What is known about the political preferences, participation, and representation of different ethnic groups in the USA? We turned to the Pew Research Center for insights.
As the leading destination for immigration worldwide, the United States boasts a highly diverse population. During presidential election campaigns, both Democratic and Republican candidates compete for the support of the various ethnic groups. We inquired with the Pew Research Center about the demographic makeup of the USA and the political significance of different ethnic groups: Which party do these groups tend to vote for? To what extent do they participate in elections? And are they represented in Congress in proportion to their population share?
What is the Pew Research Centre?
Founded in 2004, the Externer Link: Pew Research Center is one of the most respected nonpartisan research organizations in the United States. It is known for its public opinion polling, demographic research, comprehensive analyses of social trends and other data-driven social science research.
Demographics
Who are we talking about in the U.S. context if we talk about “racial minorities” and “ethnic minorities”?
The U.S. population has historically been majority White. For this reason, certain groups have been sometimes referred to as racial or ethnic minorities, including people who identify as Hispanic, Black, Asian American, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and American Indian or Alaska Native. However, the Externer Link: share of White people has declined in recent decades. The long-term rise of racial and ethnic diversity has caused terms like “racial minority groups” to be used less frequently in the U.S. than in the past.
What are the biggest racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S.? What is their share in the population?
Hispanics are the largest of these groups. The number of Hispanics reached 65 million in 2023 and accounted for 19% of the nation’s population. Hispanics can be of any race in government surveys.
The next-largest groups include those who identify with only one race and are not Hispanic: Black Americans numbered 42 million and were 13% of the population, followed by Asian Americans (21 million, 6%) and American Indians or Alaska Natives (2 million, 1%). The number of Americans who are of two or more races and are not Hispanic reached 8 million and were 2% of the population. The nation’s largest group, the non-Hispanic White population, accounts for 195 million people or about 58% of the U.S. population.
How has this population developed over time, that is: How has the demographic composition of the U.S. population changed over time?
The U.S. Hispanic population reached 65 million in 2023, up from 35 million in 2000. The 85% increase in the Hispanic population was faster than the nation’s 19% growth rate.
The Black population in the U.S. has grown by 23% since 2000, rising from 34 million then to 42 million in 2023. If you include those who identify with multiple races or as Hispanic, Externer Link: the Black population reached nearly 51 million 2023.
The Externer Link: Asian population stood at 21 million in 2023, up from 10 million in 2000. The group’s 100% growth during this time was faster than any other major racial or ethnic group.
Hispanics have played a major role in U.S. population growth. The U.S. population grew by 53 million from 2000 to 2023, and Hispanics accounted for 56% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group.
If we look further back to 1965, the U.S. population has grown by 141 million since then. Hispanics accounted for 40% of this growth. During this time, the Hispanic share of the U.S. population grew from 4% in 1965 to 19% in 2023. The Black population share remained mostly flat, growing from 11% to 13%, and the Asian population share grew from 1% to 6%. Over this period, the share of the largest group, non-Hispanic Whites, declined dramatically from 84% to 58%.
How are these minorities spread across the U.S.? Where do most of them live?
States along the U.S.-Mexico border have the nation’s largest Hispanic populations. In 2023, 15.8 million Hispanics lived in California, the most of any state. Hispanics are also California’s largest racial or ethnic group and made up 40% of the population. Texas had 12.1 million Hispanics and they made up 40% of the population in 2023.
While Florida does not border Mexico, its 6.2 million Hispanics is the third-largest in the nation and are over a quarter of the state’s population. The two largest Hispanic groups, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, combined made up nearly half (46%) of the state’s Hispanic residents over a quarter of Florida's total population.
The three states with the largest absolute number of Hispanics also had the largest Hispanic counties. In California, Los Angeles County had 4.7 million Hispanics in 2023. In Texas, Harris County (which includes the city of Houston) had 2.1 million Hispanics, while Miami-Dade County in Florida had 1.9 million Hispanics. Hispanics are also the largest racial or ethnic group in the three counties.
In New Mexico, the state’s 1.0 million Hispanics accounted for 49% of the population, the nation’s highest share.
The South region of the U.S. has states with the largest number of Black residents. Texas had about 3.9 million Black Americans in 2023, followed by Georgia (3.5 million) and Florida (3.5 million).
The U.S. counties with the largest Black populations are Cook County in Illinois (1.1 million), which includes the city of Chicago; Harris County in Texas (955,000), which includes the city of Houston; and Los Angeles County in California (769,000). Black residents are not the largest racial or ethnic group in these counties. However, Black residents are the largest group in Philadelphia County in Pennsylvania (612,000) and Prince George’s County in Maryland (567,000), which borders Washington, D.C. The District of Columbia’s 290,000 Black residents are the largest racial or ethnic group in the city.
The West region of the U.S. has a large Asian population, with 30% of the nation’s total in California alone. California had an Asian population of 6.2 million in 2023, by far the nation’s largest. Next is New York (1.9 million) and Texas (1.8 million). Nearly half of U.S. Asians (47%) lived in these three states.
Eleven states have a larger Asian population than Hawaii (520,000). However, Asian Americans are Hawaii’s largest racial or ethnic group and accounted for 36% of the population. In addition, 138,000 of Hawaii residents identify as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Hawaii is home to 21% of the nation’s Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander population.
