RBP
05-24-2018, 01:26 PM
By Sean McElwee (Mr. McElwee is a co-founder of Data for Progress) May 23, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/opinion/democrats-race.html
In response to both the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the backlash in favor of Donald Trump in 2016, analysts and commentators have focused mostly on racial attitudes on the right. Both scholarship and journalistic accounts of American politics have drilled down on the increased opposition to immigration and high levels of racial resentment among Obama opponents and Trump supporters.
But few have investigated the countervailing trend on the left, the increasing racial liberalism of Democratic voters, which I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Though Mr. Obama’s presidency ended up being defined in many ways by America’s reaction to his race, he carefully avoided racially liberal appeals during his original campaign, even taking the time to criticize the purported excesses of campus liberalism. Mr. Obama had begun his national political career with a speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, declaring that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” During his 2008 campaign, to give just one example, he turned down an invitation to Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union, an event Hillary Clinton attended.
During her 2016 campaign, Mrs. Clinton invoked concepts like intersectionality, white privilege, implicit bias and systemic racism. She warned of “deplorables,” while Mr. Obama once gave a speech arguing that “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns” was something that “widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.” According to the American National Election Studies 2016 survey, Democrats perceived Mrs. Clinton as more racially liberal than they had perceived Mr. Obama in 2012, when his strategy was not notably different.
This shift in political rhetoric has coincided with an underappreciated trend: the rapid increase in the racial liberalism of Democrats, including white Democrats, which I analyzed in a recent report by my think tank, Data for Progress. The General Social Survey asks a question about the causes of racial inequality and allows respondents to select whether they think various factors contribute to inequality. Two possible answers are “discrimination” and “willpower,” which are the two variables I explore here (respondents could select both if they chose). The first roughly measures whether respondents take a structural view of racial inequality and the second whether they take a more individualistic view of racial inequality.
http://i65.tinypic.com/fozmmp.png
As the first chart shows, white Democrats have become much less likely to endorse individualistic explanations of racial inequality and more supportive of structural explanations of racial inequality. In 2016, for the first time since the question was asked, a majority of white Democrats agreed that discrimination held black people back.
A similar trend can be seen in Pew data: In 2014, 41 percent of Democrats agreed that racial discrimination was the main reason black people couldn’t get ahead, a number that rose to 64 percent in 2017. Not only have Democrats shifted their attitudes about African-Americans, they have changed their thinking about policies that affect Latinos and other people of color. In 1994, 65 percent of Democrats supported decreased immigration (67 percent of white Democrats), a share that fell to 29 percent in 2016 (30 percent of white Democrats).
We’re witnessing a historically unprecedented shift left in opinions about race among Democratic voters. But is this the result of a change of heart or a sorting process in which racial conservatives leave the Democratic Party and racial liberals leave the Republican Party?
To study this, I used the Voter Study Group, a panel survey that re-interviewed individuals in 2016 who had previously been interviewed in 2011. By examining only individuals who identify as Democrats in both the baseline survey and the 2016 survey, I can weed out the possibility that the shift I’m measuring is due only to attrition. And indeed, on every question in the racial resentment battery, white Democrats were more likely to take the liberal position in 2016 than they were in 2011, often startlingly so.
http://i68.tinypic.com/2d1pqwj.png
In primary contests across the country, Democratic politicians are being held to an increasingly stringent standard on racial equity. In Colorado, Representative Diana DeGette faces a primary challenge from Saira Rao, an Indian-American lawyer who has called for defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Massachusetts, which has an all-white congressional delegation, Representative Mike Capuano faces a primary challenge from an African-American councilwoman in Boston, Ayanna Pressley.
The two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination in New Mexico’s First Congressional District, Deb Haaland and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, have also both called for defunding ICE. Even centrist Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer talk openly about racial disparities in arrests for marijuana and incarceration rates. On the other hand, anti-immigrant candidates like John Morganelli in Pennsylvania’s Seventh are losing their bids in the face of intense opposition from racial justice groups like Center for Popular Democracy Action, working through local affiliates like Make the Road Action in Pennsyvania.
Already, we’ve seen changes at every level of government, with racial justice advocates supported by millennial-led organizations like Launch Progress and Run for Something winning down-ballot races. Incumbents, sensing the change, have moved left. Democratic politicians who opposed the Dream Act in 2010 (like Senator Jon Tester of Montana) have signaled their support for such a bill now. That’s a far cry from the party that under President Bill Clinton supported the disastrous 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that helped pave the way for increased deportation under Mr. Trump.
It’s unlikely that these changes in racial attitudes will reverse, meaning that Democratic politicians will no longer have the option in general elections of using a Sister Souljah strategy to win over independent whites the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 — the Democratic base simply won’t allow it. Instead, prominent progressives like Bernie Sanders have tried to win over young voters by praising rappers like Cardi B.
It’s difficult to imagine a Democratic strategist advising a future presidential nominee to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens,” as the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, did when he worked for President Bill Clinton in 1996. Black Lives Matter will continue to pressure politicians on issues from policing and housing to criminal justice reform. As the party realizes that its hopes lie in mobilizing its base of black and Latino voters and increasingly liberal whites, they will be forced to take these movements seriously.
