By Ed Smith

The changing demographic face of America is a familiar topic. Most people understand the country is seeing a rapidly aging white population, that the growth in our population is increasingly among people of color, and that these trends have profound societal and political ramifications.

Two of the nation's leading demographers offered a notion of what that means for the country in Wednesday's general session at the Legislative Summit in Chicago.

James Johnson, a professor at the University of North Carolina, said the nation is “in the midst of unprecedented transformation. If you ignore it, you ignore it at your own peril.”

Johnson sketched out the sea change in American demographic trends since the mid-1960s when the U.S. liberalized its immigration policies and allowed in many more immigrants from Asia, Latin America and other regions.

The bulk of the change, he noted, affects the Southern and Western states. While many are familiar with graying and browning of America—the huge increase in older baby boomers and the rise of Latinos—there are other changes with which people may be less familiar.

“The southern swath of the country has large numbers of older people and largest numbers of kids in school,” Johnson said.

Those younger people are disproportionately people of color and the older people are disproportionately white. The older folks, he said, are reluctant to pay higher taxes for education. Many of these children, he added, are attending racially isolated schools and they are underrepresented in in college-preparatory programs.

This, Johnson says, is the “triple whammy of geographic distribution.”

If you want a vibrant, well-educated workforce that can support the growing number of aging baby boomers—8,000 of whom are turning 65 every day—changes are needed.

Johnson was followed by Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute, who put a more political twist on the demographic story.

She noted that the white share of the electorate appears to be declining by 2 percent every four years. Nonetheless, older white people vote in larger proportion than younger people and people of color.

“Their political clout does not match their demographic clout,” Bowman said. “Hispanics are clearly punching below their weight electorally.”

Another unknown, she said, is whether Latinos will continue to vote for Democrats. In general, they tilt toward conservative social values and are by no means a homogenous group.

The same might be said for millenials. They are skeptical of government but not hostile to it, and many want to own their own businesses. While they are voting for Democrats now, they may, like earlier generations, grow more conservative as they age.

“Many do not consider themselves categorically one party or the other, and many see themselves as independent,” Bowman said.

While neither demographer could see the future with absolute clarity, Bowman seemed to sum it up nicely: “Changes in demography are having profound effects on our politics and our culture.”

Ed Smith is NCSL’s director of digital communications.

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