Thanks, Kanye -- let's talk more about race in politics
I'll say this for Kanye West's recent enthusiasm for President Donald Trump: Thanks to him, people are talking again about the touchy topic of race in this country's politics.
That's significant in light of the somewhat belated attention that we media workers and numerous political operatives have been giving to Trump voters, especially those who voted for the real estate developer and reality TV star after voting twice for Barack Obama.
While 9 percent of Obama's 2012 voters swung over to Trump in 2016, according to a New York Times analysis, 7 percent -- or more than 4 million missing voters -- stayed home, contributing to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's defeat. Three percent voted for a third-party candidate.
As Democrats try to develop strategies for the midterms and 2012, they face a thorny dilemma: How do they woo those mostly white swing voters back while also energizing black voters, whose turnout in 2016 fell back to 2004 levels, after surging to new record highs for Obama's two elections?
That's a big but not insurmountable challenge, judging by recent studies and a string of Democratic victories in this year's special elections.
Evidence has emerged in some studies that "economic anxiety" about changes that had left them behind may have had less to do with Trump voters' choices than anxiety about other, more complex social changes that seemed to be slipping beyond the voters' control.
Instead of economic hardship, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, after analyzing data from 2012 and 2016, "it was about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend." For those voters, Trump's "Make America Great Again" theme called up visions of a comforting past, whether it ever actually existed or not.
In other words, the very fact that Trump is so different -- racially and otherwise -- from his predecessor Obama may have had more to do with many Trump voters' choices than economic concerns that cross other demographic lines.
But if you want to talk about economic anxiety, ask black folks. So says a new poll conducted by former Obama and Democratic National Committee pollster and strategist Cornell Belcher and his firm, Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, and due to be released by the independent political organization BlackPAC.
As reported by The Atlantic, the poll of 1,000 black voters in the battleground states of Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, North Carolina, Illinois and Florida finds more than half of those surveyed believe the economy is getting worse and only 1 in 10 believe they are getting ahead economically.
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