Democrats Have a Clear Non-White Voter Problem
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Democrats Have a Clear Non-White Voter Problem
Heading into 2024, a key part of their coalition is turning away
Democrats may simply have misjudged what is most important to nonwhite voters, reflecting perhaps the increasing domination of their coalition by white college graduate voters, virtually the only demographic among whom the party has been doing steadily better. The agenda of white college graduates, particularly the progressives who support the party so fervently and fuel the party’s activist base, is less coterminous with that of nonwhite voters than Democrats seem to believe.
Reviewing recent data on the views of nonwhite voters makes it less mysterious why they can contain their enthusiasm for Biden.
1. A May Washington Post/ABC News poll asked, “Who do you think did a better job handling the economy (Donald Trump when he was president), or (Joe Biden during his presidency so far)?” Nonwhite respondents felt, by 48 to 41 percent, that Trump had done a better job on the economy than Biden is currently doing.
2. In an August Fox News poll, two-thirds of nonwhite voters rated their personal financial situation as only fair or poor and barely over a quarter (27 percent) said the Biden administration had made the economy better, compared to 42 percent who thought Biden had made the economy worse. Respectively, 46, 54 and 56 percent of nonwhite voters say gas prices, grocery prices and utility costs are a “major problem” for them and their family. Biden’s net approval (approval minus disapproval) among these voters is minus 25 on handling inflation, minus 22 on handling border security and minus 8 on handling the economy.
3. In a recent 6,000 respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), 57 percent of nonwhite voters say Biden has accomplished not that much or little or nothing during his time in office. About half consider the Democratic Party too extreme, think it bases its decisions more on politics than common sense and supports policies that interfere too much in people’s lives. Over two-fifths don’t see the Democrats as sharing their values. And over a third think Democrats look down on people like them, don’t value hard work and aren’t patriotic.
The Democratic Party has been all-in on the idea of “structural racism”—that idea that racism is “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, rather than coming “from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions.” In the SCAL/NORC survey, about half of nonwhite voters choose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society. And two-thirds of these voters reject the idea of reducing police budgets in favor of social services, preferring instead to fully fund police budgets in the interest of public safety.
4. In The Liberal Patriot’s recent survey of American voters conducted by YouGov, most nonwhite voters believe the Democratic Party has moved too far left on both economic and cultural/social issues. On economic issues, 57 percent of these voters say Democrats have moved too far left. On cultural and social issues, 56 percent say the same.
As examples, only about a quarter of nonwhite voters identify with the standard Democratic position on transgender issues—that “states should protect all transgender youth by providing access to puberty blockers and transition surgeries if desired, and allowing them to participate fully in all activities and sports as the gender of their choice”. And only around a third support the standard Democratic position on climate and energy policy—that “We need a rapid green transition to end the use of fossil fuels and replace them with fully renewable energy sources.” The latter finding is intriguing because so much of Democrats’ industrial and economic policy is built around just this transition. But perhaps not surprising because climate change is just not a particularly important issue to the typical voter, including the typical nonwhite voter.
None of this means that nonwhite voters are now going to become a Republican constituency, despite these voters’ concerns about the Democrats and cross-pressures on issues. Hardly; Biden will likely carry these voters by a healthy margin in 2024. But it does mean that Democrats’ hold on these voters may well slip further in 2024, cutting Democrats’ margins dangerously among a group that has been the bedrock of Democrats’ electoral strategy.
Is Ron Turning on NBD?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has privately complained about a powerful operative at the center of his 2024 presidential effort, according to three people familiar with the comments, a sign of the internal drama that has complicated his struggling White House bid.
DeSantis has expressed regrets over Jeff Roe’s hiring as a lead strategist at the super PAC Never Back Down, an outside group that has assumed many responsibilities in the race traditionally handled by campaigns, two of the people said. One, a DeSantis donor, heard the comments directly from the governor, this person said.
DeSantis has also voiced anger over a pre-debate strategy memo from Never Back Down, which was publicly posted last month on the website of Roe’s firm, Axiom, these people said. One of them, the donor, said the governor was “apoplectic.”
