From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Democratic centrists complained that Jesse Jackson and his progressive allies were pushing the party too far left.
Using the leverage of his Rainbow Coalition, Jackson pushed the party conventions to adopt more liberal stances than the nominees wanted. Now, some 40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.
White, well-educated liberals are the proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.
This results from the changing demographic characteristics of white Democrats, especially whites with college degrees, and the shifting focus of the liberal agenda from racial and economic equality to culture war issues.
Black voters today are no longer on the party’s left flank. Since the late 1990s the share of white Democrats identifying as liberal roughly doubled, from about 30 percent to 61 percent, while Black Democrats moved only modestly.
White voters without college make up about a quarter of the Democratic coalition. White college graduates are now more liberal across the board.
Black Democrats are more religious and more traditional on cultural issues than white Democrats.
The moral and cultural gulf between Black and white Democrats has grown steadily.
Along similar lines, a 2022 American Enterprise Institute study found that white liberals favored “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services” by 71 percent to 27 percent; Black voters were much more closely split, 53 percent to 44 percent; and Hispanic voters were opposed, with 40 percent for shifting funds to social services and 57 percent against doing so.
White Democrats are significantly more likely than Black Democrats (52 percent vs. 26 percent) to believe that societal acceptance of gay, lesbian and bisexual people has not gone far enough.”
These differences are part and parcel of a larger ideological shift among Democrats over the past 26 years.
There are four major issues on which “Black voters have indeed become a moderating force compared with white liberals”:
Crime:
A 2024 American Enterprise Institute survey found that nonwhite working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.
Patriotism:
Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were “proud to be an American,” compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.
Racial preferences:
When asked if Black people should work their way up “without special favors,” white liberals were about 12 points less likely to agree than Black voters.
The pro-affirmative action stance among many white liberals, in contrast to the moderate positions of Black Democrats, is striking.
In an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates. polls found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.
The reversal of ideological positioning of white and minority Democrats is closely connected to the class conversion of the Democratic Party from the party of the working class to the party of well-educated whites.
Today’s white Democratic voters are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.
At the same time, Erickson’s analysis points to a Democratic split with the so-called post-material wing dominated by white liberals and a Black-Hispanic minority wing more concerned with bread-and-butter issues:
According to 2024 A.P. VoteCast Data, when asked to rank their level of concern on top issues in the 2024 election, white progressives expressed the most concern about “the effects of climate change,” at 75 percent, while nearly 70 percent of Black, Latino and white non college voters were most concerned about the cost of food and groceries.
The racial, ideological and class alterations of the Democratic Party have created a damaging dynamic both internally and in competition with the Republican Party.
The white working-class voters who favor Republicans are struggling economically but don’t feel that their struggles are given the same attention as racism and other cultural issues. They are a large group that feels disrespected, distrusts government and feels like their own economic challenges are being ignored.
The ascendance within Democratic ranks of culturally liberal well-educated whites has, in turn, intensified tensions with Black, Hispanic and other minority Democrats, Sawhill wrote
Democrats, have a huge opportunity to unite the working class across racial lines, but to do so, I believe they will have to focus much more on inequalities of wealth and power, and put a stronger emphasis on economic issues such as work, wages and the cost of living while simultaneously embracing more mainstream or less-contentious cultural values in many areas.
Over the last two decades, Democrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads.
The nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.
The problem for those who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.
They vote, donate and participate heavily in party organizations more than any other major bloc. They dominate or exert disproportionate influence among party activists, primary voters, campaign staffs, advocacy organizations, the media, nonprofit leadership and donor networks.
It may well be that the internal power lies with those who are happy campers just where they are, and that the party as currently constructed cannot and will not dig itself out of the hole it’s in.
