Heads I Win

I found this post by Hakeem Jefferson at 538 on why racist white Republicans vote for black candidates interesting:

Can white voters who back a Black candidate still hold racist beliefs and views?

That question has come to the fore in the wake of Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in the blueish state of Virginia. Conservatives were quick to counter claims that Youngkin’s win represented the effectiveness of stoking racial fears with results from Virginia’s down-ballot election for lieutenant governor — a contest where the Republican candidate, Winsome Sears, made history by becoming the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, for example, emphatically mocked the notion that “voters called white supremacists elected a Black Lt. Gov.” Conservative commentators on Fox News and Twitter, including Sears herself, also used the historic victory as an ostensible shield against accusations of Republican racism.

He proposes several explanations along with a bit of statistical analysis to back up his conjectures including:

• Racially prejudiced white voters are not opposed to Black candidates simply because they are Black, but because they believe that most Black candidates will fight for “those people” and not “people like us.”

• Black Republicans’ partisan and ideological commitments allay concerns that they are for “them,” not “us.”

• “racial distancing”
• moral credentialing

I think there’s a kernel of truth in this analysis. However, I look forward to Mr. Jefferson’s analysis of why racist white Democrats vote for black Democratic candidates or why black moderates and conservatives vote for Democratic candidates who are much more progressive in their views than they. I suspect it’s largely for the same reasons e.g. moral credentialing or their mirror images e.g. “racial nearing”.