Michael Barone: Democrats are taking minorities for granted

That depends on many things, one of which is the continuing overwhelming support of voters considered minorities. According to the 2016 exit poll, Hillary Clinton received the votes of 88 percent of black Americans and 65 percent of Hispanic and Asians. Barack Obama’s 2012 percentages among these groups were marginally higher—93 percent of blacks, 71 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of Asians. That was a downtick from the 95 percent he won among blacks, but that and his 2012 percentages among Hispanics and Asians were the highest Democratic percentages among the three nonwhite groups measured in exit polls starting in 1972.

Naturally, Democrats want to retain these high levels of support. Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent among white voters was the lowest Democratic percentage among that bloc since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot, and her fall to 28 percent among white non-college graduates may be the worst Democratic showing in that group in the party’s history. It’s easy to imagine — it can be extrapolated from current polling — that other Democrats will run stronger among white groups than Clinton did. It’s harder to imagine that they can win without something like the very high percentages they have been getting among nonwhites.

One way to do that is to hark back to the issues that seem to have worked in the past. In August 2012, campaigning before a biracial audience in South Side Virginia, Vice President Joe Biden said that Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s financial policies would “put y’all back in chains.” Obama-Biden campaign spokesman said this was a metaphor for “unshackling” the middle class, but Republicans — and probably many voters — heard it as an insinuation that their side wanted to return to slavery. Similarly, Democrats attacked the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision overturning section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, but leaving in place the rest of the law, as a return to exclusion of blacks from the polls. But that section only singled out for special administrative scrutiny changes in voting laws in states defined by low voter participation levels in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 elections. That provision made sense when discrimination barred blacks from voting in several Southern states, but as the Court pointed out, there has been no such mass suppression in recent decades; a Census survey showed higher turnout rates among blacks than whites in 2012. It’s hard to see the Democrats’ attacks here as anything but attempts to tar their opponent as racists determined to restore slavery or segregation, even while knowing that such characterizations are false.

Similar outrage has been expressed by Democratic politicians about state laws requiring voters to show picture identification and by the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision upholding one such law. “Voter suppression” is the common charge, and some politicians have compared these measures to the discriminatorily applied laws, and threats of violence, which effectively blocked blacks from voting in several Southern states before enactment of the federal Voting Rights Act. But there is little in common between being asked to show your picture ID and being bloodily beaten on the Pettus Bridge in Selma. The suggestion by Democrats that being asked to show picture ID is anything like being beaten by or within sight of law enforcement officials is preposterous. As is the suggestion that vast numbers of Americans lack such documents or the means to obtain them.

A large majority of voters already possess driver’s licenses or the official picture identification cards states readily provide. Polls have shown large majorities, 70 to 80 percent, of Americans, including majorities of blacks, support voter ID requirements.

Charges of “voter suppression” are obviously intended to revive memories of slavery and segregation, and to imply that Republicans want somehow to bring them back. Certainly the partisan near-unanimity of black voters over the last century and a half reflects a consciousness on the part of a great many individual voters that they are counted, like or not, as part of a group that has suffered discrimination and enslavement. From the 1860s to the 1930s black Americans, where they were allowed to vote, went heavily Republican, for the party of Abraham Lincoln. During the 1930s a majority of them switched to the party of the New Deal, but not all: in 1960, for example, according to Gallup, 68 percent of “nonwhites” voted for Kennedy, but that was less than the 78 percent of Catholics who did so. But starting in 1964, blacks have voted more than 80 percent, up to 95 percent in 2008, Democratic in every presidential election. Triggering that response in large part was the vote cast against the Civil Rights Act that year by the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. That evidently overshadowed the facts that key support for the legislation came from Republicans like (William McCulloch and Everett Dirksen) as well as Democrats, that the senators filibustering against the legislation were all Democrats, and that a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill.

Undoubtedly this voting behavior has represented agreement with Democrats on other issues; polling shows they overwhelmingly back big government and economic redistributionist policies, for example. And in this age of strong partisan polarization, polls show that self-identified Democrats and Republicans are not only changing their minds on issues in accordance with their parties’ leaders but also changing their assessments of the performance of the economy: Democrats are more positive when a Democratic president is in office and less so when one is not; Republicans, vice versa. Democratic politicians’ suggestions that their Republican opponents want to return to the days of segregation are an attempt to appeal to what are now historical events without relevance to current issues.

