This is the racial structure of eligible voters for every presidential election from 2000 to 2016.  Obviously as you can see, the percentage of whites is declining quite a bit.  The percentage of every other race is more or less stable, except for Hispanics, who are growing quite rapidly.

This is a graph showing the party affiliation of each race.  Whites are more or less evenly split between democrats and republicans, leaning more toward republicans as a whole than not.

Minorities, on the other hand, obviously favor democrats.  This is especially true among blacks, who almost entirely favor democrats (I'm counting independents as neutral BTW).

It's things like this which gives the republican party the image of the "racist" party.  But is the ideology of the republican party really so racist?

Apparently when you ask about the political ideology, you get slightly different results.  If we were to go by liberal = democrat and conservative = republican route (which is not entirely true, though it's fair to say that if you're conservative, you'd be more aligned with republicans than democrats, and vice versa for liberals), we'd see a higher representation of that ideology among minorities.  And while the proportions of liberals do appear similar to the one of democrats, there are larger portions of conservatives than republicans.

Which brings me to the question: Why do minorities affiliate themselves with democrats so much?  Why do blacks especially do that, especially when they have substantially larger percentages of conservatives?

This is a very intriguing question because as we see the percentage of eligible white voters decline and so many minorities affiliating themselves largely with democrats, we're going to be seeing a government dominated by democrats in the future unless some shift in the party affiliation of minorities occurs.

Here are some graphs on what issues were rated as more important to whites, blacks, and hispanics.

http://www.amazon.com/Its-OK-Leave-Plantation-Underground/dp/0965521818

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whoisabs i'm not sure
Guess who's back?

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Because Democrats are "for the minorities."

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And how exactly are they for the minorities?  By promoting affirmative action (this wouldn't explain Asians, though, who are generally hurt by AA)?  By generally favoring immigration and granting amnesty to illegal immigrants (although you can't say republicans don't already do this)?

It's hardly as if republicans discriminate against minorities (you certainly see high ranking republicans that are minorities).  They simply don't grant privileges to minorities based solely on their race.

Hmm, could that be a reason why?  If that's the case, it often makes me wonder what the reaction would be if whites voted with that sort of mindset.

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I'd like to see this graph cross referenced with one that shows people's political affiliation based on class (or, because class is so fucked up in the U.S. start with economic status) within racial groups. I think you might start to find some answers there.

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That could be true as well.

Though I am pretty certain that far more than 5% or 6% of blacks are in the middle class or above.  Yet they still largely affiliate themselves with democrats.

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/when_did_blacks_start_voting_democratic.html

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Blacks mostly voted Republican from after the Civil War and through the early part of the 20th century. That's not surprising when one considers that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and the white, segregationist politicians who governed Southern states in those days were Democrats. The Democratic Party didn't welcome blacks then, and it wasn't until 1924 that blacks were even permitted to attend Democratic conventions in any official capacity. Most blacks lived in the South, where they were mostly prevented from voting at all.

The election of Roosevelt in 1932 marked the beginning of a change. He got 71 percent of the black vote for president in 1936 and did nearly that well in the next two elections, according to historical figures kept by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. But even then, the number of blacks identifying themselves as Republicans was about the same as the number who thought of themselves as Democrats.

It wasn't until Harry Truman garnered 77 percent of the black vote in 1948 that a majority of blacks reported that they thought of themselves as Democrats. Earlier that year Truman had issued an order desegregating the armed services and an executive order setting up regulations against racial bias in federal employment.

Even after that, Republican nominees continued to get a large slice of the black vote for several elections. Dwight D. Eisenhower got 39 percent in 1956, and Richard Nixon got 32 percent in his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

But then President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (outlawing segregation in public places) and his eventual Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater, opposed it. Johnson got 94 percent of the black vote that year, still a record for any presidential election.

The following year Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. No Republican presidential candidate has gotten more than 15 percent of the black vote since.

Footnote: Younger African American voters have been edging away from the Democratic Party in recent years. David Bositis of the Joint Center notes "a fairly long-term pattern of decreasing identification with the Democrats by younger African Americans." Of course, it remains to be seen what the 2008 campaign will bring.

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You have to thank Johnson and Goldwater for this divide,

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All men and women are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

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Tradition perhaps.

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It's a possibility, though you see so many whites and other races voting against the political ideology they were exposed to from their parents while growing up.  I wonder why this would not be the case for blacks?

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You have to thank Johnson and Goldwater for this divide,

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Heh, when I was a kid, I was led to believe that black people couldn't vote at all throughout the entire country until the Civil Rights Movement, as opposed to just a select few states that imposed Jim Crow laws.

But anybody who takes a deeper look at US history should know about that.  Clearly, the shift has something to do with advocating propositions and beliefs that would benefit the black community during LBJ (and in the case of FDR, the simple fact that it was clear what Hoover was doing about the economy wasn't satisfactory, virtually uniting the entire country against him).

Since then, the democrats have generally advocated more "pro-minority" propositions - at least if you consider "pro-minority" to be affirmative action and the like.  Perhaps tradition plus this could explain why more conservative blacks tend to vote democrat, despite being more aligned with republicans (except perhaps when it comes to AA and a few other things)?  It could really just be a general question about priorities, I suppose, which the graphs I showed about what's generally important to each race had nothing about racial issues.

    In every country there's some type of a conservative party trying to defend what they see as their country's identity from 'outside influences'. In some Arab countries its the Islamic Fundamentalists. Liberalisms on the rise globally though. Time keeps turning, power changes hands, and culture evolves (or should i say 'rotates'/)

   Give the democrats power long enough and you'll see that they become the same as Republicans. Or maybe even worse, on some Brave new World shit. To me, its only natural.