There’s a simple assumption that drives much of American politics these days: Democrats will become an electoral powerhouse as the United States gets more diverse, and the GOP will fade into extinction. It’s how Donald Trump rose to power in 2016 on a platform of racist grievances and demographic anxieties. It’s why Tucker Carlson complains about the Immigration Act of 1965 and touts the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. Republican state lawmakers across the country have embraced voter suppression and illiberal rule in hopes of staving off their own political demise.
So what happens if that if that theory isn’t quite right? The U.S. is obviously growing more diverse in the decades to come. But that may not necessarily translate into permanent dominance for left-liberalism or an electoral lock for the Democratic Party. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn explored this possibility on Tuesday with new numbers from the Census and the 2020 election:
The first set of data lays out long-term demographic trends widely thought to favor Democrats: Hispanics, Asian-Americans and multiracial voters grew as a share of the electorate over the last two presidential races, and white voters — who historically tend to back the G.O.P. — fell to 71 percent in 2020 from 73 percent in 2016.
The other data set tells a second story. Population growth continues to accelerate in the South and the West, so much so that some Republican-leaning states in those regions are gaining more Electoral College votes. The states won by President Biden will be worth 303 electoral votes, down from 306 electoral votes in 2020. The Democratic disadvantage in the Electoral College just got worse again.
These demographic and population shifts are powerfully clarifying about electoral politics in America: The increasing racial diversity among voters isn’t doing quite as much to help Democrats as liberals hope, or to hurt Republicans as much as conservatives fear.
One factor here, Cohn noted, is that Hispanic voters in states like Texas and Florida don’t vote like Hispanic voters in Texas and Florida, or else Biden would command FDR-like majorities in Congress and the Electoral College. While diverse electorates helped Biden flip Arizona and Georgia, his overall victory also owed much to his relative strength among white voters compared to Hillary Clinton. “It’s just hard to call it a Great Replacement if Mr. Trump could have won in 2020 if only he had done as well among white voters as he did in 2016,” Cohn concluded.
I’m hesitant to draw any sweeping conclusions about the future of American elections and American politics from this at the moment. On one hand, all that population growth in red states could end up bolstering conservatives’ structural advantages in the Senate and, to a lesser extent, the Electoral College. (Thanks to gerrymandering, it could also tilt the House further in their favor.) On the other hand, that same growth could still eventually turn ruby-red strongholds purple or even blue in the next few cycles. Nevada and Virginia show how this trend already played out over the last 15 years. Always in motion is the future.
More than anything else, I wanted to highlight Cohn’s analysis as a bookmark of sorts. It suggests that part of the conventional wisdom surrounding American politics over the next 20 years is somewhere between flawed and wrong. If nothing else, it’ll keep me from making any grandiose predictions about how our elections will look in 2031 or 2041.
My favorite Trump-era subplot was that UFOs turned out to be real and nobody really cared. During the holiday doldrums of 2017, The New York Times published a blockbuster article on a top-secret Pentagon program that tracked U.S. military encounters with unidentified flying objects. Accompanying the story was footage from Navy fighter jets that showed pilots mystified by sightings of strange things while on missions. If you haven’t seen the videos before, they’re worth watching.
Last week, The New Yorker published an excellent long read by Gideon Lewis-Kraus last week on Leslie Kean, one of the reporters who broke that story for the Times, and the wider resurgence of interest in UFOs1 by the government and the public. It’s a great dive into how officials studied the phenomena during the 20th century, as well as how it became the subject of mockery and conspiricism in pop culture. (The part where a handful of senators secretly funded the aforementioned Pentagon program is a fun window into the defense budget as well.)
You might be reading this by now and thinking, “Seriously, Matt? You’re writing about UFOs?” Yes, I am. I would like to know what’s going on here. If the U.S. government has evidence of extraterrestrial life, that’s worth knowing. If foreign adversaries are flying hyper-advanced drones or aircraft in U.S. airspace, that’s worth knowing. If all these well-trained military pilots are seeing things that aren’t there, that’s worth knowing. And if military radars and cameras are picking up things that aren’t real, that’s also worth knowing. Some answers to this mystery are less exciting than others. None of them are all that trivial.
The Kean profile also shed some light on a smaller mystery surrounding the 2017 Times story. In the original version, the Times reported that former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who helped create the Pentagon program through a black-budget appropriation, “believed that crashed of vehicles from other worlds had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades, often by aerospace companies under government contracts.” The Times then corrected the story to say that Reid thought there “may” have been crashes and that any materials “should” be studied, which is far less exciting. So Lewis-Kraus did what I’m now kicking myself for not doing earlier: he called Reid and asked him about it.
When I asked Reid about the confusion, he told me that he admired Kean but that he had never seen proof of any remnants—something Kean had never actually claimed. He left no doubt in our conversation as to his personal assessment. “I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials,” he said. “And I tried to get, as I recall, a classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.” He told me that the Pentagon had not provided a reason. I asked if that was why he’d requested [special access program] status for [the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program]. He said, “Yeah, that’s why I wanted them to take a look at it. But they wouldn’t give me the clearance.” (A representative of Lockheed Martin declined to comment for this article.)
If you study extraterrestrial alloys from downed alien spacecraft for Lockheed Martin, please contact me at matt@tnr.com.
Michael Collins, the “third man” of Apollo 11, died last week at age 90. Collins commanded the orbiter Columbia while Neil Armstrong, who died in 2012, and Buzz Aldrin descended to the Moon’s surface in the Eagle lander. Though he was vital to humanity’s first landing on another celestial body, Collins did not quite become as famous as Armstrong and Aldrin. “He may not have received equal glory, but he was an equal partner, reminding our nation about the importance of collaboration in service of great goals,” President Biden said in a statement last week.
I have always found Collins’ role in Apollo 11 to be as impressive as his shipmates, if not more so. Armstrong and Aldrin had each other; Collins was truly and inconceivably alone. The thought of orbiting the Moon in a 1960s space capsule in total isolation is terrifying to me. But as Collins eloquently recounted in his 1974 memoir Carrying the Fire, it was not so fear-inducing for him.
Far from feeling lonely or abandoned, I feel very much a part of what is taking place on the lunar surface. I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.
I don’t mean to deny a feeling of solitude. It is there, reinforced by the fact that radio contact with the earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon. I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side. I feel this powerfully—not as fear or loneliness—but as awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation. I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars—and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void; the moon’s presence is defined solely by the absence of stars.
Ad astra, Michael.
Lightning round! A Belgian farmer seized part of France. Someone adopted the demonic chihuahua. Canadian hummingbirds blocked an oil pipeline. Good luck to Nicola Sturgeon on Thursday. Shipping containers won’t stop falling overboard. Student-loan programs may be in deep fiscal trouble. Death to AEDPA.
Some have abandoned “UFO” in favor of “UAP,” or “unidentified aerial phenomenon,” to remove any stigma from the inquiries. It’s a distinction without a difference, so I’ll use the more familiar term.