How Democratic Candidates Win the African-American Vote

There has been a lot of discussion about how older African-American voters have shown a preference for Joe Biden and younger African-American voters are more up for grabs. Do you think the candidates are or are not competing for African-American voters in this primary in similar ways to the past several Democratic primaries?

There have been candidates who have been competing for the African-American vote. They just haven’t been successful. You have to keep in mind there are two black candidates that are still not quite dead, particularly Senator Harris. And I think she tried to use some of the same tropes and the same strategy as Barack Obama did in 2008, but it’s not sticking. So, if you take out the black candidates who are not viable, I think there are candidates who have been trying to cultivate the black vote. Elizabeth Warren has. She’s been going to South Carolina. She’s been holding meetings with groups of African-American voters. And so, in fact, I think it’s a good thing that the black vote is not concentrated around one particular candidate.

Why do you think the Harris and Booker campaigns haven’t really succeeded this far?

This relates maybe more to Harris than Booker, but this point I’m about to make applies to both. I think the anti-Trump sentiment is so strong among African-Americans that they’re really thinking pragmatically, and that pragmatism has got them to be far more supportive of Biden than they probably would be in a previous election. There is the obvious reason that he was Obama’s Vice-President and, at least in the polls, is the candidate who consistently seems that he can beat Trump. And so they’re pushing aside, for a moment, the case of Senator Booker and Senator Harris.

The other thing is that—how can I put this—there is a core of black voters who are just not going for the okey-doke again. And what I mean is that this idea of having some sort of symbolic black Presidency has been done, and so they’re asking hard questions about policy. What has been their record around issues that are important to them? I think, for Senator Harris, it’s been the current hard criminal-justice record that’s in many ways tripped her up, in addition to her not being very clear on some positions and going back and forth. We’ll see what happens with Mayor Bloomberg, who only yesterday went before a congregation at a black church in Brooklyn and said, “I’m sorry about my record on stop-and-frisk.” We haven’t heard any apology like that from Senator Harris on her record. She stood by it or she’s kept silent on it.

And so here we are, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement, where criminal-justice reform is a very important, salient issue among many black voters. And the black woman candidate doesn’t have a record that reflects the reform that’s needed. So, again, the thing is pragmatism and beating Trump, and the second thing with Senator Harris is her record on reform. For Booker, I suspect some sort of message of all of us coming together—this Martin Luther King-esque view about the need for black, white, and all people to come together for the common good—just doesn’t fit well in this moment that we are in in American history.

I know you’ve written critically about the Obama Presidency, or what the Obama years actually delivered for people of color. It seems like what you’re saying is that even though there is this immense respect for Obama, there is also this idea that voting for an African-American candidate just because they’re African-American, if they’re not going to deliver on certain things, is kind of—

In the past, I think. It is a thing of the past, at least at this moment. We’re not that far away from President Obama’s two terms, and there are people who have seen that the only racial and ethnic group that has not rebounded from the Great Recession, particularly in terms of net worth, have been African-Americans, and this occurred under a so-called black Presidency. So, because of that, I think people are asking harder questions about policy issues.

Just to go back to Biden, do you see the support that he’s getting from African-Americans, especially the ones over fifty, as being as much about pragmatism as it is about warm feelings toward him for serving as Obama’s Vice-President for eight years?

I think it’s a combination. He wouldn’t have been a viable candidate, I don’t think, in 2016. I really do think that it’s because he seems to be the person who can beat Trump. And it helps, too, that he worked in Obama’s Administration. At least, those are the anecdotal things I hear among older black voters. I’m trying to think back about other Democratic primaries. People have forgotten that Bill Clinton was thought to be the first black President. And I could hear people say, including some of my relatives in Georgia, “Wouldn’t it be great to see Bill Clinton back in the White House by voting for Hillary?” And then Barack Obama rose up.

But you have to remember he only saw the black vote coalesce around him after his victory in Iowa. Before then, he didn’t have the majority of the black vote. African-Americans are the most loyal constituency in the Democratic Party; they’re more Democratic than any other racial or ethnic group in the country. And so that loyalty informs the way they think about political candidates. And, when I speak here about that loyalty, I’m thinking of middle-aged and older African-American voters. And so, because of that, I think their political preferences tend to be pretty pragmatic. And I think that’s been historical.

I think that fits a little bit into what you’re saying about 2008, because once Obama won in Iowa and in all these states, it was sort of like, “Oh, maybe this guy actually is the pragmatic choice, too.”

Once Obama got—how can I put this—validation from white voters, black voters felt comfortable in switching from Hillary to Obama. Which means then that if, by some chance, Kamala Harris or even Booker wins in Iowa, then you may see shifting there. But, even then, I still suspect people are going to be raising issues about their records.

For how long has it been assumed that African-Americans would deliver votes for the people considered the more pragmatic or even establishment part of the Party?

The late political scientist Hanes Walton wrote series of books where he made an argument about white Southerners who were Democrats, like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and even L.B.J. in 1964—that black voters, half of the Democratic electorate or more in the South, felt much more a sense of kinship with those white candidates. And they tended to support those candidates in primary elections. So Jimmy Carter wasn’t necessarily the establishment candidate, nor was Bill Clinton in 1992, but they did very well with black voters. Carter got the endorsement of Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, the civil-rights élites in Atlanta. John Edwards won in South Carolina in 2004, too. So there’s that argument, the native-son-candidacy theory of black voting behavior.

