“Blacks die sooner than whites. How many votes has this cost Democrats?” So headlined The Washington Post over the weekend. It’s not so much that black lives matter, you see, as black votes matter to Democrat politicians.

Writing in the Post, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Professor Dean Robinson takes a look at the research of Javier Rodriguez, Arline Geronimus, John Bound and Danny Dorling, four university professors who attempt to calculate how different election outcomes might have been if the voting-age blacks who died between 1970 and 2004 had lived and voted (Democrat).

According to Robinson, “Rodriguez and colleagues estimate that excess deaths among blacks totaled 2.7 million between 1970 and 2004, that 1.74 million would have been of voting age, and that 1 million would have voted in the 2004 election. Combining excess mortality with the consequences of felon disenfranchisement, they find that about 1 in 7 blacks (15 percent) did not have the opportunity to vote in 2004 for one of these two reasons.”

While the study authors conclude the 2004 presidential election would not have turned out different, they assert the “[o]utcomes of 7 senate and 11 gubernatorial races could have been reversed.”

Then Robinson lays out the familiar narrative about racial inequality. “Research has shown that blacks are not dying in excess because of differences in genetic endowment or health behavior,” he says. “Instead, health disparities reflect racial and class inequality and an accumulation of stressors, including segregation, discrimination, exposure to pollution and unequal access to health-care resources, to name a few.”

He didn’t get into the disparity in incarceration rates, but that’s been a bugaboo of the Left for years, too. Never mind that blacks commit crime at a rate far higher than other races, and that the overwhelming majority of crime is intra-racial, not interracial.

We certainly would not argue that there hasn’t been any racial inequality. Slavery was a horrific thing, and, ever since its end, the nation has endured 150 years of racial discrimination and bitterness.

But blacks have been a monolithic voting bloc for Democrats — the party of slavery and Jim Crow, by the way — for half a century. Particularly in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and Ferguson, to pick three at random, Democrats have been running the show for at least that long. And blacks in those cities remain mired in failing schools, poor housing and low-wage jobs.

Might there be not just correlation but causation?

Yet according to Political Research Quarterly, “Historical legacies provide deeply rooted ties between blacks and the Democratic Party. These ties may simply render it impossible for Republicans — black or otherwise — to move public opinion or mobilize among blacks.” Translation: Blacks aren’t going to vote GOP any time soon, no matter what.

Robinson concludes, “The tragic deaths of unarmed black men have again generated conversations about racial inequality in the United States.”

He neglects, of course, the thousands of tragic deaths of armed black men at the hands of other armed black men through gang violence in inner cities. This social breakdown and family collapse is largely the result of subsidizing fatherlessness through the Democrats’ “Great Society,” which left blacks enslaved on urban poverty plantations.

Nor did Robinson mention that 37% of aborted babies are black. If blacks, at 12% of the population, accounted for a similar percentage of all abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973 — not even as far back as the researchers go — that’s roughly 21 million people who never had a chance at life, never mind voting. Yet abortion is a sacred plank of the Democrat platform.

Do black lives matter only when taken by police officers?

The ugly truth is that Democrats need blacks to win elections, and this demographic decline is worrisome to leftist politicos. Perhaps that’s why they seek to flood the country with immigrants.