The Path to the Presidency Could Be Harder for White Democrats in 2020
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/12/2020-democratic-primary-white-candidates-trump-racism.amp
Before Barack Obama’s election in 2008, the relationship between white racial views and partisanship wasn’t as clear-cut as one might think. Yes, Republicans won the large majority of white voters who believed black disadvantage could be attributed to a lack of hard work or effort—a key measure in the “racial resentment scale”—but a substantial minority of white voters was part of the Democratic coalition as well. But once Obama was in office, whites—and especially those with less formal education—“became better able to connect racial issues to partisan politics,” according to a recent book charting these changes to American politics.
Still, in his 2012 re-election race, Obama won a portion of whites with negative views of blacks. The reason has everything to do with the campaigns. Obama didn’t emphasize race or speak explicitly on racial issues. Neither did Mitt Romney. Race mattered, but white racial views—and white identity—weren’t as crucial to the outcome.
This changed in 2016. And the way it changed has important implications for the upcoming presidential election—and the Democratic race in particular.
In Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America, political scientists John Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Michael Tesler provide a short but useful summary of what happened: “In 2016, the presidential campaign focused on issues tied to racial, ethnic, and religious identities and attitudes. The two candidates took very different positions on those issues, and voters perceived those differences. People’s attitudes on these issues were then ‘activated’ as decision-making criteria and became even more strongly associated with white voters’ preference for Clinton or Trump.”
From the start, Donald Trump ran an openly racist campaign of agitation and disdain toward immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, and likewise, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign emphasizing tolerance and racial diversity. They were asking Americans to vote on the basis of national identity: Who should America be for? In response, white voters sorted themselves according to their racial views: If you held negative attitudes toward blacks and immigrants, believed racial inequality was a result of individual laziness or cultural pathology, or thought nonwhites threatened the economic advancement of whites, you were more likely to back Trump. If you believed the reverse, you were more likely to back Clinton. Account for education, and the result is the same.
The number of white Republicans with liberal racial views was low enough that there weren’t many defections. But the number of white Democrats with conservative racial views was significant—and critically, those voters were clustered in key Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin, enough to give Trump his narrow but decisive advantage in the Electoral College...One possible implication of all of this is that black candidates may have the strategic advantage in the Democratic primary. Not because they’ll automatically win black voters, but because they won’t have to demonstrate the same social solidarity. Like Obama, they can stay somewhat silent on race, embodying the opposition to the president’s racism rather than vocalizing it and allowing them space to focus on economic messaging without triggering the cycle of polarization that Clinton experienced ... {T}here’s a certain irony in the possibility that to get some Trump voters back into the Democratic fold, the party may have to choose another black messenger.
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