Voice of Reason
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The Catch-22 Facing Black Voters At The Ballot Box
It gets into the political reality that Black folks face and why not voting can be detrimental.
The last section is really interesting.
That leads us back to our initial question: What can Black voters do?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way out of “captured” status. In order to do so, a large amount of Black votes must be up for grabs, which doesn’t seem likely.
Of course, Black voters do have another choice besides voting for Democrats or Republicans: sitting out future elections entirely (or voting for third-party candidates). But it’s not clear how viable of an option that is given the increasingly illiberal natureof the GOP.
“If they don’t turn out then potentially you end up with a Trump-like figure in office,” Stephens-Dougan said. “And while that could send a message to the Democratic Party to not take your votes for granted, it arguably ends in a worse outcome than if they had turned out and helped elect a Democrat who was closer to their preferences. The cost of sending a message or a signal to the party might be too costly for a lot Black people.”
That leaves Black voters with two other options. First, they could put their electoral weight behind local, state and congressional officeholders, instead of focusing on change at the federal level (i.e., the presidency). According to various political scientists I spoke with for this piece, including Candis Watts Smith of Duke University, there’s a lot to be said for this approach.
“Those down-ballot prosecutors, judges, sheriffs and school boards match quite well with issues of criminal justice, public resources and education,” she said. “Given that those are the issues that many Black voters care about and the issues that influence people on a day-to-day basis, it makes sense for Black voters to focus on the positions of the elected officials who can do the work that they want them to do.”
We’ve seen examples of this recently. Take, for example, the 2018 and 2020 electionswhen a slate of progressive candidates who made overt appeals to Black voters and other voters of color won their congressional races. Indeed, the large numbers of racially conservative white voters who vote at the national level aren’t always present in many states and congressional districts.
Alternatively, Black voters could try to overcome racist messaging and hope that public opinion on certain issues related to race and racism changes. That’s a tall ask, especially in the near term, according to the experts I spoke with, because it’s highly unlikely any political figure would be able to overcome the anti-Black tendencies of many white voters.
That said, there is a problem with simply looking at the polling above and declaring pro-Black issues political losers: Public opinion is fluid. It can change quickly — even if only for a brief period of time. And on a longer time horizon, lasting change does happen. Especially when talking about civil rights issues, which often involve a minority making demands of society at large, large-scale change is almost always unpopular to start with — if it wasn’t, the demand or protest wouldn’t be required in the first place. Case in point: Civil rights marches and Martin Luther King Jr. were viewed negatively by a majority of the public in the 1960s. Both are viewed overwhelmingly positively now.
Does that put the onus on Black activists, voters and their allies to convince politicians that the issues important to them are worthwhile, then? Frymer, at least, argued that might be the case. “This is unfair, yeah, but the reality is that parties are rarely going to mobilize and change on their own unless they perceive that the political calculus has changed in their favor,” he said.
Others, however, including Phoenix and Smith, felt differently.
“The reason Black voters are in captured status is because there’s arguably only one party for them to choose from,” Smith said. “If Republicans decided they wanted to be a multiracial party, then the range of choices for Black voters would increase by 100 percent.”
Regardless of the choice that the Democratic Party and Black voters make, though, they should also acknowledge that public opinion on race-related issues isn’t as malleable as, say, public views on Russia, free trade and the media. That’s because, as Phoenix told me, “many white voters have by and large reinterpreted long-standing issues and partisan debates through a racial lens, increasing the influence of their senses of racial conservatism, aggrievement and plain old-fashioned prejudice on their political decision-making.”
Perhaps the greatest thing working in Black voters’ favor is that the electorate is quickly diversifying and these changing numbers might eventually force politicians to stop placing white voters at the center of the political universe. “By discarding the outmoded zero-sum framing of race-relevant policy issues and framing their commitment to advancing the interests of Black voters as broadly benefitting all, the Democratic Party can increase its electoral odds in the immediate, and especially the long-term future,” Phoenix said.
In the future, then, it’s possible that politicking will instead call on all groups to engage and compromise on issues important to other constituencies beyond themselves.
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good luck
