The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

What Do Black Voters Want?

One thing’s for sure, it’s better to look at the actual data rather than the expressed views of leaders, self-appointed and otherwise, because the two can diverge very sharply.

In this regard, the recent poll of black voters conducted for the Black Economic Alliance by Hart Research is illuminating. As well summarized by David Leonhardt:

“In the poll, people were given a list of 14 economic policies and asked how much they thought each would help the black community. The list was full of progressive ideas: paid leave and better workplace benefits; a higher minimum wage; a federal jobs guarantee; stronger laws against discrimination; reparations for descendants of slaves; and more.

On a straight up-or-down basis, a majority of black Americans favored every one of the 14 policies. But there was a fairly wide gap in how much they thought each would help. At the top of the list were a higher minimum wage, stronger discrimination laws and better workplace benefits and training. About 70 percent of respondents said each of those would help “a great deal.”

At the bottom of the list: Slavery reparations. Second to last: a federal jobs guarantee. Only about half of respondents said each would help a great deal.

What’s going on here? To me, it’s a reminder that black Americans, as a group, don’t have the same political opinions as the most liberal parts of the Democratic coalition. On many issues, black Americans are more moderate — or perhaps more pragmatic.”

Of course, that’s not the impression you’d get from listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently testified before Congress on the issue of reparations. But then, Coates is probably pretty far away from the views of the median black voter. Closer perhaps is Coleman Hughes, a brilliant young (he’s still an undergraduate at Columbia) black intellectual, who also testified at that Congressional hearing.

“In 2008 the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable healthcare. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery…

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further – making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today. We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors, and turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction, from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”

This point–about the divergence between the median black voter and the views of certain liberal elites, both black and white–is also relevant to understanding the kerfuffles around Joe Biden’s various missteps around racially-inflected issues and how much they are likely to hurt him with black voters. Perry Bacon, Jr. addressed this question recently in a 538 column and gets it exactly right, I  think. While acknowledging that it’s certainly possible Biden’s statements will hurt him seriously, he thinks it’s quite possible that:

“[these statements] could alternatively not really damage him much at all — even among black voters. Poll after poll has found that Biden has very, very high approval ratings among black voters. For example, a survey conducted last month on behalf of the Black Economic Alliance found that 76 percent of black Democrats are either enthusiastic or comfortable with Biden’s candidacy, compared to just 16 percent who are uncomfortable or have some reservations. This was the best favorable/unfavorable of any of the candidates that respondents were asked about. And according to data from Morning Consult, which is conducting weekly polls of the 2020 race with large sample sizes — giving us more resolution on results for subgroups — older black voters really, really like Biden: He is getting more than 55 percent of the Democratic primary vote among blacks age 45 and over, compared to 34 percent among blacks under age 45.

So I’m skeptical that this controversy will substantially erode that support, particularly among older black voters who have such positive feelings about Biden. In the early stages of this race, he has already weathered another issue that involves race: his treatment of Anita Hill during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991, when Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

He concludes:

“It’s hard to predict what will happen to Biden’s standing in the wake of this week’s news. But I think it’s increasingly clear that the way we think about racial controversies (with the implication that minorities are particularly triggered by them) and the black vote (assuming it is fairly monolithic) are off. Biden’s positive mentions of his work with segregationist senators may have annoyed nonblack Democrats as much or more than black ones. And the biggest question is not whether it pulls all black people from Biden — the younger ones are already kind of ambivalent about him — but whether it breaks his bond with older black people.”

People like, well, Whoopi Goldberg, who said on the program, The View:

“After introducing Hot Topic with clips of Biden, Booker, and Harris, Goldberg launched into a passionate monologue defending Biden from his critics. “You have to work with people you don’t like,” she said of segregationists like Thurmond, Richard Russell Jr., and Sam Ervin. “Beat Biden in the debates. If you can beat him, beat him. Don’t try to make him out a racist.” Goldberg went on to say that Biden can’t possibly be “a racist” because “he sat for eight years with a black guy” in the White House. “What, did he have a noose in the background?” she asked, earning her a massive round of applause from the audience.”

