How Harris can recover with non-white voters

Avoiding being "woke" shouldn't preclude targeted messaging

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Two scenes from the campaign trail last week tell us a lot about the struggles the Harris campaign is having with non-white voters:

1. Firstly, Kamala Harris held a town hall in Las Vegas with undecided Hispanic voters, hosted by Univision, America’s biggest Spanish-language TV network. It comes as she launches her Hombres con Harris initiative, an attempt to mobilize Hispanic men to vote for her. At the town hall, the questions were focused on the economy, healthcare, and immigration. Notably, Harris didn’t even mention Trump’s plan to tear millions of families apart and cripple the economy through mass deportation, even though she was speaking to an audience whose family members would likely be directly affected by it.

2. Secondly, Barack Obama spoke at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh and chided black voters for not enthusiastically supporting Harris. Specifically, he criticized black men, saying that the lack of enthusiasm “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers”. He went on: “Part of it makes me think — and I'm speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

Each incident in its own way illustrates the concern that is rippling through the Democratic Party as polls show African-American and Hispanic voters plan to back the party at lower rates than in 2020, a factor which could tip the election to Donald Trump. And each also illustrates why Democrats may find it hard to turn things around unless they change the way they think.

It’s worth noting first that it’s not clear how accurate these polls actually are. Pre-election polls have a record of understating African-American support for Democrats. If you compare the current polls to Biden’s pre-election polls from 2020 rather than the actual result, Harris is only running 5% behind - which is within the margin of error. (A much bally-hoed decline in African-American support for Democrats from 2016 to 2020 was similarly within the margin of error, meaning we don’t know if it was even real). The shift among Hispanics is larger and seems more real, but it’s exact extent is unclear. Either way, if there is a drop-off, it seems to have a lot to do with men. The gender gap in this election looks set to be the largest on record and the polls show mainly male members of these groups switching their support to the GOP.

If we assume this is actually happening, to some extent at least - and it looks like the Harris campaign does - then the million-dollar question is why. White liberals often react with shock and disbelief upon learning that Trump is improving his position with non-white voters. That’s understandable, because Trump is a racist. But I think this reaction often reflects a simplistic understanding of how race and racism operate in the real world.

In surveys and interviews with these voters, the situation looks more nuanced. They may not be well informed about Trump’s racism, or may not think it applies to them. They may view Trump’s racism as just par for the course in the white political establishment rather than some unusual characteristic. They may not care about abstract ideas about race and instead favor the candidate who they think will best help them with bread-and-butter concerns. They may have culturally and socially conservative views and see Trump as more in line with those than a Democratic Party whose tone is often set by white liberals (who frequently have more liberal views on racial issues than minority groups themselves do). They may even have internalized some racist assumptions themselves, as generations of black writers from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ta-Nehisi Coates have emphasized.

This shift in support is happening at a curious time in the history of Democratic campaigning. Harris, like Biden before her, has largely decided not to talk to African-Americans or Hispanics as unique communities, but rather to talk to them pretty much the same way she talks to white voters. She’s also decided not to spend much time directly calling out Trump’s racism. The theory behind this is that white swing voters will be scared away by hearing minority-specific appeals (which strike them as too “woke”), and that minorities just want to hear the same thing as white swing voters anyway.

But can this approach be taken too far? On the one hand, it’s true that minority voters have basically the same issue priorities as white voters. On the other hand, many of the voters who seem wobbly on supporting the Democrats are either young, highly disengaged, or both - meaning that things which older, more engaged observers take for granted (like “Donald Trump is a virulent racist” or “Donald Trump plans to deport your family members”) may not actually be apparent to them at all. And when nobody is out there affirmatively making that case because they think a white audience is tired of hearing it, then Trump gets a pass.

The biggest missed opportunity for the Harris campaign here is Trump’s mass deportation plan. Surveys show that most Hispanic voters don’t think that Trump is talking about them when he assails immigrants and talks about rounding them up by the millions. At the same time, Trump is out there drawing comparisons to the Eisenhower-era Operation Wetback and Japanese internment, both of which swept up U.S. citizens in their dragnets. Trump’s plans would cause massive social and economic disruption and be a humanitarian disaster which brought militarized policing into the heart of Hispanic communities. It’s not pandering to some misguided white liberal “woke-ism” to point that out, and there’s every reason to think it would undermine Trump’s support in the very communities he is planning to destroy.

Then you have Obama’s comments. On the one hand, I’m going to go right ahead and admit that Barack Obama probably has a better handle on public opinion in the African-American community than I do. On the other hand, he has a history of talking down to African-Americans, as famously analyzed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2013 essay ‘How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America', and pointed out by many other black leaders in response to his recent remarks.

If Obama’s remarks illustrate anything, then it’s what is by now a failed model of Democratic engagement with African-Americans - admonishment and blame-shifting. Simply ordering African-Americans to turn out to vote for Democrats because it’s their duty to do so is a rhetorical device whose time has clearly passed. Young black men in particular need to hear why they should turn out to vote for Harris, not to be pre-emptively blamed for Trump winning an election in which the overwhelming majority of ballots will be cast not by them but by white voters.

In the last few weeks of the campaign, Harris and her surrogates have to shift to affirmatively making that case - something that they’re already doing with the launch of Hombres con Harris and Harris’ appearance on Charlamagne tha God’s radio show this week. But if they’re going to do it effectively, they have to be prepared to “go there”. They have to explain why Trump would be a disaster for minorities specifically, what his plans are for their communities, and how the Democrats’ plans are better. Only by doing so can they hope to win back the votes they’re currently losing. That isn’t woke pandering - it’s just common sense.