Sifting through more data from the 2022 midterms, there was one indicator that surprised and concerned me, so I wrote about it at New York:
As analysts pick over the results of the 2022 midterm elections, there have been a lot of mixed messages for Democrats. Yes, they performed better than you might have expected for the party controlling the White House, especially considering the president has underwater job-approval ratings. And yes, Democrats benefited from an unusually robust performance among young voters, who often don’t participate in midterm elections. But at the same time, Democrats didn’t significantly improve their performance among other key demographics, notably Black, Asian American, and Latino voters. As my colleague Eric Levitz observed, Democrats remain dangerously dependent on white college-educated voters who remain sympathetic to Republican economic messages.
Worse yet for Democrats, there is growing evidence that their single most loyal demographic group, African Americans, was underenthused in 2022. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn looked at the preliminary numbers and sounded the alarm:
“Georgia and North Carolina are two of the states where voters indicate their race when they register to vote, offering an unusually clear look at the racial composition of the electorate. In both states — along with Louisiana — the Black share of the electorate fell to its lowest levels since 2006.
“In all three states, the turnout rate among Black voters was far lower than among white voters. In North Carolina, for example, 43 percent of Black registered voters turned out, compared with 59 percent of white registered voters — roughly doubling the difference from 2018 and tripling the racial turnout gap from 2014.
“While similarly conclusive data is not available elsewhere so far, the turnout by county suggests that a relatively weak Black turnout was a national phenomenon.”
Low Black turnout in Georgia and North Carolina is especially significant because Black candidates (Senate candidate Cheri Beasley in North Carolina and Senate Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Georgia) headed up the Democratic tickets in both states. It’s not like the old days when Black voters were being urged to support white conservative Democrats to thwart even more conservative Republicans.
If the signs of relatively low Black turnout in 2022 are accurate and representative, what do they mean? Cohn offers some possible explanations:
“Still, relatively low Black turnout is becoming an unmistakable trend in the post-Obama era, raising important — if yet unanswered — questions about how Democrats can revitalize the enthusiasm of their strongest group of supporters.
“Is it simply a return to the pre-Obama norm? Is it yet another symptom of eroding Democratic strength among working-class voters of all races and ethnicities? Or is it a byproduct of something more specific to Black voters, like the rise of a more progressive, activist — and pessimistic — Black left that doubts whether the Democratic Party can combat white supremacy?”
It’s possible to overinterpret Black voter trends. According to exit polls, the Democratic share of Black voters dropped from 90 percent in 2018 to 87 percent in 2020 and 86 percent in 2022 — not exactly a deep plunge. And some of the negative turnout trends may be attributable to voter-suppression efforts in Republican-controlled states rather than Black voter disaffection with Democrats. In Georgia, moreover, there are encouraging signs about Black early voting turnout in the U.S. Senate general election runoff contest between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.
But any way you cut it, Democrats have both a practical and a moral responsibility to boost Black voter participation in elections going forward. In particular, President Joe Biden, whose nomination and election in 2020 depended heavily on Black support, should devote a lot of attention to rekindling the fires of affection in this critical segment of the electorate.
Democracy is hard. It takes practice. Expecting it to blossom at national parliamentary scale with no minor league farm system was unrealistic.
Before a large political aggregate can successfully decide questions by democratic mechanisms, it has to come to some understanding of what the decidable questions are. It has to reach a broad consensus about how sentiment is divided on those issues (axes of polarization and planes of cleavage) … what opposing coalitions are feasible … where the middle grounds are. Minorities need practice uniting behind the wills of majorities, and majorities need practice refraining from abusing minorities.
National scale is the wrong place to develop these understandings and practice these disciplines, and what emerged was division along convenient, familiar (sectarian) lines of division — which naturally became more polarized as a result.
Iraqi national democracy would have had a better chance if it had been preceded by a cycle or more of limited, local democracy. Town and provincial councils, etc, where the issues are public works and local regulations.
Even monocultural provinces can learn a lot about coalesence and compromise from running their own sewers.
So Bottom Up isn’t off by 180 degrees. 179? Maybe.
There has always been a “shadow” rationale for the U.S. presence in Iraq – a supposedly “hard-headed national security” argument that the region is strategically vital to the U.S. and profoundly unstable and therefore requires an ongoing and substantial U.S. military presence (one that, for religious and political reasons Saudi Arabia could not be asked to play).
From this perspective, all the other rationales for the invasion of Iraq and continuing U.S. presence over the years — Finding WMA’s, rescuing Iraqis from dictatorship, creating a beacon of democracy, preventing chaos, honoring the sacrifice of the troops — are all window dressing.
The real unspoken philosophy is that as a great military power we have the right to enforce stability in areas we consider strategic and we simply will not allow any indigenous insurgents to drive us out.
This is a fairly standard mental framework in the history of 20th century colonialism – it was the underlying attitude behind the French marching through the streets crying “Algeria is French” during the Algerian war of the 50’s and the stuffy British officers drinking to “The Empire” in the decades before World War II.
These days Americans need a more comforting rationale then dreams of imperial glory for occupying foreign countries — but the truth is that pretty much any rationale will do. The gut-level attitude is simply that once America commits to a military presence somewhere it should always “win” and never “give up”. In practice this means mantaining an occupying force on an essentially permanent basis.
Seen in this light, it is not really surprising that the various rationales being tossed around are almost completely incoherent, self-contradictory, and so on. People are not really supposed to believe them as logical arguments, any more then the French in the 50’s actually believed that Algeria was part of France.