So we shall see how all this works out. But above all, I recommend close attention to actual data about the views of black voters and–I’m looking at you white liberals–rather than making assumptions that the views of these voters match your own views.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his facebook page:

This article by Robert Shapiro that just got released by Democracy journal is worth a look. Shapiro looks at employment data by race-ethnicity and education since the Great Recession and finds strong evidence of white working class decline. In Shapiro’s view, progressives’ failure to recognize the salience of these economic trends–and respond to them–is undermining their ability to reach these voters and provides a clear lane for right-wing populists like Trump.

Washington Post syndicated columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. shares some short takes on the candidate strategies for the first Democratic presidential debates beginning this week. He cautions front-runner Biden that “Thursday night is now a big deal, thanks to Biden’s unforced error in hauling his relationships with onetime senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge out of the segregationist past…This was political malpractice. Biden’s lead in the polls is built on overwhelming support from African Americans, as my Brookings Institution colleague William Galston detailed. Yet it appeared more important to Biden to make his “I can work with everybody” point the way he felt like making it than to protect his greatest political asset: the trust and affection of black voters…He’ll have to work hard in the debate to reinforce his loyalists in the black community while showing all Democrats he has the discipline to go the distance.”

At Time, Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran Democratic debate coach, writes that “on the debate stage, the front runners will have to answer the moderators as well as face the specter of attacks from other candidates. Not that I recommend going after the other candidates in this first outing, particularly Biden. He’s the front runner for a reason–people like him. If attacks on him or his record aren’t delivered deftly, they will elevate him and make the attacker look desperate. Attacking front runners–particularly in early debates–is tricky to pull off…Start by using journalists’ interest in the lead-up to the debate to reset your message and rationale with the press. Second, lay down your best arguments in the debate, and plant some seeds for issues you want to come back to on the trail and in future debates. Third, pick a couple of moments coming out of the debate to capitalize on–great ones by you or openings from an opponent’s gaffe–to drive your message in the next few weeks. Fourth, come back in July and do it again.”

Anyone who is expecting an in-depth debate, however, is likely to be diappointed. As Peter Funt puts it in his article, “Impeachment, socialism and Biden-baiting: What to look for at the 2020 Democratic debates” at USA Today: “Fact is, the word “debate” is misappropriated in this event since genuine back-and-forth on key issues is virtually impossible with so many participants. A hint of what the mashup is likely to resemble came earlier this month at Iowa’s Hall of Fame gathering in Cedar Rapids. The 19 candidates were each given a carefully-timed five minutes to introduce themselves, and most mixed predictable anti-Trump rhetoric with a dash of progressive policy. The upshot: All 19 were in general agreement in what amounted to a lightning round. Or, as Carrie Ball of Cedar Rapids summed it up in the Des Moines Register, “It’s like a carnival.”

But the most important take-away from the debates this week may be what the debates do for the Democratic Party, not individual candidates. Although African and Latino Americans and women are not quite at parity level among presidential candidates, Dems have never had a broader showcase for the field, in stark contrast to the GOP.  Also, having  several impressive younger candidates is a big plus, even if one of the older candidates wins the nomination. As Oliver Darcy notes at CNN Politics: “”We’ll actually see all these candidates on stage together,” WaPo W.H. reporter Toluse Olorunnipa said on “Inside Politics” Sunday morning. “We’ll have a historic number of minorities, we’ll have veterans, people born in the 1940s all the way through the 1980s. It will be a very historic moment just to see that on the stage together…”Americans who tune in to the two-night debate will see something else unprecedented: multiple women candidates appearing on the debate stage at the same time,” Barbara Lee writes in an analysis piece for NBC’s Think vertical. “Research has shown that critical mass makes a difference in being taken seriously: Two or more women or minority candidates have a better shot at getting hired than one alone…”

Micah Zenko has “A Foreign Policy Cheat Sheet for the Democratic Debates” at foreignpolicy.com, in which he presents 12 questions with follow-ups, including some tough ones: “What is it exactly about these forever wars that you oppose? Is it their initial intervention decisions, how they have been conducted, that they have not been effective, that they are relatively open-ended, or something else?” and “What would be the expected roles and responsibilities of mutual defense treaty allies in your grand strategy? Would you expect they further increase their defense spending or enhance reimbursements to the United States? Would you commit to coming to a treaty ally’s defense during militarized disputes over territory that the United States does not recognize as belonging to that ally?”

