Black Voters Matter
Political journalists keep ignoring the electorally decisive role that Black voters play in Democratic politics.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
Just a quick reminder that I will be hosting a Zoom chat tomorrow at 12:30 P.M. As always, hope you can join and this week I promise I will record and post the chat (my apologies for forgetting to do it last week).
While all the votes still need to be counted, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is ahead in the race to be the Democratic nominee for New York City Mayor and looks to be on pace for victory. (In ranked voting races, a candidate who has the most first-place votes usually prevails.)
Adams ran on a platform of crime-fighting and presented himself as a voice for the working class. His apparent victory is being viewed by many as a defeat for the progressive movement. I’m not so sure, and, in general, trying to extrapolate about Democratic Party politics from New York City election results is a bit of a fool’s errand.
The first and most obvious reason is that New York is not a very liberal city. Even though New Yorkers are overwhelmingly Democratic, Republicans have won five of the last seven mayoral races (Rudy Guiliani and Mike Bloomberg). Second, New York is a city where voting patterns are driven, to a striking degree, by ethnic and racial identity.
While it’s true that Adams did well among working-class voters, most of those New Yorkers were Black and Hispanic. In Harlem, the Bronx, and predominately Blacker sections of Brooklyn, he dominated. His endorsement from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz helped him to clean up among Latino voters.
To give a sense of how racially coded voting is in New York, Andrew Yang finished a disappointing fourth, though he won in Asian-American neighborhoods in Flushing and Chinatown. Kathryn Garcia, who is white (as my Hispanic barber noted to me, “Garcia” is her married name), won decisively in Manhattan and parts of affluent Brownstone Brooklyn. Maya Wiley, who is Black and was the most unapologetically liberal of all the major candidates, performed best in upper-income Black neighborhoods and wealthier white neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Ultimately, however, there are more working-class Black voters in New York than upper-class ones, hence Adams's success. Wiley was, however, the most effective candidate at assembling a cross-racial coalition.
This is not to say the candidates’ message doesn’t matter at all, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that New Yorkers - of all races - primarily voted in terms of class and race.
History Repeating Itself
Going back 20 years, victory in the Democratic mayoral primary has usually depended upon solid support from Black and Latino voters. In 2009, the Democratic nominee was Bill Thompson, who is Black and won over that crucial bloc. In 2005, Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer crested to victory over Anthony Weiner (remember him) with the support of Black and Latino voters. In 2013, Bill DeBlasio won not because he ran on a liberal platform but because of a famous ad he ran starring his Black son, which helped him win strong support among voters of color.
Adams followed a well-trod and effective political strategy.
Yet, reporters and political pundits have seemingly ignored this history to focus instead on Adams tough on crime message and ridiculing of calls to “defund the police.” Indeed, according to the New York Times, ”If Mr. Adams wins in the coming weeks after absentee ballots and ranked choices are tabulated, his victory could stall the progressive movement’s momentum in New York and reinforce the idea that rising crime and public safety drove voters to the polls.”
It’s undoubtedly true that concerns about crime are up in New York City, and it’s not a reach to think that because he is Black, Adams get-tough-on-crime message played more effectively than if it had come from a white man. But considering the recent history of New York mayoral candidates who are either Black, Latino (or have black children) to win local races, there is likely a more straightforward explanation.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
This has become a consistent blind spot in the world of political journalism. During the 2019 campaign, disproportionate media attention was devoted to the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary even though the South Carolina primary, with its large Black population, has consistently determined the party’s presidential nominee. Many pundits wrote off Joe Biden’s chances after he underperformed in these early races, even though demographically, they are unrepresentative of the Democratic Party. As it turned out, his strength among Black voters propelled him to victory in South Carolina. The same thing happened in 2016 after Hillary Clinton barely won in Iowa and lost in New Hampshire. She also trounced Bernie Sanders in South Carolina, and the rest was history. In 2008, Barack Obama’s strength among Black voters was decisive in South Carolina and a host of Southern primaries where Black voters were the largest voting bloc.
