Is Partisanship Merely a Proxy for Race?
Disentangling the two is challenging, if not impossible.
Writing in Slate, UC-Berkeley public policy professor Jake Grumback purports to explain “How Normie Pundits Paved the Way for the Supreme Court Voting Rights Disaster.” He makes some compelling points but is ultimately too reductionist. Indeed, the introductory paragraph gets there straight away:
For two decades, a certain kind of American political thinker has insisted they know the real problem. Authoritarianism, oligarchy, and racism were symptoms rather than causes. The true pathology was partisan polarization. The sorting of Americans into hostile camps. The collapse of bipartisan comity.
Nobody of any note has argued that polarization was the only problem, merely that it was making it impossible to govern.
We built serious institutions around this diagnosis. Duke opened its Polarization Lab. Princeton launched its Bridging Divides Initiative. No Labels raised tens of millions of dollars. Braver Angels held town halls. The Carnegie Foundation offered prestigious fellowships, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened a blue-ribbon commission. Ezra Klein’s bestselling book didn’t seek to answer why democracy is dying, but Why We’re Polarized. Today there are more conferences and fellowships devoted to “bridging divides” than there are functioning bridges between the parties.
Again: these are part and parcel of the same thing. Our system is explicitly designed to require compromise every step of the way. If there are no functioning bridges between the parties—and the parties are completely sorted—then our system breaks down.
So, for example, Klein’s book (written in 2019 and published just as the COVID pandemic was starting in January 2020) describes the situation thusly:
“The American political system—which includes everyone from voters to journalists to the president—is full of rational actors making rational decisions given the incentives they face,” writes political analyst Ezra Klein. “We are a collection of functional parts whose efforts combine into a dysfunctional whole.”
“A thoughtful, clear and persuasive analysis” (The New York Times Book Review), Why We’re Polarized reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.
This rather clearly does not ignore racism as a causal factor. It’s just one factor among many.
Back to Grumback:
The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 60 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.
But, put another way, 10 percent of Black voters are Republican, and 40 percent of White voters are Democrats. So, clearly, race isn’t the only sorting mechanism.
The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.
This is Grumback’s strongest point and, indeed, the one that makes the essay worth thinking about. Six decades beyond Jim Crow, anti-Black racism is no longer the central driving mechanism in American politics—even in the Deep South. Diluting the Black vote is not the main aim of Republican-led gerrymandering. But it’s certainly a guaranteed outcome if not a necessary mechanism to achieving the desired outcome of maximizing Republican advantage.
Race and partisanship are therefore inextricably linked. But they’re not one and the same.
The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.
Well no. Indeed, the primary reason Abraham Lincoln and the upstart Republican Party won the 1860 election was that the Democrats split into two factions over the issue of race and the remants of the old Whig Party formed the Constitutional Union party, creating a four-way race. Slavery and the fate of the Union was the central issue in the contest. But, of course, that means we didn’t have the partisan sorting that Klein and others have pointed to.
Polarization-obsessed liberals did not directly cause the Callais ruling. But they laid an intellectual foundation. When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.
I’m considerably older than Grumback and can not remember a presidential election when race was not at least a tacit issue. And Democrats have explicitly made race—and racism—a central issue in their campaigns against Republicans and, especially, against Trump. Further, there have been multiple best-selling volumes attributing Republican electoral success to racist rhetoric and proclaiming that Democrats would emerge as a permanent majority party as older Whites die off and get replaced by Black and Hispanic voters. (In fairness, some Republicans were making that argument at least as early as 2012.)
Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.
So, I fully agree with the second sentence here. I just disagree that “multiracial voting rights” is the primary driver of our polarization. Indeed, Grumback’s prize-winning book, Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, seemingly agrees:
Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don’t stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today’s state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time—or accelerating them.
The book is based on his multiple prize-winning Berkeley PhD dissertation, and I’ll happily defer to his expertise on what’s happening at the state level, especially since it comports with my more casual observations. While I was somewhat slow to come around to the implications, I’ve been writing about “using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself” for at least fifteen years now.
But those things are happening precisely because the parties have become more polarized and sorted. And, as Grumbach notes, the divisions are about much more than race: “red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change.” That’s to say nothing of abortion, LGBTQ issues, the role of women in society, vaccines, masks, what should be taught in our public schools, and so many other issues. And, indeed, the culture wars at least temporarily moved a considerable number of Black and Hispanic men into the Trump camp.
The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.
I fully agree with Grumbach that it’s impossible to fully disentangle race and partisanship in America. But it’s noteworthy that we’re seeing polarization and the rise of extreme populism and nativism across the West, including in places without our history of Black slavery and Jim Crow. So, while it’s right to reject “nothing can be racial,” it’s absurd to argue “everything is racial.’