Early though it is for Democrats to make hard and fast decisions about presidential campaign resource  allocation, Nathaniel Rakich’s post, “No, Florida is not redder than Texas” at FiveThirtyEight provides an instructive preview of one major choice Dems will have to make abut the southern states:

SOURCE: QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY

From Scott Bland’s “Democratic group’s poll shows Trump vulnerable with his base on health care: American Bridge is planning a $50 million advertising campaign targeting small-town Trump supporters and swing voters” at Politico: “The battleground-state polling is a new step in American Bridge’s plans to target Trump voters in small towns and rural areas with ads linking local events to unpopular Trump policies. The group’s president, Bradley Beychok, is not aiming to win a majority of those people in 2020. But even making modest inroads with these voters compared to 2016 would be a huge boost to the party’s hopes of beating Trump next year…“We’re trying to go from losing these segments [of voters] 85-15 to maybe 75-25,” Beychok said, acknowledging that, even if the project succeeds, the party will still likely lose that segment badly. “2018 gave us some good indications, and there’s data that these voters are attainable. But they want you to reach them and speak to them in a localized manner. You have to compete for these folks every day, and you can’t wait until the general…There’s this construct in the Democratic Party: focus on the base, or focus on white working-class voters,” Beychok said. “The idea you can’t do both is false.”

Are Democratic politicians too conflict-averse? Alex Pareene thinks so, and writes in his article “Give War a Chance: In search of the Democratic Party’s fighting spirit” at the New Republic: “The celebration of charismatic, conflict-averse uniters in Democratic-led White Houses omits a key, and punishing, shift in Democratic politics from anything resembling a viable effort to build a long-term majoritarian liberal coalition. Over the past two decades, Democrats steadily lost disaffected former supporters, while failing to consistently mobilize young or economically precarious people alienated from the entire political process, as the Republican Party increasingly became a nihilistic, anti-democratic machine designed to bamboozle a white elderly base and thwart the desires of the larger public for the sake of an entrenched oligarchy.
..All the while, Democratic leaders continue to campaign and govern from a crouched, defensive position even after they win power.”

“Base versus Swing” has been an ancient strategic choice in politics, and it’s coming up again, as I discussed this week at New York.

In these days of intense partisan polarization, driven in no small part by an intensely polarizing president, it’s become commonplace to argue that the politics of persuasion don’t matter anymore, and that elections are won by “energizing” or “mobilizing” one’s own party base. And it’s true that with the number of swing voters dwindling, turnout strategies have become indispensable in any competitive election.

But there are limits to base-mobilization, as veteran political reporter Ron Brownstein notes in an observation on Trump’s incessant efforts to keep his troops in a hate frenzy:

“Trump’s unrelenting emphasis on stoking that base—both in his rhetoric and through his policies…[is] providing the fuel for Democrats to mobilize their own core constituencies, particularly young people and nonwhite voters.”

In other words, every vote you get by motivating core constituencies to turn out to vote via highly emotional messages is at least partly offset by the stimulus you provide for your opponent’s core constituencies. Meanwhile, even if there aren’t a lot of swing voters who are very likely to vote, every one you “flip” by persuasion gives you two net votes — one for you, one less for your opponent. Less than one versus two: It’s always worth the trouble to devote some attention to persuasion.

Brownstein goes on to discuss a second problem with Trump’s base-mobilization emphasis: it erodes the incentives for people who don’t much care for him nonetheless to pull the lever for him because they like his policies or their effects:

“Trump [is trying] to pump up his base by acting in exactly the manner that pushes away so many voters who are content with the economy but disenchanted with his behavior….

