… It is a downbeat reality for a region that for much of the second half of the 20th century was actually closing its gap with the rest of the country, helped by the federal war on poverty and the end of legalized segregation. But during the past 15 years […] Read more »
The Trump and the Restless
I promised myself I wouldn’t blog about Donald Trump. But Ron Fournier’s piece about Trump’s candidacy calls for a facts-infused response. Fournier claims that Trump’s candidacy signals “restlessness” in the electorate, specifically among protest voters. There are three main problems with this analysis: lack of specific data about citizens’ actual […] Read more »
2016 Voters, by the Numbers
… Looking at the race through a historical lens, the odds would seem stacked against Hillary Clinton (assuming that she is the Democratic nominee). In the post-World War II era, only six times has one party held the presidency for two consecutive terms, and only once has that party kept […] Read more »
Will Demographics Transform Southern Politics?
… It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing […] Read more »
‘Brown and Gray’ Dynamics
The demographic revolution transforming the U.S. belongs to the young. That’s the unmistakable message from the latest population estimates that the Census Bureau released late last month. The Census found that along every rung of the generational ladder, the younger the age group, the larger the share of the population […] Read more »
28% of whites say they favor a law allowing homeowners to discriminate
When the Fair Housing Act first came into effect in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a substantial share of white Americans supported the kind of discrimination the landmark law made illegal. They believed that whites had a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. They said in surveys […] Read more »