Ronald Reagan famously said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, nearly every pundit was predicting a Clinton landslide. But Salena Zito noticed that white, formerly Democratic blue-collar workers in Rust Belt states were gravitating toward Donald Trump. The Democratic party had left them. This phenomenon was partially responsible for the collapse of the Democrats’ “Blue Wall,” resulting in Trump’s electoral victory.
Democrats claim to have learned from the collapse of the Blue Wall. But white blue-collar workers might not be the only problem for the Democrats. Democratic presidential aspirants have lurched so far to the left that they’ve opened sizable gaps between their policy positions and those of the party’s most reliable — and indispensable — constituency: black voters.
As I’ve noted before, over the last 40 years Democratic presidential candidates have gotten between approximately 85–95 percent of the black vote. It’s necessary for Democrats to maintain that percentage in order to win a presidential election. Not only must Democrats get an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, a large black turnout is imperative. Indeed, Hillary Clinton received 89 percent of the black vote, only four points lower than Barack Obama in 2012, but she received an estimated four million fewer black votes than Obama because black-voter turnout lagged.
The current Democratic field is at risk of replicating Clinton’s 2016 performance among black voters. The dramatic leftward shift of the Democratic presidential field is starkly at odds with the chief policy concerns of a substantial percentage of black voters.
Polls repeatedly show an astonishing 20 to 30 percentage point differential between black Democrats and white Democrats on the importance of policy issues such as lower taxes, climate change, jobs, immigration, abortion, Medicare for All, health care for illegal immigrants, and national security. Approximately twice as many white Democrats as black Democrats now describe themselves as “very liberal” or “liberal.”
Democrats traditionally rely on the historical allegiance of black voters to the party — as well as on shouting “racism” and “white supremacy” every chance they get — to get the black vote (touting the success of places with several decades of uninterrupted Democratic rule, such as Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago, doesn’t appear to be as effective). Although electoral inertia and racial division have worked relatively well for Democrats for more than half a century, today’s startling disparity between Democratic policy positions and the concerns of black voters presents an opportunity for President Trump and Republican candidates generally.
Trump’s approval rating among black voters ranges between 18–34 percent. A shift of just a few percentage points in the black vote from Democrats to Republicans, or a less-than-robust black voter turnout, can have profound implications. Blacks make up a sizable percentage of the electorate in the former Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Furthermore, Trump lost Nevada by just 27,000 votes, Minnesota by 44,000, and New Mexico by 65,000. Those states also could be put into play.
But, as Woody Allen said, “80 percent of life is showing up.” Republicans typically are MIA in black media and black neighborhoods during election season. (In my all-black neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, I did see a GOP flyer. Once. In 35 years.) In some cases, this is due to the prudential allocation of resources; a Republican candidate is less likely to get a justifiable return on campaign dollars spent in black neighborhoods. President Trump, however, has devoted more effort to courting black voters than any Republican presidential candidate in decades. And the Democrats are providing invaluable assistance by concentrating on matters that are of concern mostly to the social justice majors populating student lounges at indefensibly priced colleges.