Oh good, the 2020 presidential primary season is getting underway. And here I was this close to losing the urge to chew off my own limbs. The New York Times closes out 2018 with a look at initial Democratic contender efforts to connect with black voters—or more accurately, the first contacts with the leaders who can offer them counsel as to what black Americans want to see from their candidates. This, from Color of Change head Rashad Robinson, seems on point:
“I think some of the candidates don’t get that they’re going to have to actually come with a bold agenda,” Mr. Robinson said. “If candidates think that this is just about who can beat Trump, they’re going to have a rude awakening. People can hate Trump and not love the opposition. It actually has to be about putting out something that allows people to feel like they are connected and their community’s issues are being addressed.”
This has always been true. The most successful political voices tend to be the ones who are unafraid in announcing their would-be vision for the country. Donald Trump may be a garbage fire perched atop a second, larger garbage fire but “I promise to not be as big a garbage fire as that last guy” is, one imagines, not the sort of message that will rally volunteers to stump for you across the fifty states.
This, however, is getting a bit hoary:
This time around, Democrats are weighing how to reach out to the black community in the primary without losing the ability to appeal to the suburban and working class whites who propelled Mr. Trump to victory.
Eeeeeh, this is not really a problem. Trump's coalition was made up of (1) eager racists, who flocked to him precisely because of his anti-immigrant, anti-Obama, anti-everything-else tirades, and (2) the politically uninformed, people who know so little about politics that they were willing to believe that a transparently dimwitted reality television host might just have what it takes to lead 'Merica to greatness, for some definition of 'Merica and "greatness," and were willing to overlook Trump’s racist outbursts in order to give that a go.
The first group is unreachable. It's not worth trying. Screw them and their votes both, you're not going to convince them to vote against Trump or whatever Trump-lite candidate Republicans scurry to replace him with. The second group barely pays attention to the primaries to begin with.
What authors are really asking, when they ask how candidates can "reach out to the black community" without "losing the ability to appeal to the suburban and working class whites," is whether a candidate will be able to appeal to both non-white voters and the sort of whites who would be resentful of a candidate who tried for that inclusion. No. No, they can't. It's not worth attempting or thinking about, and a candidate who tries to balance on the head of that particular pin is by definition unworthy of the office. If you're building a coalition that includes both black Americans and disgruntled racists and have to balance your rhetoric to avoid pissing the racists off, you are doing it wrong.
There are a great many "suburban and working class whites" are not reflexive racists, and those people are not so easily turned off by candidates who recognize that systemic racism is alive and well in America, or that civil rights protections are needed to combat, for example, new racist-in-premise voting restrictions championed by their Republican opponents, or that loosening gun laws while hyper-militarizing police forces as bulwark against all those new guns has resulted in police forces too quickly turning to violence under the pretense of necessary self-defense.
But the press has been very bad on this, in the Trump era. They have been forever interviewing these "suburban and working class whites" who supported Trump and still support Trump and, almost invariably, each Trump voter story has at least one burp of raw racist sentiment that passes for "normal" in the Trump voter's community and social circles but which the reporter cannot quite muster comment on, between references to the local diner or just-closed factory. It turns out that "suburban and working class whites" is a euphemism, a stand-in for Trump's much smaller collection of "economically anxious" voters who blame all the things they are "economically anxious" about on the presence of non-whites around them.
The successful Democratic candidate will be one who can ignore this false choice, and in fact mock it. The 2020 elections will be, unavoidably, a referendum on Trump's brand of petty racism and rampant xenophobia. Embrace that fight. Be that fight. Be the candidate for everyone who isn't so obsessed with racism that they're willing to put a crooked know-nothing in charge of the nation just to get a wee bit more of it and you might get somewhere.