Lyndon Johnson predicted that passing the Civil Rights Act would cost Dems the South for a generation. Whether it’s racism per se, or identity, which largely revolves around race one way or another, Johnson was an optimist.
I clearly would need to read the piece ot comment more fully, but I am confused by the causality argument he is trying to make. I am having a hard time with the notion that “elite level discourse” helped lead to Callais.
Further, I think Alito and company know exactly what they are doing, regardless of their views on polarization discourse. They reject notions of institutional racism and its effects and think that it’s only racism if someone puts on a sheet and uses slurs (hence Alito’s new intentionality test).
Additionally, they know full well they are helping Republicans with this ruling, plain and simple.
The funny thing is, it seems to me that our obviously more polarized politics have helped show the importance of race in our politics (I mean, look at the GOP’s rhetoric these days) than hiding it.
And, moreover, it seems to me that partisan-based identity politics is more evident in SCOTUS than any time in my lifetime.
Polarization and sorting are metaphors. There are very few scientific laws regarding human nature past like the developmental phase of learning about object permanence. If there are, we have no discovered them. We are not quarks whose spin is connected to the spin of other quantum particles. If we are sorted, it is because of an actual social mechanism, like a test, or social behavior, like an accent or the way one looks. Some of these might seem rational, and might continue to seem rational. Others become arbitrary and regressive after time passes.
What’s happened with ‘polarization’ is that it’s become a stand-in for the belief, like Klein says, that everyone is a rational actor and regressive social arrangements are based on rational actors making rational decisions rather than inchoate fears and darker forces. It’s the market reworked to explain Trump and the Republican Party on their own terms, 24/7, etcetera. That’s all it is. Maybe it works to a certain limited degree, but it has nothign to do with the causes of what’s happening in this country.
@Steven L. Taylor:
That’s not an additionally. That’s the root.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think he means what I said: that elite-level discourse has been explaining American behavior in terms of markets and choice, rather than through race or class or gender or actual psychology. Partisanship is really just the free market reborn. And it’s not to hard to notice that everyone who believed in the market providing solutions thinks the answer to Trump is found in market behavior.
@gVOR10: LBJ’s prediction is often cited, but not quite right. The Deep South were the only part of the country that went for Republican Barry Goldwater (aside from his home state of Arizona) in 1964, which predated the Act. And Democrat Jimmy Carter swept the region in 1976. But, yes, the region became pretty reliably Republican at the presidential level. Yet, crucially, Democrats hung onto governorships, House, and Senate seats for at least another generation in most of the region.
@Steven L. Taylor: Yes, I think he’s just trying to hard to hammer home a perfectly valid point. It’s not if, absent the polarization debate, Alito and company would have been deterred.
@Modulo Myself: I think polarization and sorting are considerably more than metaphors. There was far more ideological overlap at both the elite and mass levels between Democrats and Republicans in 1976 than in 1996 and still much less in 2016. It used to be that an Alabama Democrat was more conservative than a Massachusetts Republican. That’s just not true today. Grumback is absolutely right that our politics have become radically more nationalized. As I’ve been writing for years, Tip O’Neil’s famous line “All politics is local” is now flipped on its head.
White men loosing power and influence, from my local observations, is the driving force–not race. It would be easy to blame race, but the real concerns are lower standard of living and fear of their children being encouraged to assume nontraditional gender identities.
Further, this angst is supported by the Supreme Court for religious reasons. I still can’t figure out Clarence Thomas, but his votes are driven by anger over his confirmation hearing, in my view.
@James Joyner:
They’re obviously metaphors, because they imply a scientific/mechanistic process where there is none.
Polarization actually has opposing meanings. One being that a person is polarizing, and the other being there are systems where natural polarization occurs. It’s become a very slippery term and often being used to start with a polarizing actor and then shift the polarization to the overall system and then equate act with system, as if it’s a law of nature or something.
I also believe this way of thinking is clearly favored by people who grew up being taught that white and black people kinda sorted themselves into the segregated south, and it wasn’t really white oppression which created racism and segregation, even though if pressed they would throw up their hands and say it’s complicated. I.e, most white Americans had to believe, at a certain level, that they weren’t the oppressor and this is how they did it.
I’d add that nobody studies something like the Thirty Years War and attributes its causes to polarization. Even though it was probably very polarizing to have a Catholic or a Protestant army kill everyone in your town and may have made you want to go to a Protestant or a Catholic town and kill everyone there. We look for reasons beyond an empty box which explains nothing because we are curious about why.
Polarization is an empty box being marketed to people who don’t want to know why.
Identity politics is a bi-partisan error. Both sides believe that we are our race, gender, spousal preferences, or religion. The Right always believed this and still does – they are, and have long been, racist, anti-semitic, sexist and against anything but man/woman monogamy. The Left – decades ago – foolishly jumped aboard the identity train with its own reductive identity politics. And more recently became even more committed to this path.