“[P]olling throughout Trump’s presidency has consistently shown that economic improvement hasn’t lifted him as much as earlier presidents. Across many of the key groups in the electorate, from young people to white college graduates, Trump’s job-approval rating consistently runs at least 25 points below the share of voters who hold positive views about either the national economy or their personal financial situation.

“The result is that Trump attracts much less support than his predecessors did—in terms of approval rating and potential support for reelection—among voters who say they are satisfied with the economy.”

Because — to put it mildly — rational persuasion isn’t the 45th president’s style, he will likely supplement his base-tending with savage attacks on his Democratic opponent aimed at making her or him equally unpleasant to swing voters. If 2016 was any guide, he’ll supplement this strategy with overt and covert efforts to suppress Democratic turnout (apparently a major focus of Trump’s social media strategy) by repeating intra-party Democratic complaints about the ultimate nominee. His Republican allies at the state level, of course, will seek to suppress Democratic turnout in more literal ways by planting mines along the path to the ballot box for young and minority voters.

Still, a “persuasion” prong of his strategy would improve Trump’s odds of victory. And Democrats, too, should keep in mind that a pure turnout battle could be perilous.

The campaign of Jamie Harrison, Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Democratic opponent, has aired an impressive new ad, blasting the flip-flopping Republican Senator for his weathervane hypocrisy — and using Graham’s own statements to show it. Here’s the ad with some commentary by The Young Turks (TYT):

According to Wikipedia, ‘jiu jitsu’ involves “manipulating the opponent’s force against themselves,” so this ad provides an excellent example of political jiu jitsu. Not only does the ad use Graham’s recorded words about Trump against him. He makes it worse by literally reversing exactly what he was recorded saying —  assertively rejecting his own words — stunning hypocrisy caught in the headlights.

Of course, attacking an opponent isn’t enough to win. A candidate also has to have a narrative, significant accomplishments and some positive, creative ideas. Fortunately, Harrison has the chops.

At ozy.com, Daniel Malloy has a political pofile of Harrison, who has “an aspirational message that can appeal both to downtrodden white Donald Trump voters and Black men whose turnout rate dropped because they weren’t inspired by Hillary Clinton.” However,  “before you get to the message, you have to have the vehicle by which the message is delivered,” Harrison says. “And that is state parties.”

More from Malloy’s profile of Harrison:

“The 41-year-old son of Orangeburg, South Carolina, is a powerful messenger. His mother dropped out of 10th grade to give birth to him; his father was not much of a presence. They relied on welfare and food stamps at times, with a side of political constituent service…A star student whose love of reading was sparked by comic books, Harrison graduated from Yale and then Georgetown law. He rose quickly on Capitol Hill with his hometown congressman, Democrat Jim Clyburn, who named Harrison the House’s first ever Black floor director when Clyburn claimed the No. 3–ranking post…He returned to South Carolina, he says, because he was disappointed in what Republican rule had done to the state, and he became the state Democratic Party’s first ever Black chairman in 2013.

Pledging to build up an atrophied grassroots network, he launched a fellowship for young political talent and an “issues conference” to train Democrats on policy around the state. He became pals with his Republican counterpart, Matt Moore, and the two joined forces to help remove the Confederate battle flag at the state capitol in 2015…Clyburn signals Harrison could be his successor, telling OZY: “I see him as a potential congressman.”

Harrison will face an uphill struggle against incumbent Graham, who has reportedly amassed a $3.2 million war chest for the 2020 campaign. Those so inclined can help to reduce the imbalance at  Harrison’s ActBlue page.