Insert the normal denials here, and then:
Top DeSantis aides have said they regret the extent of Roe’s influence over DeSantis’s 2024 operation, according to a person familiar with the comments, and several other people echoed that some campaign staff and donors have been upset with Roe, particularly after the debate memo and leaked recordings of a donor briefing by Roe and other super PAC officials held the day of the debate in Milwaukee.
Roe asked donors to help the super PAC raise an additional $50 million by the end of the year, shortly before the group announced plans to buy at least $25 million in advertising in Iowa and New Hampshire between Labor Day and Halloween.
“This election is moving now. Nothing that happens in August really kind of matters,” Roe said while previewing their plans and adding, “The day after Labor Day we’re launching, and we need your help to stay up and go hard the rest of the way.”
On Thursday, a Politico magazine story about Never Back Down’s efforts to reach voters and test its methods’ effectiveness featured another quote from Roe that drew attention.
“'They were taking a hard shot at the PAC, for whatever reason, and we were worried that they were going to, like, kill us in the crib with donors,” Roe says of DeSantis’s Tallahassee-based campaign,'” the story said.
It’s normal for campaigns and super PACs to have some tension, but “this is clearly different,” said the donor who said DeSantis voiced regret about Roe.
Will the Supreme Court Trim Chevron?
Manhattan Institute weighs in.
The Manhattan Institute filed an amicus brief in this blockbuster case, joined by professors Richard Epstein, Todd Zywicki, Gus Hurwitz, and Geoffrey Manne. We argue that the Court should take this opportunity to overhaul the Chevron-deference regime because this experiment in rebalancing the relationship between presidential administration and judicial review has failed. It has led to agency overreach, haphazard practical results, and the diminution of Congress. Though intended to empower Congress by limiting the role of courts, Chevron has instead empowered agencies to aggrandize their own powers to the greatest extent plausible under their operative statutes, and often beyond.
Congress has proved unequal to the task of responding to this pervasive agency overreach and now has less of a role in policymaking than in the pre-Chevron era. Courts, in turn, have become sloppy and lazy in interpreting statutes. It’s a vicious circle of legislative buck-passing and judicial deference to executive overreach.
Chevron deference rests on the presumption that Congress won’t over-delegate and that agencies will be loyal agents. But the past 40 years have shown that Congress loves passing the buck and that agencies are actually principals who pursue their own interests. The time has come for the Court to revisit Chevron, whether it chooses to overrule it explicitly or keep it nominally under a newly restricted standard.
Still Rumormongering Obama’s Sex Life?
There’s this face Tucker Carlson makes when he’s got a particularly wild story in the offing. The eyebrows knit together at the centre, the mouth is downturned with lips either slightly open or pursed in a pouty frown. Whoever wrote Carlson’s Wikipedia entry describes it as his “trademark scowl”, but scowl isn’t quite the right word. The expression isn’t so much angry as astonished, maybe even a little bewildered. It’s an embodiment of the classic newsman’s caveat, “Big, if true”, which allows members of the press to maintain plausible incredulity about a rumour even as they spread that same rumour all over the place.
Whether Carlson makes this face strategically is hard to say; it’s certainly a fortuitous way for someone in this line of work to look, but is it also just how he looks, generally. He got a lot of mileage out of it when he was the primetime poster boy at Fox News, monologuing on such matters of national importance as the gender identity of the green M&M. And he’s working it to great effect in his new interview with Larry Sinclair, a man who has spent the past 15 years alleging that he once engaged in a drug-fuelled homosexual liaison, in a Comfort Inn, with the then-not-yet-President Barack Obama.
“What was Obama like on crack?” Carlson asks, and then pulls the trademark face while Sinclair meanders through an answer. It’s a neat trick. The pundit’s new self-produced show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is a lower-budget affair than the Fox News position from which he was fired in April; it doesn’t allow for such technical flourishes as a chyron. But he doesn’t need one: Carlson’s expression alone creates the impression of a subtextual thought bubble floating invisibly somewhere above his head: Do you believe this shit?