On the specific issues Democrats have highlighted in these appeals, they have done very little. They have challenged voter identification laws in court and in legislatures, mostly unsuccessfully, but have done little to repeal them, even when they held large congressional majorities and the presidency in 2009 and 2010. Democrats in worked with Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee to fashion a substitute for the section of the Voting Rights Act invalidated by the Supreme Court. But they were unable to produce a formula that would single out for special federal supervision states or localities where there was evidence of systematic or extensive racial discrimination. Active denial of voting rights because of race has become scattered and rare; one such case was denial of whites’ voting rights by a black political boss in Noxubee County, Mississippi. Democrats’ suggestions that Republicans want to return to the pre-1965 status quo would be delusional in the unlikely case they are sincere. More likely they are made cynically, in the hope of gaining votes without delivering anything in return.

And on some issues, it is not clear what is in the interest of black voters. On redistricting, the prevailing interpretation of the Voting Rights Act in the three most recent census cycles has been that district plans should maximize the number of black-majority (or minority-majority) districts. This was based on the assumption that blacks could be best represented by blacks and that whites would not vote for any black candidate. There was empirical support for this when the Act was passed in 1965, but even as early as 1972 a majority-white congressional district in Georgia elected a black candidate, and majority-black congressional districts centered in New Orleans and Memphis have repeatedly re-elected white candidates in the year since.

Perhaps black voters, like other American voters, judge candidates by more things than their race. And Democratic politicians may be adjusting their thinking on this somewhat. In the past decade, Democrats they have taken to arguing that districts need not have 50 percent black voting population to pass muster, on the theory that black voters would like to see more Democrats elected and that spreading black voters around in more districts rather than corralling them in black-majority districts would tend to produce such results. But are black voters more interested in electing blacks or electing Democrats? It seems unlikely that they are of one more than the other. There’s no clear answer to that question, but it seems clear that the principle reconciling Democratic politicians’ changing stances on these matters is the election of more Democrats.

Similarly, the Obama administration policy of eliminating the “school-to-prison” pipeline by urging school districts, through an administrative guidance letter, not to disproportionately discipline or refer to police students for violent and disruptive behavior may have been supported by many blacks. But this has resulted in significantly higher levels of violence and disruption in schools with many black students, as Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has documented. And it prevented the student who murdered 14 others in Parkland High School from getting a disciplinary or arrest record which may have prevented him from buying a gun. There is room for black and other voters to disagree on whether this policy was helping blacks. Similarly, racial quotas and preferences for blacks and other minorities have resulted in large numbers of those preferentially admitted dropping out (often with large student debt) or avoiding subjects that lead to higher earnings, as Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor documented in their 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help. Democrats’ insistence on more lenient treatment of those who disrupt classes and school activities of course damages and holds back non-disruptive students, and Democrats’ policy of discriminatorily admissions policies leaves many students with inadequate preparation — the policy’s intended beneficiaries — worse rather than better off.

The picture grows even more complicated when one looks at what Democrats are offering the two groups identified since the 1970s as being potentially subject to invidious discrimination, Hispanics and Asians. For one thing, these groups are not nearly as homogeneous as American blacks, about 90 percent of whom are descended from American slaves. Few if any of those classified as Hispanics or Asians have ancestors who were subject in this country to anything like the American practices of slavery and segregation. More than 60 percent of Hispanics are of Mexican origin, but that percentage has fallen in recent years, as net immigration from Mexico fell to zero after the 2007-08 economic reverse and has increased very little in the most recent years. Some Hispanics, in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, have ancestors who have lived there for hundreds of years. And Puerto Ricans, who moved in large numbers to New York in the 1950s and to Florida in the last decade, are American citizens and thus not immigrants at all.