While this site is devoted to helping Democrats plot strategy, it’s important to recognize that on occasion the quality of opposition can make the toughest contests easier. As I noted at New York, that could definitely be happening again in Alabama:

To the great joy of Alabama Democrats and aficionados of strange politics everywhere, former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore announced today that he will again run for the U.S. Senate in 2020. It’s hardly anything new for the 72-year-old theocrat and alleged mall creeper. This will be his sixth run for statewide office in Alabama, counting two successful races for the state bench (though the first time he was removedfrom office, and the second time suspended, as he regularly defied federal court orders related to his theocratic views), two unsuccessful gubernatorial bids, and then his 2017 Senate race in the special election to choose a replacement for then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

In this last campaign, he managed to upset Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate in a primary and runoff, and then lost a shocker to Democrat Doug Jones, whom he now seeks to take on again. He is as ornery as ever, as the New York Times reports:

“His decision was an unsurprising act of overt defiance toward many of his party’s national leaders, including President Trump, who recently publicly warned him away from another Senate bid.

“Republican officials fear that Mr. Moore, were he to win the party’s nomination in March, risks their prospects of defeating the Democratic incumbent, Senator Doug Jones, and recapturing a seat they long controlled with ease …

“Before he made his announcement, Mr. Moore detailed his grievances against Republican officials in Washington, and he predicted that the campaign arm of Senate Republicans would run ‘a smear campaign’ against him.”

That’s hardly a paranoid statement, since Moore is broadly viewed as the Republican candidate most likely to help Jones to a full-term in this very red state. But Judge Roy is trying to turn that into a token of Christian martyrdom, as al.com reports:

“’Everyone in Alabama knows that last election in 2017 was fraudulent,’ Moore said. He added disinformation tactics will not be tolerated and will be punished. When asked if he believed the fraud came solely from Democrats, Moore said he thought there was also Republican collusion.”

It’s likely that at least some of the allegations of sexual misconduct that bedeviled him in 2017, which ranged from sexual assault to predatory behavior toward teenagers at the local mall, will return. But Moore is heartened by the ability of a certain Supreme Court Justice to overcome similar allegations, according to a recent fundraising missive:

“’It was no strange coincidence that only 10 months later these same false and scurrilous tactics would again be used in the midst of a very important Supreme Court nomination process of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Judge Kavanaugh would survive to be appointed to that high court.’”

In truth, Moore was considered an extreme and eccentric character even by Alabama’s tolerant standards — albeit one with a strong electoral base in the fever swamps of the Christian right — before the sexual allegations arose. The general feeling is that he made it to the general election against Jones in 2017 mostly because his major Trump-backed opponent, appointed incumbent Senator Luther Strange, was unusually weak, mostly because of suspicions of a corrupt deal with the disgraced governor, Robert Bentley, to get the job.

This time around, the Republican field facing Moore is less tainted, if not overpowering. The presumed GOP Establishment candidate is Congressman Bradley Byrne, who like everyone else in his party in the state, is a slavish Trump loyalist. Hard-core conservatives, including 2017 also-ran Congressman Mo Brooks, are backing state legislator Arnold Mooney. Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville will begin the race with name ID nearly as high as Moore’s in this gridiron-mad state. And the latest hot rumor was begun this week by Jones’s Republican Senate colleague Richard Shelby, as the Washington Post reported:

“Former attorney general Jeff Sessions has not ruled out running next year for his old Senate seat from Alabama, the state’s senior senator said Wednesday, as Republicans braced for the expected entrance into the race of Roy Moore, their failed 2017 candidate.

“’Sessions, I don’t think, has ruled it out,’ Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told reporters. ‘I’ve talked to him about it. I think if he ran, he would be a formidable candidate. Formidable. I’ve not encouraged him to run, but he’s a friend, and if he ran, I think he’d probably clear the field.'”

Sessions has declined to comment on the speculation so far, which will only encourage it. He may be trying to figure out what his old boss the president, who said so many hateful things about him after holding him responsible for the Mueller investigation, might say about a Sessions political comeback.

Even Sessions probably won’t intimidate Roy Moore into withdrawing, though. He’s very much on a mission from God, and it’s an angry, vengeful God he worships. Moore’s out for blood, and he doesn’t much care if it’s red or blue.

