America's Political Divide May Be More About Racial Attitudes Than Race
Some people submitted questions to me. They were all fairly difficult questions, so here is my best attempt at answering them:
“WTF Kentucky, how does Mitch Mcconnell keep getting reelected? How does he get Democrats to vote for him with an 18% approval rate?” a reader.
So there was a poll in 2017 that showed McConnell at 18 percent, but that was an outlier. Most polling has long had his approval in the mid 30’s or low 40s. Not great, but not unusually bad for a senator. If you have been reading this newsletter, you can guess I don’t find this question too complicated. Kentucky is a heavily-Republican state, in part because it is more evangelical, rural, and white than the average state. Here are some slightly more complicated takes on McConnell’s ability to win in Kentucky overand over while not being that well liked. There are many people who are registered Democrats in Kentucky but have voted red for years in federal races. I doubt that there a ton of Democrats in Kentucky who backed Obama or Clinton or Biden who also voted for McConnell.
Interested in your thoughts on the generational differences in the Democratic Party and how those might resolve themselves. Also, when we were first seeing Republicans doing better with minority voters you said something like, "I hope Republicans learn they can compete for these voters." What would that look like and do you think it's likely? Dave from Las Vegas.
I’m interested in hearing more about the intra-party dynamics (you’ve delved into this before) that drive actual policy changes (or not). Dave from San Mateo, California.
I think the divide between Democrats over age 45/50 versus those under those ages is going to be a core divide in the party for a while, eclipsing race and being very correlated with ideology (younger Dems are more liberal.) Will Stancil got at this in my interview with him. You have a generation of Dems who came of voting age when the party really struggled to win presidential elections, in the period from 1968-1988 in particular. Then you have a generation of people who have basically seen the Democrats always win the popular vote (post-1988). And you have an even younger group whose first real political memories are a black man named Barack Hussein Obama being elected president twice, once in an election in which he won Indiana. You also have an older generation that came of age in an era where attending college wasn’t crazy expensive and you could get a job with a pension and health care without a degree, versus a generation where you can have two degrees and be struggling to find work with health care.
If you are watching one issue in 2021 in terms of intra-party Democratic politics, keep an eye on criminal justice/policing policies in Democratic-controlled cities like Louisville. I think you are going to see a real fight between younger and more liberal Democrats who really want to make the police departments in their cities less powerful/less well-funded/less punitive versus more moderate and older Democrats who are more hesitant about such changes.
In terms of the Republicans, if you noticed, Trump dialed down the most incendiary of his racial rhetoric in 2020, the Mexicans/rapists kind of stuff. I think staying away from explicitly racist messages and tactics (like trying to get all of the votes disqualified in the Detroit area) is probably a prerequisite to Republicans winning large shares of the nonwhite vote. But beyond avoiding very overt kinds of racism, I don’t think that Republicans need to move left on a wide range of racial issues like policing to win votes among people of color. It looks like more black and Latino voters backed Trump in 2020 compared to 2016, even though Trump basically ran a presidential campaign against the George Floyd protests and the broader anti-racism movement it set off.
I should emphasize: I think the Republicans doing better with nonwhite voters is being WAY overhyped by the press and in some ways downplays fundamental dynamics of American politics. Biden likely won at least 85 percent of black voters, 60 percent of Latino voters, 60 percent of Asian voters but only around 40 percent of white voters. It is likely that more than 80 percent of the people who voted for Trump nationally are white. Trump doing better with Latinos helped make sure that Florida and Texas didn’t flip to the Democrats, but the overwhelming majority of Trump voters in both states are non-Hispanic whites. Trump still lost the nonwhite vote handily.
The more important story to me is that Trump didn’t really lose ground among nonwhite voters despite governing and campaigning with a kind of white identity politics that was more explicit and at times openly racist than either George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush.
How did that happen? First of all, there is a sizable share of black and Latino voters who are fairly conservative in terms of values and ideology--so they might disagree with BLM’s rhetoric about the police or worry about the socialist figures in the Democratic Party. In fact, some black and Latino voters are even conservative on fairly racialized issues ---so some Latinos favor a border wall, there are some black people who think that the racial wealth gap is really because black people aren’t working hard enough, having children out of wedlock, etc. as opposed to systemic racism. So it’s not surprising that Trump didn’t turn off these voters.
Secondly, particularly among younger black people, there is a skepticism about both parties and the political process more broadly. Younger black Americans are less tied to formal black institutions like black churches, and I think that is an opening for the GOP that probably helped Trump in 2020.
What I think might be holding Republicans back in terms of wooing even more black and Latino voters is economic issues. This is the basic argument of the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson ---the corporate tax cuts, reducing spending on Medicaid and other parts of the GOP agenda that would end up taking away money from lower-income people and giving more benefits to upper-income people aren’t a great way to win the votes of people of color.
One other important factoid from 2020: most of the Republican candidates who flipped U.S. House districts from Democratic to GOP control were women or people of color or both.
Put all that together and I can see a Republican Party gaining a larger share of nonwhite voters in 2024 with 1. A woman and/or person of color on the ticket 2. A pro-police, America-is-great, immigration-should-be limited message but without birtherism, bashing Latino immigrants, calling certain nations shitholes and other racist rhetoric 3. Some economic populist policies, like an FDR-style plan to hire millions of people in jobs to improve America’s infrastructure, and less of an emphasis on cutting programs like Medicaid 4. A really-focused Republican effort on reaching younger black people in particular.
