buying the Left’s narrative than are most Americans buying the J6 narrative of an “insurrection.”

3. Teixeira wonders how the Dems failed to see all this coming. There’s no mystery in any of this. Ideology, by definition, blinds adherents to reality. Teixeira says this in retrospect, but 20 years ago he was at the forefront of a Dem strategy that—however much he sought to claim it was based on economic interest—was inevitably going to descend into a racial spoils division of society. And now Dems have predictably embraced this result. With their Covid and J6 narratives either deeply unpopular or regarded as misleading and irrelevant by the majority, they will inevitably face a reckoning on the basic social issues of crime and education.