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History > 2012 > USA > Demographics (I)
Dave Granlund
Cagle
18 May 2012
Dave Granlund's cartoons have appeared
in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune,
Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek.
John Cole
John Cole is the editorial cartoonist for The Times-Tribune,
and is syndicated nationally by Cagle Cartoons.
Cagle
21 May 2012
Obama win
shows demographic shifts
working against Republicans
WASHINGTON | Thu Nov 8, 2012
1:21pm EST
Reuters
By Susan Heavey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tuesday's decisive win by Barack Obama
in the U.S. presidential election highlighted how population shifts - ethnic and
generational - have buoyed Democrats while forcing Republicans to rethink their
message.
Without recasting their core message and actively trying to expand their base
beyond older mostly white Americans, conservatives could struggle even more in
future elections as the nation's population incorporates more Latinos, Asians
and other minorities as well as young voters, analysts said.
First-time voters, including many young people and immigrants, favored the
president by large margins, while older voters leaned to Republican Mitt Romney,
Reuters/Ipsos Election Day polling showed.
Obama won an estimated 66 percent of the Hispanic vote, according to
Reuters/Ipsos election day polling, at a time when the Latino population is
growing rapidly in states such as Florida, one of eight or so politically
divided states that were crucial in the presidential race. Other estimates put
Obama's share of the Hispanic vote above 70 percent.
"The nonwhite vote has been growing - tick, tick, tick - slowly, steadily. Every
four-year cycle the electorate gets a little bit more diverse. And it's going to
continue," said Paul Taylor of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
"This is a very powerful demographic that's changing our politics and our
destiny," Taylor said, adding that the number of white voters is expected to
continue to decline a few points in each future election cycle.
Data has shown for years that the United States is poised to become a "majority
minority" nation - with whites a minority of the country - over the next several
decades. But Tuesday's results highlighted the political impact.(See
link.reuters.com/hyd83t for a graphic.)
About 80 percent of blacks, Latinos and other nonwhite voters cast their ballots
for Obama on Tuesday compared with less than 17 percent for Romney, according to
Reuters/Ipsos polling. Obama also won about 63 percent of total voters age 18 to
34.
Overall, Romney won nearly 57 percent of the white vote compared with 41 percent
for Obama, the polling data showed. The vast majority of votes cast for Romney
came from white voters.
Demographer William Frey said that division is troubling.
The United States has long history of racial divide stemming from its roots in
slavery and including the civil rights battles of the 1960s.
"We still are a country that's kind of divided, and a lot of that fissure in the
population tends to be based in race and age and ethnicity," said Frey, a senior
fellow at the Brookings Institute. "There's kind of a dangerous result in this
election when we see older whites moving in one direction and younger minorities
moving in another direction."
Frey said he sees the gap less as racism and more as a cultural generation gap.
"It's a little bit of a warning sign that we need to pay attention to," he said.
A GROWING PRESENCE FOR MINORITIES
U.S. data released earlier this year showed the number of ethnic minority births
topping 50 percent of the nation's total births for the first time..
It will be years before those newest Americans will be old enough to vote, but
the demographic shift is clear. Most analysts project whites to be the racial
U.S. minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.
Latinos, the fastest-growing demographic in the United States, are a huge
factor.
More than 70 percent voted for Obama compared with about 28 percent for Romney,
according to Reuters/Ipsos data.
"We are a much more diverse country than we were" just a generation or two ago,
said Pew's Taylor, who also oversees the center's Social and Demographic Trends
project and the Pew Hispanic Center. The rising number of multiracial children
are also likely to become more of a factor, he added.
Obama, whose historic win in 2008 made him the first ethnic minority U.S.
president, had a black father and a white mother.
Aging baby boomers also are a key factor in the demographic transition, as older
voters "leave the electorate," as Taylor delicately put it, and young voters
more accepting of diversity and an active government are added to the rolls.
That could help drive certain civil rights ballot initiatives, like votes in
Maryland and Maine on Tuesday to approve same-sex marriage. In each instance,
support from younger voters helped put the measures over the top.
"It was an election in which the future won over the past," said Marshall Ganz,
a Harvard University lecturer on public policy, said of Tuesday's various
contests.