For Democrats who really need to hang onto this seat to improve their odds of taking back the Senate in 2020, this is good news indeed.

In his New York Times column, Thomas B. Edsall reports that “It is not surprising that black and Hispanic Democrats moved to the left in response to Trump’s racist goading and baiting. Pew found that the percentage of black Democrats who agree that “the country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights to whites” rose from 82 percent in 2014 to 90 percent in 2017. The percentage of Democratic Hispanics who agreed with that statement grew from 59 to 76 percent…More surprising was the increase in support among white Democrats, many of whom are professionals with college degrees, for the view that the “country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights.” According to Pew, their support grew from 57 percent in 2014 to 80 percent in 2017…In a working paper, “Trumped by Race: Explanations for Race’s Influence on Whites’ Votes in 2016,” Andrew Engelhardt, a postdoctoral research associate in International and Public Affairs at Brown, makes the case that the percentage of racially liberal white Democrats grew from 19 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2016, as shown in the accompanying chart.”

“A number of scholars who study race and politics agree with Engelhardt’s conclusions, Edsall continues.  “Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke and the author of the book “White Identity Politics,” wrote by email that Engelhardt’s “findings are consistent with some of my own analysis. I’ve found, as have others, that there was a notable shift in racial resentment in 2016, but only among Democrats, who became more racially liberal on the racial resentment scale.”…At the same time, one of the most striking facts to emerge from Engelhardt’s analysis is how far white Democrats have moved in a liberal direction on issues of race over the last three decades….In the period from 1988 to 1990, the level of racial resentment was almost the same among both white Democrats and white Republicans. In 1992, they began to diverge, as Republicans moved to the right and Democrats to the left on issues concerning race…For example, in 1988 the mean level of racial resentment, on a scale of 0 to 1, was .65 for white Republicans and .61 for white Democrats. By 2016, the mean for white Republicans rose to .70, but fell for white Democrats to .41. While the proportion of racially resentful white Republicans grew only slightly, the Trump campaign’s rhetoric raised the salience of race. Democrats, by contrast, grew increasingly liberal.”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Theodore R. Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and expert on African-American voting patterns, explores the vital role that black voters will play in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in an excerpt from his contribution to The Blue Wave: The 2018 Midterms and What They Mean for the 2020 Elections by Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik. Among Johnson’s conclusions: “Black voters are a crucial voting bloc in the upcoming Democratic primary season, particularly in the South…White candidates with proven bona fides among black voters can compete for the black vote, even against other black candidates, as Joe Biden is showing (at least for now)…The differing backgrounds of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker provide each with unique avenues to appeal to black voters…Whites, not blacks, are driving the growth in liberal self-identification among Democrats.”

With the Supreme Court set to rule in the coming days on the legality of the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census,” Ari Berman writes at Mother Jones, “all eyes are on Roberts, now the court’s ostensible swing justice after the retirement of Anthony Kennedy. Many are wondering which Roberts we’ll see—the pragmatic justice who saved the Affordable Care Act in 2012 and has occasionally, as in the Buck case, sought to redress egregious instances of racial discrimination? Or the hard-edged conservative who wrote the majority opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and has spent much of his career trying to roll back civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities? His ruling in the census case will determine Roberts’ legacy—and that of the court he presides over—for many years to come…At stake is whether Roberts will allow the Trump administration to rig American politics for the next decade by corrupting the census, and turn the Supreme Court—which he has often said should stay above partisan politics—into an unmistakable ally of the Republican Party and white power. If the court upholds the administration’s addition of the question, experts say, it would reduce census participation by immigrants afraid of being targeted by the government and diminish the political power and economic resources of parts of the country where many immigrants live.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Let’s Face It, Nancy Pelosi Is Pretty Smart

I know a lot of people are annoyed that Pelosi is not leading the charge to impeach Trump….but really any sober consideration of the evidence would lead one to conclude she is doing the right thing. Instead. she had concentrated on uniting her caucus to pass progressive bills that, for sure, will not become law but do force GOP members to cast potentially costly votes against the bills.

