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.

Eighty-nine percent of black voters said they believed racism in the country has gotten worse since 2016, and more than half believe that one of the key shifts in American politics has been a renewed attack on black Americans.

With at least 25 potential Democratic presidential candidates beginning to hit the road to audition their vision, slogans, punch lines and policy ideas, we have yet to see who can best navigate these different perspectives.

For many voters the answer is intensely personal, as a survey by pollster Stanley Greenberg reveals. He came up with the label "Reagan Democrat" to describe the crucial swing voters of Macomb County, Mich., while working for Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. He returned there for a recent study of what they might do next, after voting for Obama twice and Trump once.

I was particularly struck by how much they lamented the damage today's polarized politics had done to their own relations with friends and family.

One white working-class man said he "lost contact with (his) own daughter because of the election." Another said, "It's like the mass media is brainwashing the younger generation and it's that serious."

No wonder so many people are reluctant to talk about race, especially in racially mixed company. Maybe it takes an audacious grandstander like, say, Kanye West to break the ice. But it remains to be seen how many of this year's office-seekers can wade successfully into those treacherous waters without being pulled under.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)