Black Americans’ partisan preferences are just about the same — heavily Democratic — in every state. Hispanics’ partisan preferences have differed widely. Cuban-Americans, many of them fleeing the Castros’ Communist regime, voted heavily Republican for many years, have been trending Democratic of late; and in Florida, where they have been concentrated, Hispanics still vote far less Democratic than Hispanics in California and Illinois, most of whom are of Mexican origin, or in New York and New Jersey, where very many are of Puerto Rican and Dominican origin. In Texas, the state with the second highest number of Hispanics and a Hispanic percentage of population essentially identical to California’s and higher than any other state but New Mexico, the patterns are different. Hispanics in the Lone Star state vote much less Democratic than in California or New York. The exit polls in 2014 showed Republican Governor Greg Abbott and Senator John Cornyn receiving almost exactly the same percentage of Hispanics’ votes as their Democratic opponents; the 2016 exit polls showed Donald Trump doing worse among them, with 34 percent (and 41 percent of Hispanic men) to Hillary Clinton’s 61 percent, but this was still significantly better than his national showing among the group. One theory that might explain these varying results: Hispanics, who tend to favor more government spending and aid programs, tend to vote 15 to 20 percent more Democratic than the whites in the states where they live or have settled.

Appeals to Hispanic voters by political candidates and analyses of their responses by political commentators have typically focused on issues related to immigration. Yet that does not seem to be Hispanic voters’ top priority. The Pew Research Center has surveyed them repeatedly; one typical result is that 50 percent or more cite education, jobs and the economy, and health care as “extremely important,” while only 34 percent cite immigration. It’s likely that for Puerto Ricans, Hispanics in New Mexico and those with long-established legal immigration status or citizenship, the status of illegal immigrants is not of close personal or family concern. Democrats strive to make immigration issues more relevant by stressing that those seeking reduced low-skill immigration do so because of distaste for people of Hispanic background — an argument which appears to be of limited salience, and in any case does not address the statistics indicating that influxes of low-skilled immigrants tend to lower the wages of lower-skilled Americans and legal residents.

In any case, it is the status of illegal immigrants which has been the chief focus of Democrats’ proposals for changes in immigration law. The 1986 immigration law, which provided legalization — amnesty, to critics — for illegal immigrants and sanctions on employers of illegals, proved to be ineffective; about half of those eligible sought legalization, but employer sanctions went largely unenforced. According to Pew Reseach Center estimates, the number of illegal immigrants in the country increased from 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million in 2007. In 2006 and 2007 the George W. Bush administration and most congressional Democrats supported “comprehensive” immigration bills with enforcement provisions and legalization for law-abiding illegals. The bills included the DREAM Act, which provided legalization for illegals who entered the U.S. before age 16 and lived there continuously for five years, graduated from high school and had no criminal record. Such a bill passed the Senate in 2006 but was not taken up by the Republican-majority House. In May and June 2007, with Democratic majorities in both houses and a sympathetic Republican president, the Senate again considered such legislation. But after several Democrats, including Barack Obama, voted for amendments deemed by lead sponsor Edward Kennedy as poison pills, the bill failed to survive cloture votes.

After the 2008 election, Democrats held the White House and large majorities in Congress, but did not move to enact immigration legislation of the type that failed to pass in 2006 and 2007. Under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House spent much effort passing the Affordable Care Act and the financial regulation law known as Dodd-Frank, versions of which passed both houses and were signed by the president in spring 2010. Environmental regulation, a favorite of Pelosi’s San Francisco Bay area constituents, also was a priority. Pelosi marshaled the votes to pass cap and trade legislation in June 2010, even though some House Democrats were put in political risk by supporting it. Immigration was a lower priority. The House passed a version of the DREAM Act in December 2010, a month after Democrats lost 63 seats and their House majority in the off-year election. But it failed to pass the Senate, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome cloture, as five Democrats voted against and only three Republicans voted for it.

In June 2012 President Obama, running for re-election, announced his DACA policy, inviting most of those eligible for legalization under the DREAM Act to apply for legal status. In June 2013 the Senate passed the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill, a modified version of earlier comprehensive proposals, by a 68-32 margin. But the Republican-majority House, as in 2006, declined to take action on the bill. In November 2014, after Republicans won a majority in the Senate, Obama issued his DAPA order, granting legal status to parents of children who were citizens or legal residents; this was enjoined by a federal court in February 2015 and that decision upheld by an evenly divided Supreme Court in June 2016. The Trump administration revoked the DAPA order in June 2017. DAPA’s rejection in federal court raised doubts whether the similar though not identical DACA program would be overturned on similar grounds. In September 2017 Trump announced the rescission of Obama’s DACA order, and said he wanted it to be passed by Congress as part of legislation together with border protection and other immigrant enforcement measures. But congressional Democrats and the administration were unable to agree on such measures, and in April 2018 Trump said negotiations were over and that DACA would lapse.

