J.D. Tuccille: Obama’s scolding won’t change the populist-elite divide that’s replaced racial politics

Published Oct 19, 2024  •  Last updated 7 minutes ago  •  5 minute read

Attendees hold signs as former President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally supporting Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, at the University of Pittsburgh's Fitzgerald Field House in Pittsburgh. Photo by Matt Freed /AP Photo

Last week, former president Barack Obama dressed down Black men for failing to support Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with the numbers he thinks she deserves.

“Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” Obama complained.

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Despite his continuing popularity, the former president’s message was laden with the usual condescension and sparked an immediate backlash, earning him the title “scolder in chief.” But Obama was on to something. While Black and other minority-group Americans continue their traditional support for Democratic candidates, they’re doing so in declining numbers as voting patterns shift, breaking along lines of class rather than skin colour. The erosion of racial politics, and their replacement by a populist-elite divide, could be seen as relatively healthy, but it frustrates politicians who still build their campaigns on old expectations.

Obama’s lecture was motivated by surveys finding that historically surprising numbers of Black men — 26 per cent of those under 50 — support Republican Donald Trump for president. That doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that Black men gave 95 per cent of their vote to Barack Obama in 2008, 87 per cent to his reelection in 2012, 82 per cent to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 80 per cent to Joe Biden in 2020. Each of those percentages are enviable results for any candidate, taken in isolation. Together, though, the trend line demonstrates that voting patterns are changing.

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Black women also show a decline in support for the Democratic party, dropping from roughly 82 per cent in 2014 to 72 per cent in 2023. But it’s much less dramatic, perhaps representing the overall gender split that has the Wall Street Journal pointing out: “While a divide between the sexes has become a fixture of modern elections, it appears to have broadened since 2020, cutting across many racial, educational and economic groups.”

As the Journal points out, it’s not just American Blacks. Axios noted in March that “Democrats’ longtime advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years. NBC polling finds this year’s Democratic presidential candidate has a 14-point advantage over the Republican among Latino voters, down from 36 points in 2020, 50 points in 2016, and 39 points in 2012.

“Harris leads Trump nationally among Latinos, 54 per cent to 40 per cent, but the Democrats’ edge is at its lowest level in the last four presidential cycles,” added NBC News’s Nicole Acevedo and Mark Murray.

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Statistician and political analyst Nate Silver recently considered evidence of “a realignment where educational attainment and social class begin to predominate over race as the major dividing line in American politics.”

In fact, the most recent New York Times/Siena poll has college-educated voters looking a lot like one another in their voting preferences. Fifty-nine per cent of white, college-educated voters favour Kamala Harris for president, with 36 per cent preferring Donald Trump and the rest favouring another candidate. Among non-white, college-educated voters, 62 per cent pick Harris, 24 per cent prefer Trump, and the rest favour somebody else or refuse to answer.

Non-college-educated voters aren’t so similar. Sixty-two per cent of white voters in this group choose Donald Trump, and 31 per cent favour Kamala Harris, with the rest choosing somebody else or not responding. By contrast, 60 per cent of non-whites without a college education prefer Harris, compared to 29 per cent who support Trump. That doesn’t sound like much working-class convergence, but it’s enough of a shift from past voting patterns to affect outcomes — especially if it continues. Many analysts think it will.

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“The ongoing development of the Democratic Party as a party not of labour but of socioeconomic elites, and the ongoing development of the Republican Party as a party not of business but of working class social conservatives represents a major, perhaps the major, American political development of the 21st-century,” Eitan Hersh of Tufts University and Sarang Shah of the University of California-Berkeley, wrote in a 2023 paper.

Hersh and Shah saw the parties changing not just in terms of support, but ideology. They noted “anti-business sentiment among Republican rank-and-file” in what was long the more market-oriented of the two major parties and cautioned that while “many companies are moving toward the Democrats, they will likely face policy issues that conflict with the Democratic Party’s other interest groups.” The result, as I’ve written, could be populist Republicans facing off against Democrats who support government management of everything with neither party well-disposed towards free markets.

That sits just fine with some pundits, such as the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Rachel Kleinfeld and Brendan Hartnett. They also see “young Black men and non-college-educated Black and Hispanic people who are moving toward the Republican Party.” They hope a political realignment will settle many of the tensions in American life that fuel rising political violence.

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But they also yearn for “an end to the Milton Friedman-esque, deregulatory trickle-down policies that had taken hold across both major political parties by the 1990s.” No fan of small government that leaves people alone, Kleinfeld and Hartnett hope that reshaped major parties lead to “a greater amount of government intervention in the market to address externalities and monopolies, and a stronger social contract” with no options for those who want limited government, free markets, and liberty.

That vision of the future may please Kleinfeld and Hartnett. But, along with leading politicians’ of both parties rejection of free speech, it’s a grim one for those of us who prefer the original American vision, however imperfectly it has been implemented, of personal liberty and a limited state that minds its manners. We’d like to believe that there is room for both a healthy transition beyond the racial politics that have plagued this country since its founding, as well as the traditional faith in small government and personal freedom.

Like everybody else, though, we don’t get to choose the direction of the evolution we see in U.S. politics. Americans are voting less along the lines of race than they did in the past, and more according to education and class. That’s affecting the prospects of the major political parties, but also their very nature. Americans can, and should, participate in that process to try to steer it in a healthy direction, because we’ll all have to live with the outcome.

National Post

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