alternet | The black community is one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting blocks. Using survey data collected from some 400 black interviewees,
political scientist Theodore Johnson created a number of hypothetical
political situations to assess black voting patterns. Party was an
overwhelming factor in their political decision-making; faced with
Republican and Democratic contenders with identical policy positions in
identical social climates, the black respondents resoundingly chose the
Democrat.
Unfortunately, their loyalty has not always been repaid with proportionate policy responsiveness,
most disappointingly from Democrats. Political scientist Nick
Stephanopoulos conducted a study to determine the extent of group
political power on effecting policy outcomes at the state and federal
levels. Unsurprisingly, black voters had less power
than whites: Unanimous support among whites for a federal policy
corresponded to a 60 percent chance of adoption, while unanimous support
among black Americans for such a policy corresponded to a 10 percent
chance of adoption. Somewhat correspondingly then, Stephanopoulos found
that the less support a policy had among black Americans, the higher its
likelihood of enactment. A policy with no black support had a 40
percent chance of enactment compared to the aforementioned 10 percent
for a policy with unanimous support.
Analysis
from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies corroborated
Stephanopoulos’ 2015 findings. With data collected between 1972 and
2010, researchers found that black voters were “policy winners” 31.9
percent of the time, while white voters were “winners” 37.6 percent of
the time. Less power means less policy.
Political scientist Paul Frymer first articulated the underpinnings of these studies in his 1999 book, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. He observed that politicians focus their appeals and energy toward white swing voters
at the expense of black voters, thereby rendering them politically
paralyzed. The result of the need to entice white voters is that explicit arguments for racial reconciliation during presidential campaigns have been waning since the 1970s, lest they turn white voters off.
In light of this history, it’s difficult to know exactly to
what extent the party will advocate for black voters. However, there
are encouraging signs to be found. In 2016, the Democratic Party
platform pledged “to make it clear that black lives matter.” The party
promised to commit itself to addressing issues that more explicitly
affect the black community, including the racial wealth gap, and that
implicitly affect them, like attempts to cut funding from SNAP and
Medicaid. They actionized those promises in December 2017: Not a single
Democrat in the House or the Senate voted for the Republican tax plan, a massive payout to the top one percent that will widen the racial wealth gap.
Progressives in the Democratic Party have every reason to
buck their history of neglect, having seen what black voters can do
electorally. In spite of a history of electoral disenfranchisement,
electoral neglect, gerrymandering, and voting purges, black voters have
potential to flip elections when they turn out at a time when Democrats
desperately need them to. Furthermore, the party itself has explicitly
acknowledged that it needs to do better. Mirroring Chairman Perez, Virgie Rollins,
chair of the DNC’s Black Caucus, insisted that the party apparatus is
well aware of this: “We learned valuable lessons last month and last
night; when we invest in our communities, we win. The DNC knows black
voters are a force to be reckoned with at the ballot box.”
The midterm elections are nine months from now. Progressives in the
Democratic Party must actively compete for black votes, running not only
on an anti-Trump platform, but on one that offers tangible protections
from Republican assaults and tangible solutions to the challenges the
black community faces. Not only is advocating for black Americans the
right thing for the Democratic Party to do morally, but it also makes
sense politically. Loyalty from the black community cannot be taken for
granted, especially at a moment when the stakes of doing the opposite
are so high.
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