Stop Me If You’ve Heard This Before

In his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley considers why black support for Joe Biden has declined:

he country has witnessed a lot of political norm-breaking in the Donald Trump era. Less black fealty for the Democratic Party could be part of the trend. It’s easy to forget how bad things were for blacks economically during the Obama presidency. Black unemployment didn’t fall below double digits until the third year of Mr. Obama’s second term. Prior to the pandemic, black unemployment under Mr. Trump reached record lows, and black wages rose at a faster rate than white wages. Mr. Obama symbolized racial progress, but you can’t pay the rent with symbolism.

That black experience partly explains why minority support for Mr. Trump ticked up in 2020. It might also explain why blacks have soured on Mr. Biden. Inflation, which the current administration first denied and then played down, is at a 40-year high. Blacks are overrepresented among low-income workers, who are watching prices rise faster than their wages. In addition, the president wants to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut and reregulate sectors of the economy that Mr. Trump deregulated. If black voters aren’t eager to return to the pre-Trump economy, who can blame them?

Mr. Biden’s efforts to appease his party’s progressive wing are also costing him black support. Black politicians and activists tend to be far more liberal than the average black voter. On issue after issue—school choice, defunding the police, voter ID, racial preferences—individual black Americans hold more conservative views than the elites who claim to represent them. The political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue in a 2020 book, “Steadfast Democrats,” that black partisan loyalty is less issue-based and has to do with social pressure from other blacks. But as the black middle class grows and black interests become less unified and more varied, the solidarity politics we see among black voters will inevitably start to wane, as it has with other racial and ethnic groups.

These are the larger trends that Mr. Biden and his party are up against, and the question is whether Republicans will take advantage of the situation. The Republican National Committee is currently preoccupied with settling scores for Mr. Trump, which could come at the cost of expanding the GOP’s appeal at a time when Democrats look vulnerable. The economic gains we experienced prior to the pandemic were real, and no one benefited more than blacks did. The establishment media mostly ignored the story, but Republicans could do worse than talk about it nonstop between now and November.

I suspect that like the Palestinians Republicans will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity but Mr. Riley has identified a serious risk for Democrats which, coincidentally, I’ve been pointing out here for some time.

The questions now are whether President Biden will try to change course, whether struggling Democratic politicians will just run away from President Biden which is hard to make into a winning strategy, whether they’ll all just stay the course and hope for the best in the face of declining polls, or whether they’ll just deny the whole thing is of any consequence.