In 2020, Biden snapped to the host of a black radio show, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
The host had wanted him to stay and answer more questions and Biden curtly dismissed the idea that there were any more questions to ask. Any black person who didn’t already support him wasn’t black. But, according to Biden, it turns out most black people may not be black.
Reuters notes that according to its recent poll, “18% of black Americans would pick Trump over Biden in a hypothetical matchup, compared to 46% who favored Biden, including about one in four black men, compared to about one in seven black women.”
Biden couldn’t even get a majority of black voters in his corner.
That 18% is up from 8% in 2016 and 12% in 2020 which is a fantastic rate of growth. At that rate, a Republican presidential candidate could be winning a quarter of the black vote in 2028.
During the 2022 midterms, the Republican share of the black vote similarly rose from 8% to 14%. Even running black candidates and accusing Republicans of racism didn’t necessarily help the Democrats. Gov. Kemp doubled his share of black voters against Stacey Abrams.
What happened? Republicans have begun making serious investments in the black community. And a miserable ‘Bidenomics’ economy has hit black people, who tend to earn less and are more likely to live from paycheck to paycheck, harder. While white liberal elites can dismiss sharp increases in the price of milk, bread or gas, black voters are much less likely to do so.
But Democrats fundamentally have a ‘Blackinx’ problem.
Latinx has become a symbol of the gulf between ordinary Latinos and a leftist elite obsessed with sexual identity politics. A more subtler ‘Blackinx’ problem has emerged as the Biden administration has embraced the culture war, fighting over transgender issues and abortion, rather than talking about the kitchen table issues that working class people care about.
A new black activist class that came from colleges rather than communities had revamped the focus in Washington D.C. away from the traditional social welfare priorities to niche identity politics issues and calls for dismantling law enforcement and the justice system.
Typical of this was Black Lives Matter whose calls to defund the police were embraced by Democrats only to realize that implementing even limited versions of the proposals led to skyrocketing crime and that strong majorities of black voters were fiercely opposed to them.
While the Biden campaign quickly jettisoned police defunding, it stuck to other elements of the blackinx agenda, including tying black civil rights activism to the LGBTQ movement and promoting abortion, that many black voters were not especially comfortable with. Black activists, many of them funded by major leftist foundations, including those of George Soros, were being financed to win elections and swing southern states. Georgia became a major hub for these efforts with the Democrats scoring big wins by securing its Senate seats and suffering major losses. But while election strategies enthused D.C. Democrats, they left black voters cold.
Black voters see an activist class that is either out of touch with the community or has sold out. All of this might be bad enough if they weren’t also coping with a horrendous economy while their economic concerns are dismissed or mushed up into dogma about systemic racism because acknowledging the misery might undermine Biden’s reelection prospects.
Democrats and their media keep wondering why they’re losing black voters. Articles like “Why Joe Biden Is Bleeding Black Support” (New York Magazine), “Democrats Fear Loss of Black Loyalty” (Washington Post) and “Falling Black Support for Biden Has Democrats Worried” (Time) consistently misdiagnose the problem by urging Dems to double down on blackinxing.
Blackinx, like Latinx and its white counterparts, reflect a political elite that has lost touch with working class voters. After losing the white working class and developing a shaky relationship with Latino voters, Democrats hoped to build a wall of black voters. But while the problem has taken longer to arrive with black voters, it has been slowly building up to a crisis.
Democrats catastrophically lost white non-college voters, especially white men, 71% of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and 66% of whom voted for him in 2020, and are on the verge of losing non-college Latino voters who backed Biden by only 55 to 41 over Trump, and have also begun bleeding black men and the problem is starting to get big enough to affect the big picture.
After years of talking to black voters almost exclusively about “voting rights” and “criminal justice reform”, Democrats are wondering why these preoccupations of the D.C. activist class aren’t generating meaningful black support. Black voters see Democrats passionately rallying to the cause of drag shows and abortion, but don’t see that conviction when it comes to black issues.
Black communities are being torn apart by massive crime waves and economic misery are not especially interested in redistricting battles and transgender books in schools yet this is what Democrats talk about, especially in the South, rather than anything black voters care about.
There is a long tradition of Democrats paying attention to black voters only during election season, but with the arrival of blackinx, they’ve lost the ability to talk to black voters. The old grifting reverends like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were seen by many in the black community as clowns yet they were still seen as coming out of the community, but the same cannot be said of a new black political elite, whose most prominent representative was Barack Obama and now Kamala Harris, who don’t share goals, values or even a common language.
Ordinary black voters think Kamala Harris represents them about as much as white working class voters feel represented by Beto O’Rourke. Biden was half right when he said, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Apart from his mythical days marching in Selma and wrestling with Corn Pop, Biden is surrounded by black staffers, aides and allies who are representative of a D.C. political elite, not black people.
Biden, like a lot of Democrats, has come to mistake blackinx for black. His idea of black people consists of black female party operatives who, like their white and Asian peers, embrace trendy causes, cry at DEI sessions and base their entire identity around pop leftist politics. This small blackinx elite, the graduates of gender studies and black studies programs at top colleges, who went on to corporate and then party positions, don’t speak for the larger black electorate.
And Biden has come to believe that the larger black electorate isn’t really black.
Blackinx, like Latinx, is a real phenomenon, but it’s in the single digits and represents little more than a small number of academic, entertainment and political spaces, not the black community.
Biden will win the blackinx voter but he may be shakier when it comes to the black vote. And he is facing the possibility of having to declare that most black people are not black.
