There is a lot of talk for decades how the Republican Party must appeal beyond their base of white voters to attract black, Latino and take back Asian voters that they lost in the mid 1990s.
However, the Democratic Party has been underperforming with white voters for a while now.
Especially the white working class.
A lot of liberal commentators say that they don’t need white working class voters, like in Fulton County, Arkansas. That they don’t need to “chase white voters at the expense of the multicultural coalition”. A coalition with different interests.
The last D to win there was Clinton '96.
One of the liberal mantras is “equity is not a zero-sum game”.
Then why do a lot of commentators say appealing to white voters expense the multiracial coalition? Isn’t it supposed to be everyone coming together as one to win?
Could you give an example of the commentators you’re talking about? I’ve honestly never heard a political analyst saying that ignoring white voters is a good idea, and it is clearly not just by looking at the numbers of white voters vs. black voters.
I think since Obama there’s been some pushback against the pre-Obama conventional wisdom that something like nominating a black guy for president would lose you an election by driving away the white vote.
The Dems are proponents of specific policies aimed at racial inequality. They could conceivably try to come up with a policy specifically aimed at advancing white people economically/socially/etc., but the underlying justification isn’t there as there aren’t the same societal barriers to success for white people as there are for some other races.
I’ve been pondering this issue for some time now and have come to the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference between Republicans needing to / trying to appeal to minorities vs. Democrats needing to / trying to appeal to white voters. My theory is this. Minorities, just like white people, have the same percentage of people who are fundamentally conservative. The Republicans, due to their embrace of racist white people, have driven the conservative minorities into the Democrat’s camp. The only thing Republicans have to do to win over naturally conservative minorities is to stop being racist. Democrats, on the other hand, already have the liberal white people in their camp. In order to win over conservative white people, they would have to change their whole platform to appeal to people who are conservative. In other words, Democrats would have to change their position on a whole bunch of issues and become more conservative on things like taxes, gun control, abortion, etc. Republicans just have to stop being racist.
Frankly I think the GOP would have a really tough time appealing to minorities, simply because of trust and perception. If they took a look at themselves and said “OK what are some positions we take that make minorities think we don’t have their best interests” and addressed those, it would take years and possibly decades for minority voters to trust them again.
If they didn’t care about actual policy at all and just cared about winning votes in the short-term, I think their best move is to embrace Trump-style Republicanism to solidify the conservative and nationalist white base as much as possible and basically give up on trying to mend fences with minorities. There are obviously long-term considerations as well as the fact that a party is never going to completely abandon policy for a cynical vote-grab.
It’s not about Republican positions on things like tax policy, gun control, etc. Conservatives will naturally gravitate Republican because the Republican platform is already conservative. All they have to do is make those minor feel welcome in the party by getting rid of the racist white people. The only reason they (Republicans) probably haven’t done so is because they probably believe that the number of racist white people is greater than the number of conservative minorities.
I got paywalled by the nyt article, but I just googled the first line in the quoted(?) text and found this, which I think is what you’re talking about: Stop Obsessing Over White Working-Class Voters
The conclusion is simply wrong. I think the good observation is that Trump brought in a lot of voters who don’t normally vote, but my response to that would be that they need to tap into the anger and resentment in this group. There is absolutely no point in the Dems actually trying to get into dogwhistle racism (and the white voters who respond to it are probably never going to vote Democrat), but more of them should learn from Bernie Sanders, who does better in this group by tapping into other forms of resentment.
The Democrats don’t have a race problem with white people in the same way. They haven’t driven white people away because they are racist against whites. Instead they’ve lost the conservative white people because they’ve gotten rid of the conservative Democrats (except for Joe Manchin). I suppose it’s possible that there is a hidden pocket of racist but otherwise liberal white people who vote Republican for race reasons, but that’s probably a very small group.
I think even if they just booted the racists out,* they wouldn’t be able to immediately win back trust from minorities. You can flip a switch and change policies, but you can’t flip a switch and make people forgive you for everything you used to do to them.
*- Also, the only way they could do this at this point would be to get rid of primaries and just pick the candidates - otherwise they’ll get a repeat of 2016, where the primary voters can just ignore the candidates leadership prefers and vote for an overt racist.
It is entirely possible that I’ve underestimated the number of racist white people. Maybe the Republicans are correct to continue on their current course, from a numbers perspective.
White voters, like me, who have no problem with being treated equally with everyone else? The Democrats are already reaching those white voters.
Or white voters who think they are entitled to special treatment? I agree the Democrats are telling those voters what they want to hear. But the Democrats are right to do so and shouldn’t change on this issue. The Democrats should not be trying to appeal to white supremacy.
Democrats would face the same problem if they were to try to reach out to the white racist vote. Those voters already have a party that’s been supporting them. Why would they switch?
I think racist white people are a subset of generally angry, disaffected white people, which is the main group Trump appeals to outside of the GOP base. People like Sanders hits other buttons in this group such as anger at Wall Street, but Clinton failed to. I think there are voters in this group that the Democrats can actually get.
The point I was trying to make is that racism is just one part of the Republican platform. There are lots of minorities who are chased out by the racism but who otherwise agree with the remainder of the Republican platform. OTOH, the racist white people have a long list of grievances with the Democrats, the lack of racism being just one issue.