The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference is taking place this week in Washington, DC. One topic generating debate and controversy is the issue of how black women have been taken for granted in the Democratic Party and whether or not the party is at risk of losing its most loyal and consistent voting bloc.
This has been a discussion months in the making. In May, several prominent black women wrote an open letter to DNC Chair Tom Perez calling for a meeting to discuss the party’s investment in black women’s engagement and leadership. While addressing the issue only marginally (because let’s face it, the party does well addressing black women when it’s politically convenient to do so) since that time, the party has spent a maddening amount of time and energy developing an economic message to appeal to the white working class voters who gravitated toward Donald Trump.
It is a sad, unrequited love affair that, on both sides, seems to be headed for disaster. The Democrats’ unhealthy obsession with winning back white working class voters is a strategy that has not proved successful for decades. Meanwhile, black women continue to remain loyal to a party that often ignores their needs and leadership save every two to four years when an election comes around. So, as we would naturally ask of any partnership where one party is deeply unsatisfied, how long can this relationship between black women and the Democratic Party last?
“It does not make logical sense, statistical sense, or any kind of sense that one can imagine to pour money into chasing a demographic that has not supported you for half a century, rather than watering the garden that’s in your own backyard,” Avis Jones-DeWeever, a policy advisor to the Black Women’s Roundtable, said.
Democrats had an opportunity to do better by black women after the 2016 presidential election. After all, black women were the most consistent and highest voting demographic for Hillary Clinton. This would have made an opportune time to invest in black women’s leadership and candidacy for key positions within the party and in local and national elections. It is true that the party was caught off guard by Trump’s win and the win of Republicans in local elections around the country.
But what happened afterward was the knee-jerk reaction white folks do so often. There was a lot of blaming of people of color for not voting, coupled with intense navel gazing about how the party could have possibly lost the votes of white working class people to the likes of Trump. This ignores how that demographic has increasingly identified itself with Republicans over the years due to increased fears of cultural displacement and a worsening economy. But it also fails to recognize the reality that Trump simply won white votes—the majority of them. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates in his latest piece for The Atlantic:
From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to Nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
In other words, as represented by this past election, white people are simply no longer the Democratic Party’s base. Now here’s the part that needs reckoning: this fact must cause some deep, painful discomfort on the part of some. It’s one of the only logical explanations as to why the leaders of the party continue on this current path. Somehow, the party that embraces diversity and inclusion is struggling with the fact that it no longer requires majority white votes to get political power. So instead of mobilizing the base, fostering diverse leadership, empowering people of color and trying to recruit young people and unmarried women, it remains stagnate—trying desperately to convince white people (specifically old, working class white men) that there is something in the party for them.
This is evidenced by the party’s new agenda which was released this summer. The idea of rolling out a new economic message for Americans is beautiful—and much needed. But to do so without thinking of how it impacts the base of the party is not only simplistic and tone-deaf, it defeats the purpose of what Democrats are trying to do.
For both Avis Jones-DeWeever and Symone Sanders [a Democratic strategist who worked for Bernie Sanders], the most vivid representation of the Democrats’ neglect of black women was the rollout of the party’s “A Better Deal” agenda in July. Congressional leadership trekked to the small town of Berryville, Virginia, to stage a press event in a park. Sanders said she cringed as the party “centered a message about the economy that does not include black women.” She told me, “They went way far out in the boonies of Virginia to launch it, when they could have gone down the street to Southeast D.C.”
Meanwhile, Jones-DeWeever was incensed by the “Better Deal” slogan itself. “What the hell is that?” she asked. “Who are you going to motivate with that? Who are you going to inspire with that?” At the very least, Sanders said she’d have “launched the thing with some black women, with a multicultural coalition.” Both she and Jones-DeWeever would also have made the same change to Bernie Sanders’s clunky unity tour with DNC Chair Tom Perez back in the spring, which Jones-DeWeever thought was focused on “Bernie bros.”
Democrats are often accused of playing identity politics. This is a tactic of the Republicans for sure, but also one that occurs internally, especially when people of color raise their voices and hold the party accountable for championing their issues. This works as a tool to silence people of color or anyone who is asking for a marginalized group to be centered in policies and organizing practices. Calls for an intersectional approach are met with cries of “but if we aren’t unified, the Republicans will keep winning!” The sad news is that Republicans winning has nothing to do with recognizing and centering the true base of the Democratic Party.
Continuing to ignore black women who always show up when it counts while hopelessly trying to hold on to white working class voters is the ultimate form of identity politics. Black women can only be ignored for so long. The Republican Party is certainly not an alternative, but black women can’t and shouldn’t be held hostage either.
So what is the Democratic Party’s plan to engage its most loyal base? Like it or not, there is no winning elections without black women. As Symone Sanders said, “If the party wants to be the big-tent party of everybody, if we want to win in the midterms and potentially regain the White House in 2020, we have to do better at speaking to all people authentically and making sure we don’t forget about our base.”