'A RECIPE FOR EXTINCTION'?
Tuesday's outcome poses big questions for Republicans as they seek new national
leaders and prepare for the next congressional election in 2014 and beyond.
Conservatives' stance against immigration reform and gay marriage is "a recipe
for extinction," said analyst Mike Murphy, a one-time adviser to prominent
Republicans including Arizona Senator John McCain, former Florida Governor Jeb
Bush, former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman and Romney, a former
Massachusetts governor.
"The question is whether or not we're going to have an adult conversation inside
the party about our need to attract more people than grumpy old white guys,"
Murphy told MSNBC. "Demographically, our time is running out."
Ted Cruz, a Latino Republican elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas, said on CBS
that his party had to recruit candidates who connect with that community in a
"real and genuine way."
Not all Republicans were willing to concede to demographics. Some highlighted
tactical and strategic issues in their lost bid for the White House and their
failed efforts to take control of the U.S. Senate.
And analysts said Democrats, too, have lessons to learn.
"It is a very powerful wake-up call to both political parties," said Pew's
Taylor.
Brookings' Frey said Democrats still must keep the white vote in mind for at
least the next couple of election cycles.
"Whites are not dead," he said. "They're still a big part of this population."
(Additional reporting by Ros Krasny and Gabriel Debenedetti in
Washington;
and David Adams in Miami; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Obama win shows demographic shifts working
against Republicans, R, 8.11.2012,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/08/us-usa-campaign-diversity-new-idUSBRE8A70QK20121108
Reversing Trend, Life Span Shrinks for Some Whites
September 20, 2012
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
For generations of Americans, it was a given that children
would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that
this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country’s least-educated whites,
an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years
since 1990.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making
the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that
life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting.
Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that
looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly
sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in
the new research said its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible
explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young
whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity,
and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack
health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who
lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public
health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead
investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life
expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of
white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life
expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the
data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics
live longer than both whites and blacks.
“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates
haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,”
said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the
National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study.
The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop
for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said
Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London.
The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a
shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The latest
estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma was
73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or
more. For white men, the gap was even bigger: 67.5 years for the least educated
white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.
The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in
international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In 2010,
American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United
Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle
of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality
Database.
The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the National
Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.
“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor
at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life
expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling
and we don’t have a great explanation.”
And it is yet another sign of distress in one of the country’s most vulnerable
groups during a period when major social changes are transforming life for less
educated whites. Childbirth outside marriage has soared, increasing pressures on
women who are more likely to be single parents. Those who do marry tend to
choose mates with similar education levels, concentrating the disadvantage.
Inklings of this decline have been accumulating since 2008. Professor Cutler’s
paper, published in Health Affairs, found a decline in life expectancy of about
a year for less educated white women from 1990 to 2000. Three other studies, by
Ahmedin Jemal, a researcher at the American Cancer Society; Jennifer Karas
Montez, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard;
and Richard Miech, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, found
increases in mortality rates (the ratio of deaths to a population) for the least
educated Americans.
Professor Olshansky’s study, financed by the MacArthur Foundation Research
Network on an Aging Society, found by far the biggest decline in life expectancy
for the least educated non-Hispanic whites, in large part because he isolated
those without a high school diploma, a group usually combined with high school
graduates. Non-Hispanic whites currently make up 63 percent of the population of
the United States.
Researchers said they were baffled by the magnitude of the drop. Some cautioned
that the results could be overstated because Americans without a high school
diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from about 22 percent in
1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a shrinking group that was now more
likely to be disadvantaged in ways besides education, compared with past
generations.
Professor Olshansky agreed that the group was now smaller, but said the
magnitude of the drop in life expectancy was still a measure of deterioration.
“The good news is that there are fewer people in this group,” he said. “The bad
news is that those who are in it are dying more quickly.”
Researchers, including some involved in the earlier studies that found more
modest declines in life expectancy, said that Professor Olshansky’s methodology
was sound and that the findings reinforced evidence of a troubling pattern that
has emerged for those at the bottom of the education ladder, particularly white
women.