Perry Bacon, Jr. has the goods on 538:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

With Trump kicking off his re-election campaign with a boffo rally in Orlando, FL, it’s a good time to check in on how the Prez is doing in the Sunshine State. Felicitously, Quinnipiac has just released a new Florida poll that allows us to assess this.

According to the poll, Trump is doing rather poorly. In a matchup with possible Democratic nominee Joe Biden, he is behind by 9 points, 50-41. Lest this be deemed too much of an outlier, Trump was behind by a similar margin in Florida in the leaked Trump campaign polls (which he claims don’t exist; maybe he’ll claim Quinnipiac doesn’t exist either).

Henry Grabar has an insightful article, “The Nonwhite Working Class: Talking to the people in Youngstown, Ohio, that the national media usually ignores” at salon.com. While the media’s better-late-than-never discovery of the white working-class has been a positive development of contemporary political analysis, the media’s comparative neglect of the distinct political culture of the African American working-class has been a glaring omission that should be corrected. Grabar’s article, cross-posted here from Salon, is a good place to begin:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio—In 1984, Lewis Macklin stood up at a community meeting and argued that city officials should shut down his high school. It had been seven years since Black Monday—when Youngstown Sheet & Tube announced it was closing its largest factory, costing 5,000 people their jobs and setting off a chain of plant shutdowns that sent the city’s population into free fall. Youngstown could no longer fill its schools, so one would have to close.

But the city did not want to shut down Macklin’s school, Wilson High, which was mostly white. Officials wanted to close the nearby black school instead. Macklin, who is black, recently told me the city’s argument was, “ ‘Keep Wilson open—if you close it down, the white community will move. We’ll take our children and we’ll move.’ ” That argument won. The city shut down the black school, South High, in 1993, and its students were sent to the district’s remaining schools. White families continued to flee the south side anyway, and by 2016, students in the Youngstown School District were 15 percent white and 64 percent black.

Like many buildings in Youngstown, South High School stands abandoned—a stately, stone Beaux-Arts building whose afterlife as a charter school never stuck. The hedges are trimmed, but the flagpole is bare. For Macklin, now a reverend at a nearby Baptist church, the building is a reminder of how deindustrialization, and the response to it, hurt not just the city of Youngstown, but the city’s black community in particular.

If you’ve heard about Youngstown lately, it is probably because the city has been held up—over, and over, and over again—as the locus of white working-class drift from the Democratic Party to Donald Trump. “The epicenter of the Trump phenomenon,” the public policy theorist Justin Gest called the city. It was here, the story goes, that Trump stoked white anxiety, pitched cures to roiling crowds, and brought white union workers into the GOP’s column for the first time in decades, where they appear to be staying put. Democrats underperformed in the region during the blue wave in 2018, and Youngstown will be represented by a Republican in the Ohio state Senate for the first time in 60 years.

“There’s no boom in Youngstown, but blue-collar workers are sticking with Trump,” the New York Times announced last month, in the latest of a series of Trump Country dispatches on the nation’s white working class. These heartland safaris exhibit a common media oversight: the compulsion to paint white, small-town manufacturing workers as the face of the working class, which is in reality mostly urban, racially diverse, and more likely to make burgers than automobiles.

In Youngstown, these stories exhibit another oversight: Youngstown is not white. In contrast to the largely white Mahoning Valley, for which it often serves as an unthinking stand-in, the city itself is 43 percent black and majority-minority. The mayor is black. In more than a dozen interviews in Youngstown’s black community, I could not find anyone who knew a black Trump supporter, let alone was one. But not all of the people I talked to voted for Hillary Clinton, either.

The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.”

And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.

It has been a slow half-century since the crisis began. The city’s longtime black residents remember what, in retrospect, look like the good times. On a recent morning, I sat in a bar called the Pit Stop with a group of older, black men who have been meeting for breakfast for more than a decade. “Jack’s Jury,” they call themselves, after Jack Carter, a former Ohio Department of Transportation worker and the group’s mischievous, raspy-voiced patriarch. There were two words I was told not to mention as we sipped coffee: work and Trump.

