The Patriot Post® · What Happens to Racial Tribalism?

One might think that the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action in college admissions in June 2023 would’ve shoved blacks and Hispanics more firmly into the Democrat camp, onto the Democrats’ race-based plantation.

One might think.

But as it turns out, the American people — including our nation’s largest minority groups — aren’t as into race-based discrimination as the Left might have us believe. In 2001, for example, a Washington Post poll asked the following question: “In order to give minorities more opportunity, do you believe race or ethnicity should be a factor when deciding who is hired, promoted, or admitted to college, or that hiring, promotions, and college admissions should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race or ethnicity?”

The result? A whopping 92% of all respondents and 86% of blacks said that these decisions “should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity.”

More recently, a 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 62% of blacks and 65% of Hispanics said that “colleges should not consider race in admissions.” These are resounding majorities, nearly 2-to-1, in favor of judging folks as Martin Luther King Jr. had dreamed of seeing them judged — by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

The point is, blacks and Hispanics seem to understand the difference between a hand out and a hand up — the former being what they’ve gotten from the Democrats’ racially divisive Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and the latter being what they’ve gotten from Donald Trump’s “lift all boats” economic policies.

Indeed, by making serious inroads into those two traditional Democrat voting blocs on November 5, Trump was able to blunt the racial demagoguery that the Left usually practices during election season. As Jason Riley writes in City Journal:

According to exit polls, Trump carried 46 percent of the Latino vote, a 14-point increase from 2020. Asian support rose to 39 percent from 34 percent four years ago. And though overall black support for Trump ticked up by only a point, his gains among subsets of black voters were notable. The Associated Press reported that Trump won a quarter of all black men and a third of black men ages 18 to 44. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki recently observed that since 2012, black voters have shifted 15 points toward the GOP.

As an aside: Does anyone else have trouble believing that Trump’s support among blacks went up by just a single point this election cycle? Think about it: If Trump “won a quarter of all black men and a third of black men ages 18 to 44,” he’d have had to lose an offsetting amount of support among blacks across all the other demographic groups. Is that really possible? Did he really have that much support to lose among these groups in the first place? Or did the big-city Democrat machines engage in some electoral chicanery? It would be interesting to see the relative turnout among blacks in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia compared to the national average.

In any case, Trump managed to make these gains despite being a rich old white male Republican and despite running against a far younger female woman of color whose surrogates made one overt racial appeal after another in the campaign’s final days. It seems certain, as Riley notes, that Trump’s bold forays into Harlem and the Bronx and black churches in Detroit paid off on November 5.

The question, though, is whether Trump’s appeal to blacks and Hispanics will last or whether the Left’s racial tribalism will return as forcefully as ever. Are we seeing a serious long-term voting shift or is this more ephemeral, a temporary byproduct of Donald Trump’s unique and powerful cultural appeal?

Riley, who himself is black, is optimistic. “My guess,” he writes, “is the shift is bigger than the candidate and part of a broader, decade-long trend that shows blue-collar voters fleeing the Democratic Party. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be working class, and larger numbers of them have started to vote like working-class whites. Increasingly, economic status matters more than ethnic identity when filling out a ballot.”

This is the critical matter: whether race is losing its luster and folks are instead aligning themselves among economic voting blocs instead of racial ones.

Whether the shift is permanent or temporary, the Old Guard Left can’t seem to come to grips with what Trump did. Here’s what a shell-shocked David Axelrod said on CNN on election night: “Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it. There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.”

Why, it’s as if Axelrod had forgotten the meteoric rise and the crossover appeal of his former boss, Barack Obama, some 20 years ago.

This time around, it might be that a lot of blacks and Hispanics — in addition to remembering the good ol’ days of Trump’s presidency and in addition to being offended by the Democrats’ open-door illegal immigration policies — found Kamala Harris to be a dimwitted candidate. In The Wall Street Journal last week, White Guilt author Shelby Steele remarked: “The inarticulateness, the lack of any sort of familiarity with the issues. I mean, wow! She was kind of an insult to minority voters. You can’t do any better than this?”

Asked by Riley about the permanence of Trump’s Republican appeal, Steele was equally optimistic: “I think it’s definitely something that will continue when Trump leaves the scene,” he said. “There is this slowly creeping reality that we blacks are in charge of our own fate. … And you see many blacks now thinking what you and I have been thinking for a long time. That hey, this doesn’t work.”