“Something is going on in the lives of disadvantaged white women that is leading
to some really alarming trends in life expectancy,” said Ms. Montez of Harvard.
Researchers offered theories for the drop in life expectancy, but cautioned that
none could fully explain it.
James Jackson, director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of
Michigan and an author of the new study, said white women with low levels of
education may exhibit more risky behavior than that of previous generations.
Overdoses from prescription drugs have spiked since 1990, disproportionately
affecting whites, particularly women. Professor Miech, of the University of
Colorado, noted the rise in a 2011 paper in the American Sociological Review,
arguing that it was among the biggest changes for whites in recent decades and
that it appeared to have offset gains for less educated people in the rate of
heart attacks.
Ms. Montez, who studies women’s health, said that smoking was a big part of
declines in life expectancy for less educated women. Smoking rates have
increased among women without a high school diploma, both white and black, she
said. But for men of the same education level, they have declined.
This group also has less access to health care than before. The share of
working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not have health
insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in 1993, according to
Mr. Jemal at the American Cancer Society. Just 10 percent of those with a
college degree were uninsured last year, the Census Bureau reported.
The shift should be seen against the backdrop of sweeping changes in the
American economy and in women’s lives, said Lisa Berkman, director of the
Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. The overwhelming majority
of women now work, while fertility has remained higher than in European
countries. For women in low-wage jobs, which are often less flexible, this could
take a toll on health, a topic that Professor Berkman has a grant from the
National Institute on Aging to study.
Reversing Trend, Life Span Shrinks for Some
Whites, NYT, 20.9.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/us/life-expectancy-for-less-educated-whites-in-us-is-shrinking.html
Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.
May 17, 2012
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and
projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer
a majority in the United States.
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month
period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on
Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of
mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in
the country’s history.
Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would
arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by
white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of
slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently,
highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.
While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a
younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad
implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity.
“This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior
demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a
“transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized
multiethnic country that we are becoming.”
Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have
swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no
longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler
population, Mr. Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and
the District of Colum-bia, and have slipped below half in many major metro
areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.
A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with
the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that
was too.
The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty
record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate
a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly
diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a
burden if it is not properly educated?
“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations
don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of
Immigration studies at New York University.
The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result
of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics
make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have
more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that
ended last July, about 26 percent were Hispanic, about 15 percent black, and
about 4 percent Asian.)
Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent,
and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent.
But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The
median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving
out of their prime childbearing years.
Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a
median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic
Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United
States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.
The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s
population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge
that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s,
when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.
The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and
racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in
Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over
immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county
with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people
under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.
Perhaps the most urgent aspect of the change is education. A college degree has
become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but
blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Mr. Frey,
just 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of blacks have a college degree,
compared with 31 percent of whites.
Those stark statistics are made more troubling by the fact that young Americans
will soon be faced with caring for the bulging population of baby boomers as
they age into retirement, said William O’Hare, a senior consultant to the Annie
E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, on top of inheriting trillions of dollars of
government debt.
“The forces coming together here are very clear, but I don’t see our political
leaders putting them together in any coherent way,” he said, adding that
educating young minorities was of critical importance to the future of the
country and the economy.
Immigrants took several generations to assimilate through education in the last
large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, Mr. Suarez-Orozco
said, but mobility was less dependent on education then, and Americans today
cannot afford to wait, as they struggle to compete with countries like China.
“This is a polite knock on the door to tell us to get ready,” said Ruy Teixeira,
a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We do a pretty lousy job
of educating the younger generation of minorities. Basically, we are not ready
for this.”
But there are bright spots. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National
Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the immigration
debate of recent years has raised the political consciousness of young Latinos
and he is hopeful that more will become politically active as a result. Only
half of eligible Latino voters cast ballots in 2008, he said, compared with 65
percent of eligible non-Hispanic voters. “We have an opportunity here with this
current generation,” Mr. Vargas said. About 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month,
he said.
And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a
huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and
demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low
levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support
larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.
“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said.
“Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too
top-heavy with old people.”
Whites Account for Under Half of Births in
U.S., NYT, 17.5.2012,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html
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