Retrospective: Black Democrats are moderate
Post-mortem sheds new light on long-held view
In a new post-mortem, Navigator Research found that Kamala lost the most ground with self-identified "Moderate" voters - a 13 point decline.
That should come as no surprise to WelcomeStack readers. As we noted here almost exactly a year ago, in our piece “it’s time to calmly freak out”:
Rather than being driven by weakness among progressives due to foreign affairs, Biden is losing the moderate, independent voters that delivered him the 2024 election. The chart below shows the change between the high-quality Fox News polls (Fox News uses both a Democratic and a Republican firm who collaborate) taken immediately before the 2020 election and this month’s poll. The 2020 poll had Biden leading by 8 (he won by 4.5) and their most recent poll had him trailing by 1 point. As the chart shows, Biden is losing the most ground with moderate and conservative voters, not liberals.
Unfortunately, moderates called this one correctly: Biden-Harris lost the middle and thereby lost the election.
Navigator also found that while Harris declined with liberal voters of color (13 points), the decline was biggest with moderate voters of color (24 points) and conservative voters of color (31 points). Her decline among white moderates was 9 points, but 24 points among moderates of color.
While this may surprise the progressive activists who have spent the last decade pretending that voters of color want to see the abolition of police, reparations and open borders, it’s not a surprise to those who study the opinions of voters of color.
Below is an excerpt of
’s piece from last year in Slow Boring on how Black and Latino Democrats are far more moderate than activists and consultants assume.
An early March analysis by the Associated Press argued that the President's pivot to the middle risked alienating not only progressives but also Black voters in calling for stronger security at the southern border, approving a significant oil drilling effort in Alaska and rejecting activists’ calls to defund law enforcement by choosing to instead “fund the police.”
The reality is far different: Biden’s pivot to the center may anger white radicals, but it is actually a move that will position him much closer to the Black voters who make up the base of the Democratic Party, something I mentioned recently on MSNBC.
In the eyes of many journalists, including those who wrote the Associated Press piece, the preferences of Black voters (especially Black Democrats) and progressives are essentially one and the same. The crowd that President Obama’s press secretary famously called the “Professional Left” has convinced many in the media that Black voters support their Far Left agenda. In reality, these wealthy white liberals are disguising their preferences behind the shield of Black voters.
The basics
Black voters are not a monolith, but even more importantly, they’re not all that progressive as a demographic.
Black voters are more moderate across the board, and Black voters are the Democratic constituency most likely to identify as moderate.
Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning Independents, Black voters are the racial demographic least likely to identify as “liberal.” Only 29% of Black Democrats call their ideology “liberal,” compared to 37% of their Hispanic counterparts and a whopping 55% of white Democrats and Dem-leaners (Pew Research). A plurality (43%) called themselves “moderate,” and one in four (25%) identified as “conservative.” In the aftermath of Rep. Jim Clyburn’s tide-shifting endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primary, a clear majority of Black voters in South Carolina (61%) voted for Joe Biden, elevating him over Far Left favorite Bernie Sanders and putting him on track to the White House.
Far from alienating these voters by moving to the mainstream middle, President Biden has shown time and time again that he’s aligned with Black voters on important issues — especially in cases where that has meant bucking the Sanders faction that is richer, whiter and more educated than the rest of the country.
In examining Biden’s “pivot to the center” that the AP claims risks alienating Biden’s Black base, The Welcome Party conducted an analysis of ANES and CES public survey datasets and found the following on matters of immigration, climate change and crime. We also reviewed recent Blueprint polling that suggests Democrats should recalibrate our understanding of what Black voters want, how closely it aligns with Independents’ preferences and who our “base” actually is.
Read the rest of Black Democrats are Moderate here on Slow Boring.