Full disclosure: I, for one, do not believe this shit. It’s not just Sinclair’s less-than-credible history, which includes multiple convictions for fraud and forgery, or the lie detector test he voluntarily took and summarily failed back in 2008 when he first levelled his allegations. It’s that the substance of Sinclair’s claims is wildly out of keeping with virtually everything we know about Obama, if not in terms of moral goodness, then certainly in terms of his ambition. Even Obama’s fiercest critics would surely concede that a man who structured his entire personal and professional life around making himself electable was unlikely, as a married state senator at the very start of a long-desired and painstakingly planned-for political career, to risk it all for the sake of $250 worth of cocaine and a blowjob.
But more importantly, does Tucker Carlson believe it? It’s not unreasonable to be a little bit cynical on this front. There is, arguably, a burgeoning effort afoot by certain members of the media to take Barack Obama down a peg, retroactively tarnishing his presidential legacy as well as his reputation for being a paragon of moral uprightness. Obama’s continued presence in Washington has been raising eyebrows among conservatives from basically the moment he left office, and some have begun to openly speculate that he’s acting as a sort of puppet master to the addled senior citizen currently occupying the White House.
And of course, there’s the matter of Carlson’s own integrity. Like many American media personalities, he does not necessarily believe all the words that come out of his mouth on camera. Among the revelations that preceded his ousting from Fox were text messages in which he privately contradicted his on-camera stances on Donald Trump and the 2020 election, which he publicly described as a “scam”. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted a producer in the days after the election had been called for Biden. “I hate him passionately.”
In this case, though, there’s a peculiar twist. Carlson has chosen to platform Sinclair’s allegations, which he describes as “obviously true” — but his ultimate contention is that the substance of the allegations doesn’t even matter.
“You know, in 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men, and smoking crack,” Carlson told podcast host Adam Carolla on a recent episode of his eponymous show. “It’s not gonna change the world that Barack Obama likes dudes… I’m just saying, the amount of lying in the media about it was unbelievable. People knew this was true! And it was quite obviously true at the time, and people who covered the campaign didn’t say anything about it because they didn’t want to lose access to the campaign.”
Feature
The PR-driven decay of Rotten Tomatoes.
Items of Interest
Foreign
At G20, Xi’s absence is a sign of instability amid China’s downturn.
What Modi wants to achieve at G20.
Musk blamed in Isaacson book for not turning Starlink on to help Ukraine.
Domestic
A macabre scene as Mitch McConnell returns to the Senate.
The coming weeks will test McCarthy and McConnell’s working relationship.
Pandemic politics returns to the Senate as Covid cases rise.
The fall in home prices may already be over.
Abigail Spanberger rails at Tuberville over military holds.
Why Tuberville’s holds aren’t unprecedented.
Lawfare
Inside the MTG, Ken Buck feud over J6 defendants.
Republicans narrow in on bribery charge in Biden impeachment probe.
Turley: A response to Laurence Tribe’s smears.
Navarro found in contempt of Congress.
Trump hosts fundraiser for legal bills of allies.
2024
York: Lots of Republicans can beat Joe Biden.
Carville: You can’t look at polls and not say you’re concerned.
Nikki Haley’s goal: Leapfrog DeSantis.
CBS asks Kamala if she’s prepared to be commander in chief.
Kristi Noem leading the veepstakes.
Media
Vogue circles the wagons around KJP in fawning profile.
BBC disinformation correspondent lied on her CV.
Taibbi on Philip Bump: Inside the blue bubble.
Tech
ChatGPT slips again, lower traffic for third straight month.
Ephemera
Takeaways from the Detroit Lions upset of Kansas City.
Danny Masterson sentenced to thirty years over rape charge.
Jimmy Fallon apologizes to Tonight Show staff.
Is this the end of Burning Man?
Podcast
Quote
“Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.”
— Chuck Klosterman