"And the county that jumps out to me, there is Starr County. Starr County is the county that has moved the most in the entire country from 2012 to 2024. Hmm. This is a county that Barack Obama won overwhelmingly in 2012, and that Donald Trump won comfortably in 2024..... It's moved continuously in the Republican direction, and the sum of that movement is 89 percentage points. And what's interesting is Starr County isn't just this county that has moved the most, it also is the most predominantly Latino county in America.
And it's not just shifting away from the Democratic party, it's stampeding away from the Democratic party. And while Starr County is this one small county in the Texas border, what you see is that same type of movement in counties with broad Latino populations, whether you're talking about the Bronx in New York City, Queens, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, places with diverse populations have moved steadily to the right, even in a lot of them, where Democrats are still winning, they're winning by less and by a
lot less. I mean, to use like a fancy political science term, we're talking about racial depolarization.... For, for a long time, one of the most important markers of how a person was going to vote in America was what race are you?"
From today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast. Audio and transcript
here (at Podscribe).
The guest is Shane Goldmacher, who wrote the NYT article
"Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward" that we were talking about on May 27th,
here.