What McGrath v. McConnell Tells Us About Kentucky, What the Last Week Tells Us About Louisville
Amy McGrath seems very likely to lose to Mitch McConnell. (She is down by either 7, 12 or 15 percentage points, according to recent polls----but those surveys all show her losing.) And she has not run a particularly strong campaign---McGrath has not excited the Kentucky Democratic base about her candidacy, said anything really memorable on policy or really connected with the activist movement that has emerged in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s killing by Louisville police.
But I don’t think we have a clear cause (McGrath is running a lackluster campaign) and effect (McGrath is losing) here in Kentucky. McGrath’s likely defeat, in my view, is much more about education, race, religion, networks and broader trends in American politics than her weaknesses as a candidate or McConnell’s strengths. Let me explain:
Kentucky’s demographics make it really hard for a Democrat to win in today’s electoral climate
There has been a series of recent polls showing that the Democrat running for the Senate in South Carolina, Jaime Harrison, is basically tied with incumbent GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham. The notion that a Democrat, particularly a black Democrat like Harrison, has a better chance of winning in South Carolina than a white Democrat in Kentucky seems odd at first glance. But this dynamic fits with broader demographic trends happening around the country. The Democratic Party is always strong with people of color and is increasing strongly with non-Hispanic white voters with bachelor’s degrees--but weak among non-Hispanic white voters without bachelor’s degrees. Joe Biden is likely to win 70-80 percent of the combined national total of Asian, black and Hispanic voters, 50-60 percent of white voters with degrees but only 35-45 percent of white voters without bachelor’s degrees.
Trump has a real chance to win the election because the white non-college group is the biggest, about 42 percent of all voters, while the white-college group is about 31 percent and people of color around 28 percent. (So Trump is strongest with the biggest part of the electorate and weakest with the smallest.)
But those are national numbers. South Carolina’s electorate is 41 percent white voters without degrees, 28 percent black, 27 percent white voters with degrees, 2 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian/other voters, according to a 2019 demographic analysis of the 50 states’s electorates that was done jointly by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Brookings Institution, the Center for American Progress and the Democracy Fund.
Kentucky’s electorate is 60 percent white people without degrees, 9 percent black, 28 percent white voters with college degrees, 2 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian/other.
So a fairly simple explanation for why Jamie Harrison is doing better than Amy McGrath is simply that South Carolina has way more black people than Kentucky.
You might think that seems a bit reductive. But I know Jamie Harrison--he is a fine politician, but not a super-compelling figure. He is not running on bold ideas--his platform is similar to Joe Biden’s (and McGrath’s.) He is black, but like McGrath, hasn’t said a ton of really memorable things about racial relations in America this year.
Harrison probably isn’t going to win either. And some Democratic Senate candidates, like Maine’s Sara Gideon, are likely to win even though they are in very-white states. (Maine’s electorate is 62 percent white non-college, 35 percent white college, 4 percent people of color.) What gives? White people with degrees and white people without degrees in the South tend to be more conservative-leaning than their counterparts across the country. Here’s some data from recent Quinnipiac polls to illustrate that point:
White voters with degrees in South Carolina---Biden 41%, Harrison 44%
White voters without degrees in South Carolina--Biden 27%, Harrison 29%
White voters with degrees in Kentucky--Biden 49%, McGrath 53%
White voters without degrees in Kentucky--Biden 27%, McGrath 32%
White voters with degrees in Maine--Biden 72%, Gideon 65%
White voters without degrees in Maine--Biden 53%, Gideon 49%
Why might white people in Maine be more Democratic-leaning than in Kentucky or South Carolina? There are a ton of possible explanations. But racial attitudes and religion are two obvious factors. Being white and also a born-again/evangelical Protestant is very tightly correlated with voting Republican--much more so than being white and not having a college degree. According to data provided to me by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group’s Robert Griffin, 39 percent of Kentucky’s white voters identify as evangelical Protestants, as do 36 percent in South Carolina. (Kentucky is the sixth-highest state in the nation by this measure, behind Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Oklahoma.) In Maine, only 15 percent of white voters are evangelical Protestants.
A second explanation is racial attitudes. Griffin did an analysis of racial attitudes based on polling conducted as part of an initiative between UCLA and Democracy Fund. In this polling, respondents are asked their views on issues like whether they prefer their relatives to marry someone of the same race and whether they agree or disagree with statements like, “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” White voters in Kentucky are more likely than white voters in all but eight states to reject the anti-racist positions. (So white Kentuckians are both more likely than those in most other states to be skeptical of the idea that slavery and discrimination are holding back black people and less supportive of their relatives dating people outside of their race.)