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Thank you for reading.
Reuters notes that according to its recent poll, “18% of black Americans would pick Trump over Biden in a hypothetical matchup, compared to 46% who favored Biden, including about one in four black men, compared to about one in seven black women.”
Biden couldn’t even get a majority of black voters in his corner.
That 18% is up from 8% in 2016 and 12% in 2020 which is a fantastic rate of growth. At that rate, a Republican presidential candidate could be winning a quarter of the black vote in 2028.
During the 2022 midterms, the Republican share of the black vote similarly rose from 8% to 14%. Even running black candidates and accusing Republicans of racism didn’t necessarily help the Democrats. Gov. Kemp doubled his share of black voters against Stacey Abrams.
What happened? Republicans have begun making serious investments in the black community. And a miserable ‘Bidenomics’ economy has hit black people, who tend to earn less and are more likely to live from paycheck to paycheck, harder. While white liberal elites can dismiss sharp increases in the price of milk, bread or gas, black voters are much less likely to do so.
But Democrats fundamentally have a ‘Blackinx’ problem.
Latinx has become a symbol of the gulf between ordinary Latinos and a leftist elite obsessed with sexual identity politics. A more subtler ‘Blackinx’ problem has emerged as the Biden administration has embraced the culture war, fighting over transgender issues and abortion, rather than talking about the kitchen table issues that working class people care about.
A new black activist class that came from colleges rather than communities had revamped the focus in Washington D.C. away from the traditional social welfare priorities to niche identity politics issues and calls for dismantling law enforcement and the justice system.
Typical of this was Black Lives Matter whose calls to defund the police were embraced by Democrats only to realize that implementing even limited versions of the proposals led to skyrocketing crime and that strong majorities of black voters were fiercely opposed to them.
While the Biden campaign quickly jettisoned police defunding, it stuck to other elements of the blackinx agenda, including tying black civil rights activism to the LGBTQ movement and promoting abortion, that many black voters were not especially comfortable with. Black activists, many of them funded by major leftist foundations, including those of George Soros, were being financed to win elections and swing southern states. Georgia became a major hub for these efforts with the Democrats scoring big wins by securing its Senate seats and suffering major losses. But while election strategies enthused D.C. Democrats, they left black voters cold.
Black voters see an activist class that is either out of touch with the community or has sold out. All of this might be bad enough if they weren’t also coping with a horrendous economy while their economic concerns are dismissed or mushed up into dogma about systemic racism because acknowledging the misery might undermine Biden’s reelection prospects.
Democrats and their media keep wondering why they’re losing black voters. Articles like “Why Joe Biden Is Bleeding Black Support” (New York Magazine), “Democrats Fear Loss of Black Loyalty” (Washington Post) and “Falling Black Support for Biden Has Democrats Worried” (Time) consistently misdiagnose the problem by urging Dems to double down on blackinxing.
Blackinx, like Latinx and its white counterparts, reflect a political elite that has lost touch with working class voters. After losing the white working class and developing a shaky relationship with Latino voters, Democrats hoped to build a wall of black voters. But while the problem has taken longer to arrive with black voters, it has been slowly building up to a crisis.
Democrats catastrophically lost white non-college voters, especially white men, 71% of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and 66% of whom voted for him in 2020, and are on the verge of losing non-college Latino voters who backed Biden by only 55 to 41 over Trump, and have also begun bleeding black men and the problem is starting to get big enough to affect the big picture.
After years of talking to black voters almost exclusively about “voting rights” and “criminal justice reform”, Democrats are wondering why these preoccupations of the D.C. activist class aren’t generating meaningful black support. Black voters see Democrats passionately rallying to the cause of drag shows and abortion, but don’t see that conviction when it comes to black issues.
Black communities are being torn apart by massive crime waves and economic misery are not especially interested in redistricting battles and transgender books in schools yet this is what Democrats talk about, especially in the South, rather than anything black voters care about.
There is a long tradition of Democrats paying attention to black voters only during election season, but with the arrival of blackinx, they’ve lost the ability to talk to black voters. The old grifting reverends like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were seen by many in the black community as clowns yet they were still seen as coming out of the community, but the same cannot be said of a new black political elite, whose most prominent representative was Barack Obama and now Kamala Harris, who don’t share goals, values or even a common language.
Ordinary black voters think Kamala Harris represents them about as much as white working class voters feel represented by Beto O’Rourke. Biden was half right when he said, “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” Apart from his mythical days marching in Selma and wrestling with Corn Pop, Biden is surrounded by black staffers, aides and allies who are representative of a D.C. political elite, not black people.
Biden, like a lot of Democrats, has come to mistake blackinx for black. His idea of black people consists of black female party operatives who, like their white and Asian peers, embrace trendy causes, cry at DEI sessions and base their entire identity around pop leftist politics. This small blackinx elite, the graduates of gender studies and black studies programs at top colleges, who went on to corporate and then party positions, don’t speak for the larger black electorate.
And Biden has come to believe that the larger black electorate isn’t really black.
Blackinx, like Latinx, is a real phenomenon, but it’s in the single digits and represents little more than a small number of academic, entertainment and political spaces, not the black community.
Biden will win the blackinx voter but he may be shakier when it comes to the black vote. And he is facing the possibility of having to declare that most black people are not black.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.
Thank you for reading.
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It's a beautiful thing.
ReplyDeleteReparations handouts will lure many formerly Black people back.
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