As we all unpack and diagnose the 2016 election, I want to discuss the Black voter enthusiasm, which some people have stated was disappointing considering how much of a bigot and racist Trump and his campaign has been. Black voters made up 12% of the 2016 electorate, and voted slightly more in favor of the GOP nominee compared to 2012, although still overwhelmingly for Clinton.
There were many surprising things coming out of the 2016 election. I don’t think the drop in enthusiasm from Black voters in 2016 compared to 2012 and 2008 should be any surprise, however.
Pew Research on 2016 vote
Clinton won Black voters in 2016 88%-8% (12% of voters)
Obama won Black voters in 2012 93%-6% (13.4% of voters)
Obama won Black voters in 2008 95%-4% (13% of voters)
2008 and 2012 offered people the chance to vote for the first Black president in this nation’s history. Yes, there were plenty of Black people who had never voted before who probably won’t be reliable voters in the future, but they came out to vote for Obama. And while Obama tried hard to make the case that 2016 was also a vote for him to seal his legacy, it’s not quite the same. In 2012 Black voters voted at a higher rate than Whites for the first time in history. Did anyone really think that would be the case this year? So there was going to be a drop off. That should have been a given for the Democratic campaign strategy.
To me the more curious question is why there wasn’t a surge in enthusiasm from White Women voters. With the rate of voting so woefully low in this country, there was plenty of room to grow among that giant demographic.
Now, some people thought the outwardly racist nature of Trump would counteract that drop off. This is where I think some within the Democratic party had a false assumption. Trump’s outward bigotry isn’t much of a motivating factor. Black people for the most part, we believe all the Republican presidents have been prejudiced against us. George W. Bush, of course. Katrina as a prime example. George H.W. Bush, Reagan, Nixon, etc…
Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy just turned the language they used into dog whistles:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The fact that Trump’s language was more direct, that his campaign rallies were more outwardly racist, wasn’t going to bring more Black people to the polls. Trump was just more straightforward than the average GOP candidate. What his rhetoric did do was make Black people interested in how the White electorate would respond to a politician who was not speaking in innuendos. And we all saw how that turned out.