Why do you think that is? Is it that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton has a pragmatic streak, or are from states with large African-American populations and have shown they can win white voters, too?

It’s pragmatic. It’s also the “candidates that we know” sort of thing. It goes back to what V. O. Key, who, in his famous book on Southern politics, referred to as “friends and neighbors.” I mean, I know Barack Obama is a great orator, but, even to this day, I cannot think of any President who could speak with the comfort of Bill Clinton in some Baptist church in the South or even outside of the South. He had a personal connection to a lot of black voters.

There was a book, a year or two after Clinton’s Presidency, “Bill Clinton and Black America,” with these interesting anecdotes about why black people felt that Bill Clinton was the first black President. It’s because of this cultural connection they felt they had with him. He ate the same food that we did, listened to the same music. He knew us. He embraced us. And, in fact, some even said that the reason why the Republicans were going after Bill Clinton is because he liked or embraced African-Americans so much. Jimmy Carter had some conservative policies that rankled black leaders at the time. But there was this sense that he very much had a cultural connection, and particularly there was this religious evangelicalism that would also be familiar and appeal to black voters.

The qualities you’re describing don’t really fit any of the candidates that we have in the race now, black or white.

That may be part of the problem.

I guess one reason for that is there are so few Democratic governors in the South, although I know one just did win in Louisiana. It would seem to suggest a problem for Democrats, in the sense that the candidates who could really inspire black voters may not be the types that are going to win the nomination of a Party that is much more Northern, much more liberal. It’s a different profile than what you’re talking about.

Yeah. It is a different profile of candidate. And I would even argue that the reason why Obama was able to craft that in 2008, particularly in South Carolina, was not just by the force of his personality but because of Michelle Obama, who had the roots from the South Side of Chicago to the American South, and went before black women voters there particularly to say to them, “I understand your fear of voting for black candidates.” She tapped into their anxiety—she knew the language. She was a Southern surrogate from the South Side of Chicago.

If you look at polls, Warren has some support among African-American voters under forty-five or so, but it’s still pretty low. Buttigieg is getting zero per cent among black voters in various polls. Beyond what you’re saying about the type of candidates that historically have appealed more to African-American voters, do you have some sense about why these two candidates specifically might be struggling with black voters?

For the same reason why Kerry and the same reason why Bernie struggled last time and is struggling now. They don’t know them. They don’t have any reference point or a cultural connection like with the type of candidate I talked about in the past. The black vote is still rooted in the South. There are candidates who are not on the circuit at the N.A.A.C.P. national conventions, or attending this Congressional Black Caucus weekend or speaking regularly at a Baptist church in Alabama and Mississippi. They just don’t know these people. I mean “don’t know them” in the sense that they don’t have enough information to make sense about what their commitment really is to the African-American community. And, even though things are changing, I think it does go back to this “friends and neighbors” view of politics among black voters. It’s a part of how you stand on political issues, but it is based on what your connections are to black communities prior to running for public office.

Is there a way in which you think Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg, with more exposure, could have some potential upside or political strength with black voters?

You mean in the general election?

Yeah.

Even though it didn’t matter, black voters came out during the Reagan years, even though they were disappointed by the native-son candidacy of Jesse Jackson. They’re going to come out because the animus against President Trump is so high that they will vote for any Democratic candidate in large numbers.

I was wondering if you have any concern that turnout won’t come close to matching what it did in the Obama years.

It won’t. For the first time, black turnout surpassed white turnout in 2012. I do think it will depend on some degree of enthusiasm about the candidate. But I think the Party didn’t do enough last time around to put money into mobilizing these voters. I think that was a crucial mistake by Senator Clinton. And so I think there are two sides to this: how motivated people are going to be, and what kind of resources the Party’s going to put in place in order to get these voters out to vote.

Stacey Abrams as a Vice-Presidential candidate—that’s a part of the equation, too, that we haven’t discussed. I think the Vice-Presidential candidate is going to be an important factor, because if it’s a person like Stacey Abrams—who does have the “friends and neighbors” sensibility, who, after her loss in Georgia, has become a national celebrity in the Democratic Party and loved by many black voters—that could make the difference.

African-Americans Democrats are, according to polls, more skeptical of gay marriage than other Democratic constituencies, and there has been some speculation that that could be hurting Pete Buttigieg. Do you give credence to that, and do you think that will be somewhat of a problem for him winning over black voters either at some point in the primary or later in the general election?

I think with Buttigieg the problem is that black voters don’t know him. To me, he’s just like Warren and Bernie in the sense that they just don’t know who he is. And the thing is, you’re absolutely right, black voters, particularly those who are regular churchgoers, tend to be opposed to gay marriage and supportive of other conservative, values-oriented beliefs. But the economic factors or civil-rights issues always trump those social issues. And so the thing about that is that if it’s a candidate who’s viable, who speaks to the interests and needs of the black community . . . For instance, if Buttigieg had a record in South Bend that was more positive to black voters, perhaps he would get a different response. He doesn’t have the social ties to those communities.

It seems like what you’re saying is that, if a candidate who did have these social ties and was speaking to the community was gay, you don’t think it would then be a particular political problem.

Not on a national level. If there was a candidate for governor of Mississippi, certainly it would be. So, yeah, context means a lot here. They didn’t punish Obama because he was supportive of gay-rights issues, right? There was no mass exodus.