Are Black Voters Punished for Their Loyalty?

Are Black Voters Punished for Their Loyalty?

Yes, they vote overwhelmingly Democratic. But that doesn’t mean they lack influence over the party.

By Jonathan Bernstein.

No doubt.

Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty

I strongly recommend an article about Black politics by Alex Samuels over at FiveThirtyEight. There’s a lot of important stuff here about why Black voters are underrepresented. The stuff that matters? Unlike other groups, such voters face the reality of anti-Black sentiment, so that any party that delivers benefits perceived as helping them risks facing a backlash from other parts of the electorate. Samuels cites quite a bit of research backing this effect up that can’t just be wished away. It’s real, and it has real political consequences.

But I somewhat disagree with the framing of the article, which suggests that Black voters have minimal leverage because the overwhelming majority of them are reliable Democrats. I think that’s exaggerated. The truth is that all voters as individuals have extremely limited leverage. Sure, parties sometimes adjust their policy agenda and priorities in search of support from hypothetical median voters, or those who are perfectly balanced between the two parties. More often, however, they’ll simply seek out popular positions and hope for the best. So if Iowa is a swing state, parties will tend to support corn; if Louisiana is contested, they’ll tend to support oil and gas interests — positions that appeal to very large groups, that is, rather than to narrow segments. They’ll avoid unpopular policies and support popular ones if all else is equal. But all else is rarely equal.

That’s because parties aren’t simple machines narrowly focused on winning. Instead, they’re made up of organized groups. And those groups jostle and position to raise their profile within the larger party, and in doing so win more nominations, hold more offices, and elevate the things they care about in the party’s agenda. As individuals, taking no political action other than showing up on Election Day, Black voters (like any others) have little leverage. But to the extent that they form organized groups within the party and become party actors and get involved in party affairs, they can and have won a great deal of influence. Yes, that influence is limited by the hostility discussed above. Party actors, Black ones included, are reluctant to take unpopular positions. Still, it’s a mistake to conceptualize the Democratic Party as some alien monolith that exists entirely apart, so that voters’ only choice is to take it or leave it. That’s just not how it works. Parties are permeable; voters can become party actors by simply getting involved; and if they do that as part of an organized group, changing a party is surprisingly easy. Especially for those who bring valuable resources with them, and there’s no resource more valuable than reliable party voters.

Involvement in parties isn’t the only way that organized groups can achieve political goals. Independent interest groups can influence the parties and directly lobby elected officials. Social movements can mobilize large numbers of people and have at times successfully changed the direction of policy through demonstrations and other direct action. The point is that very little happens in U.S. politics or any democracy because of individuals acting as just-plain-voters — but getting more involved, and acting with others, can often achieve surprising results.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that victory is guaranteed: The nature of democratic politics is that there are always at least temporary winners and losers. The U.S. system probably makes it easier than most for people to get involved meaningfully, especially (as Samuels points out) at the state and local levels; it also is a system with a strong bias toward incremental change, so big wins can be hard to come by and post-election frustration is even more of a central theme than in most other democracies. All of this is true for every group and every individual; Black citizens, again, face obstacles that others do not.

But it’s a real mistake to consider any group trapped by its strong allegiance to a single party. To the contrary: Active participation in a political party is a source of group strength, not weakness.