You could even go back to a race I wrote a book about: the 1968 Democratic primary race. Robert Kennedy won the Indiana primary because he captured the lion’s share of the state’s Black voters. In California, he eked out a victory on the strength of Black and Latino voters. But in the Oregon primary, he became the first Kennedy to lose an election because the overwhelmingly white electorate there chose his opponent, Senator Eugene McCarthy.
For all the focus on ideology, messaging, ground game, endorsements, etc, the most critical factor in becoming the Democratic presidential nominee is the Black vote. Period. Due to Biden’s long-standing support in the Black community both in Delaware and nationally, and the fact that he served as Vice President to Barack Obama, it gave him a leg up that no other Democratic candidate in the race could match - and that included actual Black candidates like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
This is not to say that Black voters vote in lockstep or en masse. Still, there is a rather unmistakable pattern here: the candidate who is most effective at winning Black support has a near-insurmountable advantage in Democratic primaries. Polls have shown for a while that Adams did best in New York among Black voters. Indeed, he barely even bothered to focus on Manhattan and performed badly there. As long as he could turn out Black and Latino voters in a multi-candidate race, he would have a considerable advantage. It looks like that’s exactly what happened.
Rather than focusing on candidate messaging, which seems to matter more to journalists than actual voters, political reporters would do well to pay attention to demographics and voting history. It offers a much better sense of why elections turn out the way they do.
What’s Going On?
This week in … Donald Trump’s sociopathic indifference to the plight of his fellow man:
The week leading up to Trump’s infection was frenzied, even by his standards. On Saturday, Sept. 26,he had hosted a party with scores of maskless attendees to announceAmy Coney Barrett as his pick for Supreme Court justice. The celebrations had continued indoors, where most people remained maskless. By that time, the virus was surging again,but Trump’s contempt for face coverings had turned into unofficial White House policy. He actually asked aides who wore them in his presence to take them off. If someone was going to do a news conference with him, he made clear that he or she was not to wear a mask by his side.
The day after the Supreme Court celebration, Trump had also hosted military families at the White House. At Trump’s insistence, few were wearing masks, but they were packed in a little too tight for hiscomfort. He wasn’t worried about others gettingsick, but he did fret about his own vulnerability and complained to his staff afterward. Why were they letting people get so close to him? Meeting with the Gold Star families was sad and moving, he said, but added, “If these guys had covid, I’m going to get it because they were all over me.” He told his staff that they needed to do a better job of protecting him.
I’ll give $10 to the reader who can explain to me why this is a threat to America:
In April, the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment warned that “Beijing is working to match or exceed US capabilities in space to gain the military, economic, and prestige benefits that Washington has accrued from space leadership.”
This threat isn’t limited to the vacuum of space. China’s efforts must be viewed in the context of its ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, smothering of Hong Kong, saber-rattling against Taiwan and obstruction of independent investigations into the origins of the coronavirus.
I’d actually suggest reading this entire piece - and using your critical analysis skills - because it offers a master class in how threat-mongering works.
China is amping up its efforts on outer space. NASA administrators are “concerned,” and they are using the alleged threat from China to call on Congress to increase the space agency’s budget. A gullible journalist then pens a piece arguing that this is a grave issue that Americans should worry more about, but at no point offers any evidence as to why. The argument relies on scare tactics and euphemism to present China’s space efforts as a threat rather than actual evidence.
If China wants to send more astronauts into space and explore the far side of the moon, that’s great. Why wouldn’t we want to encourage greater space exploration? When someone explains to me how this disadvantages the United States, maybe I’ll be concerned.
This week’s winner of the “GOP is on the slow road to fascism” award … Ron DeSantis!
People are still refusing to get vaccinated, and you will 100 percent absolutely, positively believe what happens next.
A long read on the container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal …
Musical Interlude
There aren’t many great songs about voting, but considering the theme of today’s newsletter, it’s hard to see how I could go wrong with this James Brown tune.
Radiohead’s “Electioneering” also feels particularly relevant.
Ok, this song is not per see about voting, but it is about making a choice (“you can go with this or you can go with that”), and it’s a funky tune.