So to sum up all of this data, McGrath is running in a state with very few voters of color, not that many white college graduates and lots of white voters whose attitudes about race and religion might tilt them away from voting for Democrats.
Of course she is losing.
2. Booker would almost certainly be losing too
If he had won the Senate nomination, Charles Booker would have faced all of these same challenges. I’m not convinced it would have been worse for him because he is black---basically all Democratic candidates, black and non-black, now take positions on racial issues that lots of white voters don’t agree with. (Like the idea that present-day discrimination is holding back black people.) Nor do I think that being for the Green New Deal or Medicare-for-All would have hurt him that much---the big barrier is being a Democrat running in a federal race in Kentucky.
That said, McGrath being the Democrats’ candidate rather than Booker is a significant difference, even if it’s not a significant electoral difference. Booker was likely to make Taylor’s death and issues of race a huge part of his campaign. A Senate campaign by a black man running against Mitch McConnell in the state where Breonna Taylor was killed in the year when Donald Trump is president and black people are disproportionately dying from a deadly virus would have gained national and perhaps international attention. Booker would have had a forum to speak for and to black people across the nation and the world. McGrath is talking about big issues too, rightly suggesting that McConnell in some ways symbolizes what Americans dislike about politics even more than Trump. But it’s easy to imagine Booker running a really memorable campaign in defeat---and McGrath is in some ways just re-running Jack Conway and Alison Lundergan Grimes’s Senate campaigns.
3. Andy Beshear would probably be losing right now too
According to Quinnipiac, Biden is down 38-58 to Trump in Kentucky. According to Data for Progress, another polling outlet, Biden is down 38-56 to President Trump. The Biden-Trump numbers suggest that Kentucky is pretty Republican-leaning, particularly when there is a national presidential race happening.
In 2019, Andy Beshear very narrowly won the governor’s race. Some reasons why he won are 1. Matt Bevin was really hated by Democrats and not beloved by Republicans 2. Beshear and his father have created a strong political brand in the state 3. Andy Beshear is a strong politician himself.
But I wonder if the biggest factor was this---Andy Beshear ran in 2019, an off-year election in which turnout was fairly low. If Beshear was running this year, he would need a big bloc of Republicans to decide to vote for Trump for president and then, in the same voting process, vote for Beshear instead of the Trump-like Bevin. I doubt there would have been too many Trump-Beshear voters in November 2020.
McGrath has borrowed from Beshear’s approach--avoiding super-liberal stands and trying to appeal to voters in the suburbs, particularly in the Cincinnati area. Beshear is a superior politician to McGrath, but I doubt he could have overcome the factors I have discussed here either.
4. Networks matter
We tend to think of voting in this frame. Candidate X talks about Issues Y and Z. Voters choose to back Candidate X if they agree with her on issues Y and Z and will support Candidate B if they don’t.
But this general frame, in my view, ignores how politics and society actually work. There is political science research that suggests that black people who have conservative views on some issues are discouraged from voting Republican by other black people in their personal networks. Voting Republican is in some ways viewed as an act of breaking with a larger black collective--an anti-black action. (If you don’t want to read the research, watch everything going with Kanye West right now, it illustrates this dynamic perfectly.) My experience talking to white evangelical Christians suggest a similar dynamic---many white evangelicals would react in horror if one of their friends said that they were voting for a Democrat, and that dynamic keeps white evangelicals in the GOP tent.
Here’s another example of this idea. The 2020 Democratic primary was covered as a race where Elizabeth Warren surged from August-October, but then she couldn’t figure out her Medicare-for-All position, causing voters to abandon her. Bernie Sanders’s supporters like this narrative (“our candidate was the true leftist”), as do Biden supporters (“our candidate was practical and electable.”) A narrative that fits the evidence better, in my view, is that Warren surged in the polls, but then a theory emerged that she could not defeat Trump in a general election. This notion was repeated in venues where left-but-not-that-left Democrats consume news (the New Yorker, the New York Times, MSNBC, Twitter) and Warren dropped in the polls as a result. I would argue the same thing happened to Sanders after he won the Nevada caucuses--an informal network convinced Democrats he could not win a general election and pointed them to Biden.
