Why ethnic minorities aren’t catching Kamala’s ‘vibe’
The Democrats’ vapid identity politics is driving black and Hispanic voters away.
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Making history. Breaking glass ceilings. The coverage of Kamala Harris’s campaign for the presidency is so laden with faux-inspirational clichés you’d think we were all in the middle of a corporate DEI seminar, rather than a particularly consequential US election campaign.
I suppose it’s understandable. What else are the liberal-left media going to get excited about? Americans may be restive, the world may be on fire, but in Harris the Democrats have a candidate who seems even more vapid, bereft of insight and principle-lite than the rest of the generation of machine politicians she sprung from.
Having changed her mind on every issue – from fracking to sex-change operations for illegal immigrants in detention (a pressing concern for many voters and illegal immigrants, I’m sure) – Harris makes Keir Starmer look like a paragon of political consistency by contrast.
And so her outriders have leaned in, as the Silicon Valley feminists would put it, heavily to the notion that Harris’s mere presence in the White House would represent tremendous progress for America, on account of her being the first woman of colour to be president.
While Harris has avoided making these arguments herself – having watched Hillary Clinton try and fail to guilt-trip her way to the top job – she has allowed her surrogates and media allies to do it for her, at the convention and across the airwaves. ‘It is like my ancestors are dancing’, enthused one African American delegate at the DNC in August, summing up the mood.
The snag is, a large number of ethnic minorities seem not to have got the memo. While the headline polling numbers remain neck-and-neck, Harris is losing ground among black and Hispanic voters, particularly black and Hispanic working-class men. Meanwhile, according to Nate Cohn of the New York Times, Republican nominee Donald Trump is on course to fare ‘better among black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964’.
According to New York Times / Siena College polling, Harris is beating Trump by 78 per cent to 15 per cent among black voters, and by 56 per cent to 37 per cent among Hispanic voters. Another poll has Trump actually beating Harris among Hispanics (by 49 per cent to 38 per cent) and hitting 17 per cent (to Harris’s 72 per cent) among African Americans.
Those leads among African Americans may sound commanding, but if they were replicated in the election they would represent the worst performance of any Democratic candidate among black voters since the Sixties. (Hillary Clinton won 92 per cent in 2016, and Barack Obama won 95 per cent at his peak in 2008.)
As the Democrats have tried to stem these losses, they’ve shown us why so many people are turning away from them in the first place. Harris recently launched an ‘Opportunity Agenda for Black Men’, which reads like it was written by a racist AI chat bot. Two of its key planks are legalising marijuana and protecting cryptocurrency investments. The former is particularly outrageous, given Harris’s record of aggressively prosecuting weed-related crimes when she was California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney.
When patronising black men doesn’t work, Harris’s team just scolds them instead. During an appearance at a campaign office in Pittsburgh earlier this month, Obama told ‘the brothers’ (his words) that they were ‘coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses’ for the fact that they ‘just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president’. He all but called them misogynists.
Ah, the old ‘basket of deplorables’ technique, because that worked out so well last time. Indeed, whenever formerly faithful voters dare to defy the Democratic establishment – as supposedly ‘deplorable’ white working-class voters did in 2016 – the response is always to accuse them of being bigots or idiots or both.
In 2016, Gloria Steinem accused young women who were backing Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, of just wanting to be with the boys. Since then, twice-failed Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams has blamed black men’s susceptibility to ‘misinformation’ for her failures. So black men are a bit dim and young women are slaves to their hormones, are they? Remind me: which party is the racist and sexist one again?
Just as the Democrats took their working-class Rust Belt base granted, so too they have treated America’s ethnic minorities as if they were their exclusive property – as people who, electorally, had nowhere else to go. After Obama’s victory in 2008, pundits arrogantly pontificated about a young, diverse ‘coalition of the ascendant’ that would secure Democratic success for generations. Now, that coalition is breaking down in multiple directions (Trump is also doing strikingly well among young men).
The story of the past 10 years has been of a Democratic Party becoming increasingly obsessed with identity politics – embracing once fringe notions of white privilege and crippling racial victimhood; defining itself against a fever dream of a fascistic ‘MAGA Republicanism’. And yet this seems to have repelled ethnic minorities away from the Democrats and led a growing proportion of them to give Trump a second look.
The data don’t lie. ‘Trump’s shares of the nationwide black, Hispanic and Asian vote in 2016’, notes the Wall Street Journal, ‘were two, two and three points greater, respectively, than Mitt Romney’s in 2012. Even as he lost in 2020, Mr Trump improved on his own performance among these segments by four, three and five points, respectively.’ As David Shor, a leading Democratic consultant, points out, ‘racial [political] polarisation had been steadily increasing from 1992 up until 2016’ – until Trump sent it into reverse. ‘It is very strange, in some ways, that Donald Trump kicked off an era of racial depolarisation’, says Shor.
But is it really so strange? Trump may be an unlikely – not to mention cranky – vehicle for this emerging multiracial populism, but his focus on blue-collar concerns was always bound to resonate across the multiracial working class. His gains reflect what used to be a pretty fundamental insight of the political left. That workers of all pigmentations have a lot more in common than the elites would like to let on. That, in today’s case, a black construction worker is likely to feel similarly to a white construction worker about illegal immigration, eco-lunacy and men in women’s changing rooms.
The same goes for Muslim and Arab Americans. It’s striking that the man who imposed a ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries and is a staunch ally of Benjamin Netanyahu is also doing surprisingly well among these cohorts. Indeed, Trump has helped to rebuild the Republicans’ hitherto terrible standing among American Muslims following the so-called War on Terror. According to one 2020 exit poll, he may have won as much as a third of Muslim voters in the last election. And he has gained some eye-catching endorsements in this campaign. Last month, Trump was endorsed by Amer Ghalib, the Muslim Democratic mayor of Hamtramck in Michigan – America’s only Muslim-majority city.
There’s been a lot of chatter about ‘vibes’ in this election, largely because Harris has nothing else to offer. But while the upper-middle classes will happily warm their hands on the ‘joy’ of electing another ‘first’ as president, the working classes – still smarting from runaway inflation and nurturing the suspicion the elites despise them – will not. Ethnic minorities, certainly, have had their fill of empty symbolism, after the ‘hope and change’ promised by the first black president never materialised. ‘Great expectations weren’t met’, notes Nate Cohn. ‘For a decade’, he adds, disappointment in the ‘perceived failures’ of Barack Obama’s presidency ‘could be heard between the lines’ in ‘focus groups and interviews and polls of black and Hispanic voters’.
Ethnic-minority Americans are rejecting the patronising notion that an ethnic-minority American in the White House will boost, if not their prospects, then certainly their self-esteem. Harris’s rocky path to the Democratic top table amply demonstrates this. She flamed out of the primary in 2019 due to her woeful support among African Americans. When Joe Biden made Harris his vice-presidential pick, it was hailed as a boost to his prospects with black voters following the summer of BLM, even though he had always been much more popular among black voters than she ever was.
Kamala Harris could well ‘make history’ next week, becoming the first woman of colour elected US commander-in-chief, despite historically low support among the very minorities she is supposed to ‘represent’. Americans are fast coming to the conclusion that when politicians talk of ‘breaking glass ceilings’, they mean breaking glass ceilings only for themselves.
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Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
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