Five Thirty Eight does some digging on this….
It is a given the minority votyers tend to vote Democratic….
When people of color see politicians who look like them, it can have profound effects. Political science research suggests that this so-called “descriptive representation” increases Americans’ trust in politicians and engagement with politics. But in the U.S., the percentage of people of color running for office lags far behind their share of the population (41 percent). And it’s not enough for nonwhite candidates to simply run; to achieve any sort of proportional representation, obviously, they also have to win.
In 2022, 30 percent of the candidates who ran in Democratic or Republican primaries for Senate, House or governor were people of color, according to new data collected throughout the primary season by political scientists Bernard Fraga and Hunter Rendleman.1 And the data shows that only 28 percent of the candidates appearing on the November ballot will be people of color. In other words, in all likelihood, 2023 will not be the year that people of color are proportionally represented in the halls of government.
Unsurprisingly, as has been the case for decades, Democrats had a more diverse candidate pool. At least 46 percent of their candidates this cycle were people of color, as opposed to only 19 percent of Republican candidates. But, in 2022 — possibly because white candidates were more likely to have advantages like incumbency and fundraising, possibly because of racism on the part of voters, possibly for other reasons — candidates of color from both parties had a harder time winning their primaries. As a result, when we mapped Fraga and Rendleman’s data onto the primary results, we found that people of color will constitute just 39 percent of Democratic general-election candidates and 16 percent of Republican general-election candidates.
Of course, several distinct racial groups are included in those numbers, and some are better represented than others. Here is the full breakdown by race for all candidates who ran in this year’s primaries:…