If they don’t, they risk the fate of candidates like Mr. Morganelli or Brad Ashford, a former congressman who lost a primary election to the upstart Kara Eastman in Nebraska last week. Both men found that the Democratic base would no longer stand for an older brand of politics that was too quick to ignore the country’s history of racial injustice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/opinion/democrats-race.html
In response to both the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the backlash in favor of Donald Trump in 2016, analysts and commentators have focused mostly on racial attitudes on the right. Both scholarship and journalistic accounts of American politics have drilled down on the increased opposition to immigration and high levels of racial resentment among Obama opponents and Trump supporters.
But few have investigated the countervailing trend on the left, the increasing racial liberalism of Democratic voters, which I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Though Mr. Obama’s presidency ended up being defined in many ways by America’s reaction to his race, he carefully avoided racially liberal appeals during his original campaign, even taking the time to criticize the purported excesses of campus liberalism. Mr. Obama had begun his national political career with a speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, declaring that “there’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” During his 2008 campaign, to give just one example, he turned down an invitation to Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union, an event Hillary Clinton attended.
During her 2016 campaign, Mrs. Clinton invoked concepts like intersectionality, white privilege, implicit bias and systemic racism. She warned of “deplorables,” while Mr. Obama once gave a speech arguing that “to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns” was something that “widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.” According to the American National Election Studies 2016 survey, Democrats perceived Mrs. Clinton as more racially liberal than they had perceived Mr. Obama in 2012, when his strategy was not notably different.
This shift in political rhetoric has coincided with an underappreciated trend: the rapid increase in the racial liberalism of Democrats, including white Democrats, which I analyzed in a recent report by my think tank, Data for Progress. The General Social Survey asks a question about the causes of racial inequality and allows respondents to select whether they think various factors contribute to inequality. Two possible answers are “discrimination” and “willpower,” which are the two variables I explore here (respondents could select both if they chose). The first roughly measures whether respondents take a structural view of racial inequality and the second whether they take a more individualistic view of racial inequality.
http://i65.tinypic.com/fozmmp.png
As the first chart shows, white Democrats have become much less likely to endorse individualistic explanations of racial inequality and more supportive of structural explanations of racial inequality. In 2016, for the first time since the question was asked, a majority of white Democrats agreed that discrimination held black people back.
A similar trend can be seen in Pew data: In 2014, 41 percent of Democrats agreed that racial discrimination was the main reason black people couldn’t get ahead, a number that rose to 64 percent in 2017. Not only have Democrats shifted their attitudes about African-Americans, they have changed their thinking about policies that affect Latinos and other people of color. In 1994, 65 percent of Democrats supported decreased immigration (67 percent of white Democrats), a share that fell to 29 percent in 2016 (30 percent of white Democrats).
We’re witnessing a historically unprecedented shift left in opinions about race among Democratic voters. But is this the result of a change of heart or a sorting process in which racial conservatives leave the Democratic Party and racial liberals leave the Republican Party?
To study this, I used the Voter Study Group, a panel survey that re-interviewed individuals in 2016 who had previously been interviewed in 2011. By examining only individuals who identify as Democrats in both the baseline survey and the 2016 survey, I can weed out the possibility that the shift I’m measuring is due only to attrition. And indeed, on every question in the racial resentment battery, white Democrats were more likely to take the liberal position in 2016 than they were in 2011, often startlingly so.
http://i68.tinypic.com/2d1pqwj.png
In primary contests across the country, Democratic politicians are being held to an increasingly stringent standard on racial equity. In Colorado, Representative Diana DeGette faces a primary challenge from Saira Rao, an Indian-American lawyer who has called for defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In Massachusetts, which has an all-white congressional delegation, Representative Mike Capuano faces a primary challenge from an African-American councilwoman in Boston, Ayanna Pressley.
The two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination in New Mexico’s First Congressional District, Deb Haaland and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, have also both called for defunding ICE. Even centrist Democrats like Senator Charles Schumer talk openly about racial disparities in arrests for marijuana and incarceration rates. On the other hand, anti-immigrant candidates like John Morganelli in Pennsylvania’s Seventh are losing their bids in the face of intense opposition from racial justice groups like Center for Popular Democracy Action, working through local affiliates like Make the Road Action in Pennsyvania.
Already, we’ve seen changes at every level of government, with racial justice advocates supported by millennial-led organizations like Launch Progress and Run for Something winning down-ballot races. Incumbents, sensing the change, have moved left. Democratic politicians who opposed the Dream Act in 2010 (like Senator Jon Tester of Montana) have signaled their support for such a bill now. That’s a far cry from the party that under President Bill Clinton supported the disastrous 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that helped pave the way for increased deportation under Mr. Trump.
It’s unlikely that these changes in racial attitudes will reverse, meaning that Democratic politicians will no longer have the option in general elections of using a Sister Souljah strategy to win over independent whites the way Bill Clinton did in 1992 — the Democratic base simply won’t allow it. Instead, prominent progressives like Bernie Sanders have tried to win over young voters by praising rappers like Cardi B.
It’s difficult to imagine a Democratic strategist advising a future presidential nominee to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens,” as the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, did when he worked for President Bill Clinton in 1996. Black Lives Matter will continue to pressure politicians on issues from policing and housing to criminal justice reform. As the party realizes that its hopes lie in mobilizing its base of black and Latino voters and increasingly liberal whites, they will be forced to take these movements seriously.
If they don’t, they risk the fate of candidates like Mr. Morganelli or Brad Ashford, a former congressman who lost a primary election to the upstart Kara Eastman in Nebraska last week. Both men found that the Democratic base would no longer stand for an older brand of politics that was too quick to ignore the country’s history of racial injustice.