Democrats have attacked Republicans for preventing passage of these various immigration measures, and it is true that Republicans provided most, though not all, of the votes in opposition. But it also can be argued that Democrats were unwilling to make concessions that could have won enough bipartisan votes for passage. Some Republicans argue, not implausibly, that Democrats are more interested in using the DREAM Act issue as a campaign issue than in helping its recipients keep or gain legal status. As the political and policy debates have continued, the number of illegal immigrants who might have been eligible for legalization dropped from something close to 12 million in 2006-07 to the 800,000 who had applied for legal status under DACA. In those same years the total illegal population, according to the Pew Research Center, declined from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 to between 11.0 and 11.3 million from 2009 to 2016, and the proportion of illegals of Mexican origin declined from 57 percent in 2009 to less than 50 percent in 2016. Certainly the facts on the ground have changed from those of a dozen years ago, when it seemed that the number of illegals was inexorably rising, and there was widespread agreement that a continuing surge was inevitable and that the legal framework needed to accommodate it. Today immigration flows seem more manageable and subject to modification.

Scarcely mentioned in the immigration debate are Asians, who in recent years have made up an increasing share of immigrants. They constitute, however, only 13 percent of the illegal immigrant population, and the income levels of Asian households are more than 30 percent higher than those of all U.S. households. Historically, there was much prejudice among Asians, peaking perhaps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Today there is little evidence of invidious discrimination or of the underrepresentation in desirable categories that is considered the justification for racial quotas and preferences. To the contrary, there is stark evidence that racial quotas work against Asian applicants to colleges and universities, who need much higher test scores and academic records than whites, much less Hispanics and blacks, to be admitted to selective schools. Harvard University has been sued for discriminating against Asian applicants and, when Democratic legislators in California sought to seek a ballot proposition to repeal an earlier measure barring racial discrimination in state higher education, they were met by a torrent of protest from Asian parents and dropped the issue.

It seems obvious that there is little political mileage in race- or ethnic-based appeals to Asian voters, beyond anodyne bows to their cultural heritage. Nor in this case is there much mileage in summoning up memories of historic wrongs. The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II ended 73 years ago, both houses of Congress and the president solemnly apologized for it and began paying reparations 30 years ago (the last payments went out 19 years ago) and, inconveniently for Democrats and liberals, the internment policy was ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt and strongly supported by California Governor and late Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Historic wrongs, more serious and much longer lasting, understandably continue to have reverberations for black Americans, and recent grievances about immigration policy have continuing relevance for some large percentage, but by no means all, Hispanic voters. But increasingly these voters, like those conscious of various ethnic heritages and religious beliefs, are casting their votes and engaging in political activities according to views on other issues. In this context, Democrats’ general failure to deliver concrete results on the issues they highlight to appeal to blacks and Hispanics may undercut their appeal to such voters even as they divert attention from other issues of more salience.

The thrust of Democrats’ identity politics appeals to blacks, Hispanics and (sometimes) Asians is that their problems and desires are connected with their minority status, and that Republicans want to take them back to the more discriminatory policies of the past. In the short run such appeals can work. But in the long run, they can rebound against those who make them. There is no sizeable segment of American society that seeks to go back to the days of racial segregation, much less to subject current Hispanics and Asians to such strictures. And appeals based on summoning up the memory of ancient wrongs can cause a party — and government generally — to overlook or neglect concerns that voters of whatever racial category have today. Rubbing raw the sores of resentment can be self-defeating. After eight years of the Obama administration, with its considerable attention to race-based grievances, opinion on American race relations — among all groups — soured. An April 2009 ABC/Washington Post poll showed that by a 66 to 22 percent margin, Americans believed race relations were generally good rather than generally bad. By July 2016, another ABC/Post showed that Americans believed by a 63 to 32 percent margin, that race relations were generally bad rather than generally good.

And in the November 2016 election, turnout levels among blacks declined, including in key states where Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton lost electoral votes her predecessor Barack Obama had won. Did some of the Democratic party’s strong supporters conclude the party had taken them for granted and done little for them? Looks like it.