The point at which whites in the United States will fall to less than 50 percent of the population could come much faster that what was previously projected, according to a new report released this week.
The report, which examines the period from 1999 to 20016, found that deaths now outnumber births among white people in 26 states in the country, up from 17 only two years earlier.
The Census Bureau has known for decades that trends in the U.S. were slowly transforming the population to a time when whites would no longer be a majority, with about 2045 previously being the most widely accepted projection.
But Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a co-author of the report, told The New York Times that "It’s happening a lot faster than we thought," adding that he was so surprised at the finding that at first he thought it was a mistake.
Some states with aging white populations have been experiencing the trend for a few decades, but the pattern accelerated as fertility rates dropped drastically after the Great Recession and mortality rates for whites who are not of Hispanic origin have been rising.
Although the change into a more multiethnic and racial population has broad implications for identity and for the nation’s political and economic life, it is unclear how that will play itself out.
For example, of the 26 states where deaths now exceed births for whites, 13 voted for President Donald Trump and 13 for Hillary Clinton. Four are states that switched from President Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 — Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.
But it is not clear how demographic change will affect politics in the future.
Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, told The New York Times that "We should not assume that white moderates and liberals will maintain current political allegiances, nor should we expect that the so-called nonwhite group is going to work in any kind of coalition."
And despite demographic change, whites — and especially less educated ones — will still make up the bulk of eligible voters in the country for a while, with whites without a bachelor’s degree expected to connstitute 44 percent of eligible voters in 2020.
In addition, not all experts agree that a white minority in the U.S. is fast approaching. Some point out that the Census Bureau counts any person who is of mixed race or ethnicity as nonwhite, which can underestimate whites in the population.
"The Census Bureau is trying to apply a 20th-century conception of race and ethnicity on a situation that’s fundamentally changing," City University of New York Sociology Prof. Richard Alba said. He added that the younger generation increasingly is the product of racial and ethnic mixing, but that they often "lean white," he said. "You could think of them as kind of integrating into a kind of white mainstream."
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