The three U.S. counties with the largest Asian population are all in California: Los Angeles County (1.5 million), Santa Clara County (773,000) and Orange County (726,000).
Political preferences, participation and representation
Which political party do the biggest racial and ethnic minorities (Hispanics, Blacks, Asians) tend to vote for? What changes can be observed with regard to these political preferences over time?
In the 2022 midterm congressional elections, there were Externer Link: familiar patterns in voting preferences among subgroups. Younger voters, Black voters and those living in urban areas continued to support Democratic candidates while older, White and rural voters backed Republicans.
In the 2020 presidential election, Hispanic voters favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a substantial margin (61% to 36%). This represented Externer Link: an improvement for Trump over the previous election. In 2016, 66% of Hispanic voters backed Clinton compared with 28% who backed Trump.
In the 2020 presidential election, Republican candidate Donald Trump made gains among Hispanic voters. Even as Democratic candidate Joe Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall compared with 2016. There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters.
Apart from the small shift among Hispanic voters, Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral coalition looked much like Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, with Black, Hispanic and Asian voters and those of other non-White racial groups Externer Link: casting about four-in-ten of his votes. Nationwide, Black voters remained overwhelmingly loyal to the Democratic Party in 2020, with 92% voting for Biden and 8% supporting Trump.
What is generally known about political participation of different racial or ethnic groups, e.g. with regard to their voter turnout?
White Americans are Externer Link: much more consistent voters than Black, Hispanic or Asian Americans. Compared with the national average of 37% who voted in 2018, 2020 and 2022, 43% of White citizens who were at least 18 years old and thus eligible to vote in all three elections did so; just 24% did not vote in any of these.
Black, Hispanic and Asian adults lagged far behind, with 27% of Black, 19% of Hispanic and 21% of Asian age-eligible citizens voting in all three elections. Hispanic citizens were most likely to have not voted in any of the most recent three general elections (47%, compared with 36% for Black and 31% for Asian citizens ages 22 and older in 2022).
Is the influence of Hispanics, Black Americans, and Asian Americans on election outcomes growing in light of their increasing demographic significance?
Hispanics have Externer Link: grown at the second-fastest rate of any major racial and ethnic group in the U.S. electorate since the last presidential election. An estimated 36.2 million are eligible to vote this year (2024), up from 32.3 million in 2020. This represents 50% of the total growth in eligible voters during this time.
Every year, about 1.4 million Hispanics in the U.S. become eligible to vote.
U.S. presidential elections are decided by a series of statewide elections in a Externer Link: system called the Electoral College – i.e. presidents are not elected directly by the people, but indirectly via electors, who are appointed by the respective states and whose number depends on the size of the population. This makes state populations of Hispanic, Black and Asian eligible voters especially relevant in presidential elections. In 2024, political analysts are closely watching the most competitive states, also called “swing” or “battleground” states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Hispanic, Black and Asian voters all could play an important role in determining the outcome of 2024 elections, including in several battleground states. In Arizona, Hispanics account for 25% of the state’s eligible voters as of 2022. In Georgia, Black Americans account for 33% of eligible voters as of 2022. And in Nevada, Asians make up 11% of the eligible voter population and Hispanics are 22% of this population.
What is known about the political representation of non-White population groups, e.g. in Congress?
When the 118th U.S. Congress was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2023, a Externer Link: quarter of voting members of the U.S. Congress identified their race or ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic White, making the 118th Congress the most racially and ethnically diverse in history. This continues a long-running trend toward more racial and ethnic diversity on Capitol Hill: This is the seventh Congress to break the record set by the one before it.
Overall, 133 senators and representatives today identified as Black, Hispanic, Asian American, American Indian or Alaska Native. This number has nearly doubled in the two decades since the 108th Congress of 2003-05, which had 67 minority members.
The vast majority (80%) of racial and ethnic minority members in the 118th Congress were Democrats, while 20% were Republicans. This split was similar to the previous Congress, when 83% of non-White lawmakers were Democrats and 17% were Republicans.
Despite growing racial and ethnic diversity on Capitol Hill, members of Congress are still far more likely than the Externer Link: overall U.S. population to be non-Hispanic White (75% vs. 59%). This gap is about as wide as it was in 1981, when 94% of members of Congress were White, compared with 80% of the U.S. population.
Have there been any recent changes in the political preferences, participation and representation of ethnic minorities in the US?
Joe Biden’s Externer Link: extraordinary decision to not pursue the Democratic nomination for president has upended the 2024 presidential race. With Kamala Harris having secured the Democratic nomination, much remains to be learned about how Latino, Black and Asian voters view her as a candidate. As Election Day approaches in November, the Pew Research Center will be asking Americans about their views of Harris, Donald Trump and the issues most important to them as they decide how they will vote. In an Externer Link: August 2024 survey conducted before the Democratic National Convention, Hispanic voters favor Harris over former President Donald Trump by a 17-point margin (52% to 35%). By comparison, Black voters favor Harris over Trump by a far wider margin (77% vs. 13%), while Asian voters also favor Harris over Trump (62% vs. 28%).
Vera Hanewinkel submitted the questions in writing.
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