Which of the twenty Democratic presidential candidates next year will have black voters? The answer to this question will likely be identical to the answer to the question “Which candidate will be the Democratic nominee or perhaps president?”
Over the years, black Americans cast about 1 in 4 votes in Democratic primaries. In 2016, they cast 71% of the Democratic primary in Mississippi, 61% in South Carolina, 54% in Alabama, 51% in Georgia, 46% in Maryland, 32% in North Carolina and Tennessee, and 20 to 28% in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Virginia, New York, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio.
Nearly unanimous black support helped nominate and elect the last three Democratic presidents – Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is almost unanimous because black voters in the primaries voted overwhelmingly for one candidate over another, even against alternatives with powerful claims to support.
Such voting solidarity makes sense for people who identify as part of a distinct group experiencing discrimination. For years, political reporters listened as black preachers, avoiding direct endorsements, called for “unity.” Their congregations understood what they meant.
Blacks have voted Democratic by at least 85% in every presidential election since 1964; and in Jimmy Carter’s primary over Ted Kennedy in 1980; for Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988; for Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in 2008; and for Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016.
If the impulse for solidarity prevails again in 2020, it is unclear who will benefit. Joe Biden, after eight years as a true vice president to the nation’s first black president, is leading among black voters in current polls. But will he run?
The two candidates of African descent, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have unusual ancestry as descendants of antebellum American slaves. Harris’ father is from Jamaica, and Booker grew up in an affluent black suburb of New Jersey. But Barack Obama’s background was even more unusual: How many Americans grew up in Indonesia?
Additionally, there are signs that black voters may not behave as monolithically as they once did. Exit polls in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary showed that they favored Clinton fairly unanimously in the South, giving Sanders only 6-19% in the former Confederate states. However, in New York, Pennsylvania, the five Great Lakes states, and Missouri, Sanders received between 26 and 32%; he carried three of them and was 2 points away from carrying two more.
The Chicago mayoral election is another example of dwindling Black solidarity. Although Tuesday’s runoff was a contest between two black women, neither carried the city’s 19 mostly black hometown candidates into the Feb. 26 nine-candidate primary. Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot was made up of whites in the exclusive Lakefront districts, and her appeal was not related to race but to her lack of connections to corrupt insiders.
Interestingly, even on racial issues, white college graduates, not black ones, are currently the most liberal portion of the Democratic electorate. As New York Times blogger Thomas Edsall notes, more white liberals (79%) than black liberals (60%) believe that racial discrimination is the main reason many blacks cannot achieve success. Fully 32% of blacks say it is blacks who are not mostly responsible.
Black voters are generally more religious than whites and much more so than white liberals; they cast the deciding votes against same-sex marriage in California in 2008 and opposed it in North Carolina in 2012, only changing their minds after being endorsed by then-President Barack Obama a day later. Indeed, blacks make up a vast share of the dwindling number of Democratic primary voters who describe themselves as moderate or conservative.
Black Democrats appear less willing than white college-educated liberals to support and hold as a litmus test positions that are unpopular with most general election voters, such as open border immigration, nine-month abortions, and the Green New Deal. Perhaps they will prevent “woke” white college graduates – and a press composed almost entirely of that demographic – from pulling the party too far to the left in an attempt to defeat a Republican incumbent whose job approval seems to be hovering around 45%.
Or maybe not. The Democratic Party, since its founding by Jackson in 1832, has always been a coalition of out-groups, people not considered typical Americans. At best, they constitute a triumphant majority. At worst, they are a disorganized mob. Which will be in 2020? Black voters will have a substantial say in this.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