This used to be a white bar. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t walk in here,” said Carl Bryant, a former TV newsman. The group is on its fifth location, after three previous meeting spots closed and one was sold.

This is Youngstown’s golden generation of black Americans—men who grew up here when wages were decent enough, the neighborhoods were (briefly) integrated, and the schools were good. Sylvester Patton worked at the General Motors plant in Lordstown in the late ’60s, making Chevy Vegas, a car that no longer gets built, and served five terms in the state Legislature. “Youngstown was good to me,” he reminisced. But, like many Youngstown residents of his generation, he’s watched his children move away in search of opportunity.

Today, Youngstown is a city of 65,000 that has one hospital and barely one full-service supermarket. The unemployment rate for black workers here is triple what it is for whites. And the poverty rate in the city is 36 percent—twice as high as the county figure. For residents who remember the good years, there’s a feeling of whiplash. A good job now pays $15 an hour. It used to be $30.

Whatever went wrong for the white working class here went even worse for their black counterparts. Blacks were hurt by job sprawl that saw work opportunities move from the heart of town into distant suburbs, where housing racism kept black workers out. They were hurt by the racist legacy of the unions here, which left them with worse jobs than their white peers and made them more likely to be dismissed first when downsizing occurred. They were hurt by urban renewal and the wave of declining home values, public services, amenities, and school quality. They were stuck in the city as white flight hollowed out the neighborhoods. They were hurt by the whiteness of the county Democratic Party, which they say has shown little interest in the city’s problems.

The story of Tre Lewis, who lives in a modest, well-kept house with his family on the south side, is typical. Lewis was raised on the city’s east side, where his father was a union metalworker for four decades at Falcon Foundry in Lowellville. He works at a cleaner’s. His daughter works at Wendy’s. “If there was something to do in this town, this town would prosper, because there’s a lot of loyal people here, a lot of good people,” he said as we chatted in his front yard. “But there’s nothing to do. There’s no jobs here. The only jobs we had they just closed.”

He means Lordstown, the enormous GM plant 16 miles west of the city that General Motors closed in March. The saga of the Lordstown plant has obsessed Donald Trump, who had criticized GM for layoffs at the plant and boasted on Twitter of “GREAT NEWS FOR OHIO” when the company said it was in discussions to sell the 6-million-square-foot facility to a 99-person company called Workhorse. In July 2017, Trump held a campaign-style rally in downtown Youngstown that drew 7,000 people to the city’s convention center. “Don’t sell your homes,” he told the crowd, promising new jobs at the valley’s abandoned plants.

Talk like that was what swayed some white Democrats in Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. In 2016, the number of registered Republicans here went from 14,663 before the GOP primary to 35,867 afterward. For the first time since 1972, the Democratic candidate failed to crack 50 percent. Trump deserves credit. But also important was the lack of turnout for Clinton. Trump improvedon Mitt Romney’s performance in the county by 11,000 votes. Clinton underperformed Obama by twice that margin.

Lewis was one of those people who did not vote for president, for the first time in his adult life. He has plenty to say about why he finds Donald Trump appalling: his comments about women, his deportation of a local Jordanian business owner, his petty feuds. But he found little to like in Hillary Clinton; he told me that he felt she was hiding something. Other black voters in Youngstown told me they didn’t like her stance on trade or abortion, or remembered her “superpredators” speech, or her husband’s crime and welfare bills.

“They need to give a sense of reality, not false hope,” said Mayor Jamael Tito Brown, when we spoke on the phone about how the Democrats could counter Trump’s appeal in the county. “The reality is we have tough economic issues. But in a place like Youngstown, Ohio, we don’t just want a campaign speech every 3½ years.” I asked the mayor which presidential candidates he liked, and he did not hesitate: “Tim Ryan” —the local congressmen, who is currently polling at 0.5 percent. “He understands what we’re going through.”