What does that have to do with Amy McGrath? It’s hard to imagine Democrats in Kentucky winning until the networks in the state change--white people breaking from evangelicalism; a big surge in Kentuckians joining labor unions; Kentuckians in rural areas becoming more linked to causes in Louisville or moving to urban areas in mass numbers; the University of Kentucky opening a 40,000 student campus in Prestonsburg; Google moving its headquarters to Lexington. Similarly, if say, Republicans want to win more black voters, both and here nationally, one big opportunity is that younger black people aren’t as likely to attend church---churches dominated by older black people are really strongly connected to the Democratic Party.
Some thoughts on the legal process involving Breonna Taylor and the fallout
The protests mattered, a lot. It is hard to imagine the city giving Taylor’s family $12 million in a settlement without the protests and the heightened local and national attention around this case. The activism mattered--even if it didn’t result in the outcome that many activists wanted (the officers involved in Taylor’s killing arrested and charged with murder.)
Cameron’s decision was to be expected. I am not a legal expert, but I had read enough from legal experts who suggested that current law would make it hard to charge the officers with major crimes. I am something of a political expert--and I had anticipated that Cameron, a black Republican, didn’t want to totally annoy black people across the nation by charging no one but didn’t want to annoy Republicans by charging all three officers with major crimes. He landed in a bit of a middle ground. That may have been the right legal decision anyway, but it was certainly right politically. Cameron remains well-positioned to be a future Kentucky senator or governor or cabinet member in a Republican presidential administration.
It’s not clear if policing is changing in Louisville. The protests were about Taylor’s death, but also a broader sentiment in Louisville that black people are over-policed and policed unfairly. It is not clear how broad that sentiment is within the community. If the takeaway for most politicians in the city is simply that the Taylor case was an unfortunate accident, those politicians aren’t likely to push for many major changes in policing.
The last week was well, interesting. The imposition of curfews before Cameron announced anything. The arrest and rioting charge against Attica Scott. The police surrounding First Unitarian Church after protesters went there post-curfew. Mayor Greg Fischer’s comment that people who are standing near people rioting or suspected of rioting are subject to being arrested--seeming to imply Scott got what she deserved.
I am raising these actions as concerns because they seem like mild versions of the kinds of things that Chad Wolf (the U.S. Homeland Security secretary) and Attorney General Bill Barr might say and do.
This is not all about Fischer.
The last week presented two different problems. 1. The protests resulted in blocked streets and a small bloc of the protesters seemed to be breaking widows and then stealing from businesses, setting things on fire and committing other crimes. 2. Preventing those problems from the protests involved a huge police presence that made parts of Louisville look like a war zone, deterred some people from participating in the protests because but didn’t want to be arrested or treated badly by the police for no reason and resulted in some excesses (the Scott rioting charge.)
The overall Taylor situation has presented two different problems 1. Many people in Louisville (particularly its black activists) perceive the police as being the most obvious example of a broader set of institutions and practices in the city that don’t value their black lives enough. 2. Others in Louisville (particularly older white people) may generally like the city’s status quo and be uncomfortable with major changes to it.
The city council seems eager to blame everything on Fischer--from Republicans who are very aligned with the police to Democrats who are more open to policing changes. I hear people in the community also suggesting Louisville’s problems are largely about leadership style and approach--so more effective leadership would fix many of these problems.
I’m skeptical. Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York City, Washington, D.C.--there are a ton of cities right now with deep tensions between activists who think the police are overly aggressive and police departments who think they are being scapegoated. This is not a problem unique to Louisville. What’s really going is that while nationally there is still a debate about whether to embrace the ethos of Black Lives Matter, that’s not really a debate at the city level in America. I don’t have a poll to prove this, but my suspicion is that support for the broader Black Lives Matter movement is a clear majority position in most major U.S. cities, since cities are mostly Democratic-leaning.
So we are now fighting over how to really enact that idea: what does a city and community that truly values black lives look like? And there are two questions at the heart of this debate. What policies actually will improve the lives of black people? And secondly, what policies will politicians push forward to improve the lives of black people, meaning what policies are either already popular with white voters or what policies are politicians willing to press forward even if they might be controversial?
Hiring a black police chief and hiring more black police officers are ideas that are politically-safe but usually not effective in changing policing practices. A reparations plan would help black people financially but is the kind of thing politicians would have to push hard on to overcome white voter resistance.
But it’s important in my view to stop having the easy conversation (“Is Greg Fischer a poor, average or above-average mayor?”) and start having the hard conversation, (“What are the actual specific policies Louisville should adopt so that we are a city that truly embodies the idea that Black Lives Matter by 2030?”)