One can’t persuasively rebut popularism’s arguments without first trying to understand them, writes EricLevitz
Photo: Joshua Lott/The Washington Post via Getty Images I am not normal. And, in all probability, neither are you.
The impetus for this discourse was a New York Times article about the political data scientist David Shor, and his gloomy forecast for the Democratic Party. Shor’s analysis will be familiar to regular readers of this blog . It has diagnostic and prescriptive elements. The former goes roughly like this: Unless Democrats start winning a much larger share of non-college-educated voters, they will lose the Senate by 2025, and be unlikely to regain the chamber for a decade thereafter.
Unfortunately, one of the least productive interventions in the popularism discourse has also been one of its most widely read. In a column titled, “Democrats Are Ready to Abandon Black Voters, Again,” The Nation’s Elie Mystal misrepresents Shor’s arguments while baselessly indicting his motivations. I have admiration for much of Mystal’s work.
At no point in these developments did Shor advise Democrats to avoid taking Black voters or racial justice seriously. To the contrary, he argued that nonviolent protests in general — and the nonviolent George Floyd protests in particular — helped Democrats electorally. In an interview with Intelligencer in July 2020, Shor claimed that the racial justice protest in D.C.’s Lafayette Park had provided Biden with the biggest polling boost of his campaign.
One can argue that Black voters’ faith in the possibility of police reform is naïve, and that only abolition will end police violence. And one can insist on the utility of property destruction as a tactic. Regardless, it remains the case that Shor advised Democrats to adopt the typical Black voter’s views on policing, and tacitly endorsed that voter’s preference for nonviolent protest.
Mystal’s third claim is straightforwardly inaccurate. Shor and likeminded “popularists” do not advise Democrats to give racists what they want. Nor has Shor encouraged Democrats to take no action on issues of racial justice or civil rights. In fact, he has been one of the party’s most prominent advocates for redressing Congress’s systematic underrepresentation of nonwhite voters. Shor has implored Democrats to grant statehood to D.C., Puerto Rico, and any other U.S.
This analysis is tendentious at best. Mystal’s reading of the electoral landscape elides several realities that are integral to Shor’s. Among them: • The party’s current paper-thin majority is a product of luck. In 2018, Democrats won the popular vote across all House elections by a historically large margin — and still lost Senate seats. They were fortunate, however, to have many of their most vulnerable incumbents on the ballot in an unusually favorable year: Thanks to a national environment that favored Democrats by about eight points, Joe Manchin and Jon Tester held on in deep-red states. But their margins were slim.
Mobilizing nonwhite voters is critical. But it is not an alternative to persuasion. There simply aren’t enough nonwhite Democrats in enough different states for them to solve the the party’s Senate problem. Fortunately, it is actually possible to persuade white Trump voters to support Democratic candidates; if it weren’t, today’s Democratic trifecta would not exist.
All of which is to say: There is nothing inherently anti-Black about wanting the Democratic Party to avoid alienating bigoted voters, much less white working-class ones more broadly. A “mobilization” strategy will only benefit African Americans to the extent that it keeps the Republican Party out of power.
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