#ethnic-voting

#ethnic-voting

Younger generations have lost faith in American institutions due to nearly two decades of economic turmoil, which has led to a significant rise in populism across the United States.

The cycle of dread and panic, of being driven to the edge at full speed before someone slams the brakes, harms our nervous systems, and has the potential to break our spirits.

Jefferson's words on equality are often seen as self-evident, yet they fail to encompass enslaved individuals, women, and other marginalized groups, revealing a significant contradiction.

As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote. Such a change would likely lead to a transfer of political influence away from urban areas that are younger and more racially diverse, and toward rural areas that are older and whiter.

A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.

Populism may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.

Collating data from the World Bank and other sources in innovative ways, he argues that globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was accompanied by then-unprecedented growth of income in both previously poor populations (notably in China) and people at the top of the world's income distribution (especially those in the West). By contrast, relative shares of world income stagnated or were thought to have declined for wealthy nations' middle and working classes, including in the United States.

Political orthodoxy tells us that younger voters tend to be more progressive on issues like immigration. But in recent years, Europe has seen anti-migrant parties surge in the polls and gain youth support across the continent. In Norway, for example, survey data shows that 24 percent of young people favour limiting immigration "to a large extent" and 23 percent "to some extent."

The cause isn't an abnormal number of deaths or a plummeting birthrate - though that's slipping too, exacerbating the trend - but instead a collapse in the rate of migration from 2.7 million people in July, 2024 down to just 1.3 million in 2025 as the White House does everything in its power to make the country hostile to immigrants.

Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said there was a clear case in principle that what we've seen in the past couple of years is a historically unprecedented dual negative shift in sentiment on immigration.

As authoritarianism accelerates - as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights - people are scrambling for reference points. But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn't who we are.

It's hard to overstate the importance of the myth of mass noncitizen voting to the MAGA mind-set. It's at the heart of the white-supremacist Great Replacement Theory, which claims nonwhite immigrants are taking over America via the ballot box. And it's not just fringe voices pushing this myth. It's the basis for Donald Trump's bizarre claim in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton if not for the "millions" of votes cast by illegal immigrants.

Now, he's one of the 80,000 locals who have been thrust into the centre of the fight for the future of British politics as they prepare to head to the polls this month. These Manchester suburbs have become a microcosm of the wider story of modern British politics: Support for the centrist parties of Labour and the Conservatives is collapsing while emergent left- and right-wing parties are surging in the polls.

Donald Trump has called on the GOP to nationalize elections, which are currently run by states, as mandated in the Constitution. Many are alarmed by the president's words, considering his continued quest to consolidate power and his inability to accept the results of free and fair elections. In short, his desire to nationalize seems like a blatant effort to control their outcomes.