I think that South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott or Marco Rubio could run that exact campaign and that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is white, could run some version of it. I am not convinced that the average Republican voter would oppose a nonwhite or female nominee just on identity grounds or that a winning candidate in a GOP primary must use over-the-top racial rhetoric like Trump. I could be wrong of course. Is the GOP taking this general approach likely? No. But I think it’s entirely possible.
Final thought on this. It’s possible that Trump lost ground with white voters (college-educated, suburban, upper-income) types with his racist rhetoric but not really with nonwhite voters. In other words, it’s worth thinking about American politics as divided by racial attitudes but not race. There are some white people who are more explicitly anti-racist in their politics than some nonwhite people and the Democratic Party may be drawing those white people while losing nonwhite people for whom anti-racism isn’t a center of their politics.
Please discuss the role of money in politics. Current amounts are disgusting. Amy McGrath spent $90 million to lose by a mile. Georgia is currently swamped with money. The mailbox of any even mildly active political person is clogged with increasingly hysterical requests for money. Some money helps. Most money is wasted, either offsetting or misdirected. (I speak from experience. Almost every candidate I supported this year lost.) Please analyze beneficial vs. wasteful campaign spending. It’s an area of staggering inefficiency. David Trainer of Los Angeles
My understanding is that campaign money matters when there is a big gap --you don’t want to be the candidate who spends $10 million when your opponent spends $100 million. So I assume in Georgia right now that both sides have a ton of money and there isn’t a huge gap. So I am not sure sending $2000 (or even $2 million if that were legally allowed) to any of those campaigns will help a lot right now.
Perhaps the more important question, as the historian and activist Lara Putnam has been suggesting, is how is that money is best spent. And I think the deeper question might be if the two parties, particularly the Democrats, invest too much money on 1. Short-term efforts 2. Focused on one particular candidate and 3. Heavy on tv ads. As opposed to 1. 4-10 year projects 2. That build the broader party and other institutions that 3. Are not centered on one single candidate and 4. Aren’t mainly just tv ads.
There is now a whole publication devoted to this kind of thinking about politics.
I’ve got some questions about Kentucky and the South in general, specifically how you get these Democratic governors in these ultra-conservative states. It doesn’t really make much sense to me.
Also would like to know your thoughts on if younger moderates (Pete Buttigieg and Hakeem Jeffries come to mind) will be more or less powerful than young progressives. Alex from London
The flip of this is that Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island and New Hampshire all have GOP governors. So part of the answer is that Americans who generally align with one party are more willing to vote for the other party in a governor’s race, compared to a presidential or congressional race. That makes sense. The issues that a governor deals with are often different than a senator or president and less tied to party affiliation. And often, these governors really distance themselves from the national parties. (Democratic Gov. Jon Bel Edwards of Louisiana has signed some bills very strictly limiting abortion. GOP Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts has been very critical of Trump.)
Also, the elections for governor often happen in non-presidential years, so everything isn’t tied to the top of the ticket. I doubt Andy Beshear of Kentucky or Edwards would have won in 2020, but their races were in 2019.
In terms of younger politicians in the Democratic Party, the younger moderates will have more power, at least in the short-term. The older center-left bloc in the Democratic Party still has the most formal power, so it gets to choose which younger people to anoint. Nancy Pelosi and her cohort in the House seem comfortable with Jeffries, so I think he is the favorite to be the next speaker. Biden likes Buttigieg and that helped him get a cabinet role. Longer term, as the older center-left generation of elected officials moves on, I think the AOC faction has a chance at real power. But that’s a way off.
Now, in terms of informal power, I think the AOC faction may already eclipse Buttigieg types. As Daniel Schlozman says, in some ways there is a growing left-wing movement in America and it has made AOC a star (as opposed to AOC creating the movement.) I think we are going to have more big protests and social movements like June and July and those will be shaped more by the AOC faction than the Buttigieg one.
How can Democrats be a successful, national party when the maps (both the Senate map and the Electoral College map) don’t favor them? How do they overcome this disadvantage? Jamie from San Diego.
I kind of reject the premise of this question---the Democrats will control the House and the presidency in a few weeks. They have won three of the last four presidential elections. But Democrats do have two big problems. The current coalitions of the parties, with Republicans dominating among white voters without college degrees, means that a GOP that usually can’t get more than 47 percent of the votes nationally can often win the presidency and control of the Senate while finishing several points behind Democrats in terms of the raw national vote count. And in part because they have gerrymandered aggressively in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, Republicans have more U.S House seats and seats in the state legislature than they probably should based on vote shares alone.
It seems to me that Democrats have three potential paths. The first is to really invest in states like Arizona, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. In those states, Democrats can flip Senate seats and win the presidential race without improving that much with white people without degrees, as long as they make gains with white people with degrees and people of color. The second is to really invest in heavily-white states. Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota have all had Democratic U.S. senators in the post-2000 era. This might actually require a really fundamental shift of the national Democratic Party--like a presidential nominee who is a farmer or something. It also could come from just finding good candidates ---people in Montana seem to really like Jon Tester, for example.
The third path is kind of what Putnam is implying. Maybe the answer isn’t about candidates and campaigns but about deeper issues. Do the Democrats have a plan to deal with a media environment where crazy things like QAnon and vaccine denialism are taking hold on Facebook while local news dies? Will Democrats ever directly, head-on address the question a lot of voters have: where do white men fit into this new America where women and minorities are gaining more power?
I would suggest the Republicans have a big problem too: how do you win in a country where the number of college graduates and people of color is growing if some of the core constituencies in your party are wary of the political values of most college graduates and people of color?
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