Will Black Voters Save the Democratic Party?
Wouldn’t it be ironic if black voters end up saving the democratic party. The same party that once held them in chains. The party of Jim Crow. The party of the segregationist South. Now that party is running scared — chased by a wave of democratic socialists threatening to overrun the establishment. The DSA’s strength is mostly confined to a few deep-blue enclaves, but they’re swinging for something bigger now: a Senate seat in Michigan. The candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, calls himself a progressive, not a socialist. His platform says otherwise.
The pattern is already clear. Every time a socialist has squared off against an establishment democrat, black voters have overwhelmingly rejected the socialist. In Michigan, the establishment candidate won the black vote by more than 30 points. Same story in New York’s congressional races and in the Wisconsin governor’s race. So the real question isn’t whether black voters back El-Sayed — it’s whether they even show up. A progressive friend of mine thinks they will. He says El-Sayed is working black churches hard, preaching his gospel. Maybe but I don’t buy it. Most black voters are practicing Christians. White socialists aren’t. That gap doesn’t close with a few church visits. Black voters don’t want the police defunded. They don’t want prisons shut down. They don’t want open borders dumping newcomers into their neighborhoods and their labor markets. They support school vouchers; the left doesn’t. They won’t vote republican either. My bet: they sit this one out and El-Sayed’s numbers barely move past his primary total.
The socialists have a diversity problem. Blacks know it and no amount of rhetoric hides it. They claim to speak for the working class and for minorities. Their membership tells a different story: DSA is roughly 80 percent white, college-educated, and earning under $60,000 a year. These are the same people lecturing everyone else about “white privilege” while trying to court the black vote. Black voters have rejected white far-left candidates before, and decisively. Ask Bernie Sanders. South Carolina buried his campaign when black voters lined up behind Biden instead.
One observer nailed it: young, white, college-educated socialists can afford their extreme positions. They don’t live on blocks screaming for more police, not fewer. They don’t need a voucher to escape a failing school. They don’t feel what weak border enforcement does to wages and public services. If the revolution flops, they retreat to the suburbs. Black Democrats don’t get that option. They live with the results.
Black voters don’t trust the socialists. The talk about uplifting the working class, centering race and equity, all of it — Black voters have heard it before and know pie-in-the-sky BS when they hear it. Malcolm X said it best: white liberals can be more dangerous than white conservatives, claiming to be allies while working to manipulate the very people they say they’re helping.
Now the DSA shows up bearing gifts. My progressive friend still thinks black voters take the bait. I don’t. I’ve bet him a dollar on it — payable November 4th. If I win, the message to the democratic party is unmistakable: the socialists just kicked out one leg of the four-legged stool propping up the democrat party. White college graduates. Coastal elites. Labor unions. Ethnic minorities. Lose black voters and democrats lose one of their most reliable constituencies and the math stops working, potentially leaving them without enough votes to win most elections, and certainly not national ones. Then the party’s only path back to national power would be to shed its socialist wing and/or hope the republicans hand them a big enough unforced error to run against. Hum.
haroldblackphd.com 
The comment of the voting year:
“One observer nailed it: young, white, college-educated socialists can afford their extreme positions. They don’t live on blocks screaming for more police, not fewer. They don’t need a voucher to escape a failing school. They don’t feel what weak border enforcement does to wages and public services. If the revolution flops, they retreat to the suburbs. Black Democrats don’t get that option. They live with the results.”
I wish conservatives could appeal to a large black constituency based on shared values, but I realize that decades of mistrust have corroded that opportunity. Sadly, the right pays for the choices of the left – the war on poverty was a war on conservatism, and now socialism is trying to push things even further left.
I hope you win your bet in spades. I fear a rising tide. The message of the DSA resonates when you struggle mightily under the buffoonery of Trump’s lack of a solution for affordability – for food, gasoline, healthcare -these are basics, not luxuries. And when you’re as vocal and obnoxious as Trump, everyone forgets the inflation birthed by liberal spending at the end of Covid and the silly named IRA.
I realized last night that I’ve developed an antipathy amd disgust for every sitting member of the Republican caucus except Rand Paul (and I don’t agree with him in everything). Including a dear friend from college who is a US Rep, they all talk about a $40T debt as if some alien dropped in from another galaxy and saddled us with us it unmercifully.
Were I a US congressman, I’d be obnoxiously loud about our debt, constantly carping, drafting legislation, speaking at every opportunity, rallying stupid looking cheerleader sessions on the capital steps like the Dems love to do. Would it move the needle? Questionable. Could I at least look at my constituents and claim that I cared enough to try? Unquestionably.
I wish we could consolidate voting blocks based on shared values rather than historical ties. When my wife’s grandfather died some years ago, he died as a lifelong democrat. Like many, he lived through the Great Depression, and had an undying loyalty to FDR, who he felt saved the country from disaster through jobs programs and the safety net of Social Security. I can fully understand that.
But at his death, he had little in common philosophically with the party, yet he was immovable in his loyalty, regardless of how many abortions came of it, or the combinations of Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson and countless liberal destroyed it.
I sure hope the black constituency is stalwart enough to smell the DSA rat.
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Isn’t it interesting that the groups that are supposed to benefit from the socialist’s largesse- poor blacks, poor whites and the working class-all reject the BS from the left? Also I don’t see middle America being on board either. There will always be pockets of the discontent. But no rising tide.
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Old business: Halberstam’s The Children, has printed copies in Knox Library system.
I did download to study John Lewis, & really enjoyed his officiating chicken weddings and chicken funerals , during his farm days. And all of those childhood actions certainly indicate the truth of the description :
“country he may look, country he may seem, but country he did not intend to remain.”..
Today’s essay mentions politics & churches. I can find in written word my Boston church’s opposition to slavery, yet my MS ancestral church have been forced by ministry, to allow visits fm Black folks..
Black folks know the people who gave them the most trouble started the day reading the Bible, went to church the previous Sunday, will go again the next Sunday- and would have no hesitation putting a rope around a Black person’s neck..
There’s a separate concept: whether a Black person believes Jesus Christ died for them, the Man who will straighten out all this White Bipartisan Manifest Destiny genocide, and is that a better bet than any Socialist Democrat?..
So the real question is:
Just how “Christian” is a Socialist Democrat?
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