I believe we should be identified and judged by our actions first, our beliefs second, and our skin color or religious or sexual preferences never. Race is logically irrelevant and we, the Left, should have maintained this position. Instead we embraced the assumptions that underpin racism. We went from ‘melting pot’ to ‘diversity’ as a long-term goal. We wanted to say that dividing people along illogical lines was wrong even as we divided people along those same illogical lines. It was a very foolish mistake, particularly stupid in that we began to treat the majority – white people – as historical villains. Electoral politics 101: You don’t make the majority the enemy.
The goal should be that we all see ourselves as Americans, not hyphenated Americans. Hyphens divide, and divide in self-harming ways. Not to go all Commie, but economic class is the logical line to draw – those who need vs. those who hoard. Instead of fracturing into a dozen racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, etc… constituencies, pitting this 10% against that 19% against that 3% etc., we could unites the 90% against the 10%.
@Michael Reynolds:
Race is logically irrelevant and we, the Left, should have maintained this position.
This is just stupid and it’s not how anybody communicates or lives. A white person married to a black person is going to talk about race regardless of how irrelevant it is to them because the black person is experiencing being black in real life, and you, as a married person, have to talk about their life. In fact, you should want to rather than, “Sorry darling your problems are logically irrelevant to me.”
Expecting Democrats to turn convincingly into zombies who only talk about we’re all Americans blah blah blah is not going to happen. Race is discussed, good and bad, because it exists in society. And it’s possible that one product of racism lessening might be more candor. Likewise this candor leads to what you call ‘identity politics’.
@Modulo Myself:
I have to be honest, this assertion does not make any sense to me.
@Michael Reynolds:
All well and good, but in terms of practical history and society, when has this ever been the case?
We know, for example, that white Americans in large numbers react in fear when they see a Black man walking their direction. We know that resumes get sorted based on racially (and gender) coded names.
The notion of true colorblindness, as appealing as that may be, does not comport with the real world.
The problem is not that we have all adopted some kind of artificial set of faux identities. It is that human interaction is clearly shaped by race, gender, sexual orientation, and a host of other signifiers.
@Michael Reynolds: BTW, you constantly talk, perfectly reasonably I might add, about your own various identities all the time, to include secular Jew, kidlit author, and former criminal.
I suppose that “identity politics” could be some specific manifestation of all of this that could be specifically decried, but the fact remains, we are all a collection of identities and interests.
@Skookum:
Doesn’t the fact that you modified “men” with “White” indicate that it is, at least in part, about race?
Losing power to whom?
@Steven L. Taylor:
The author, Grumbach, is a new name to me. The only way I can make sense of that is to focus on Republican elite discourse which strives to maintain that we color blind conservatives aren’t racist, you’re the racists. A discourse that heavily influences Roberts and his accomplices.
@Michael Reynolds:
Misquoting M. L. King, white men are now being judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin (or gender). And they can’t stand it.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Look at what Klein says: rational actors making rational choices. That’s like most free market speak imaginable. It’s a bloodless way of wiping away class, power, greed, and inequality.
Apply that to the politics and what happens: the Republicans don’t want black people in the south to have representation because as Republicans it’s rational to want to win, and black southerners aren’t Republicans. It’s a means to cut out the origins and the actual story and assume that is playing through the same rational choices.
When one party espouses White Supremacy, it’s kind of hard to imagine a world in which partisanship and race don’t walk hand in hand.
This is not a recent phenomenon — it’s been how America has operated since its conception, with the only difference being that Black folk were recently given enough power to matter.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Ideals are aspirations. We aspire to a just society, do we not? Despite the impossibility of defining justice let alone achieving it? We should not adopt the enemy’s beliefs – they’re better at it. We need to have our own goals and aspirations – justice, tolerance, fairness, equality of opportunity – none are fully achievable, but they establish our True North.
Direction and intention matter, and as a practical political matter, you don’t win identity politics games when you are positioned against a larger group. Our winning strategy is not to segment but to unify, to find commonality, to adopt a unifying identity as Americans. And identity politics doesn’t just divide us from the ‘other’ it splits us up into competing groups within ‘our side,’ one of the reasons we cannot seem to unify as well as Republicans do.
As for me claiming identities as a secular Jew or a kidlit author or ex-crook? First kidlit author is what I do not what I am, and it is in keeping with my stated belief that we should be judged by what we do. I write. I can and should be judged by what I do – not just work of course, but all the actions that form a life. Including the other thing I did – crime.
As for being a secular Jew I don’t know how I could make it any clearer that I DGAF about my ethnicity and would happily dismiss it entirely were I not in a world where people insist on silly differences. In percentage terms I’d say I am 100% a writer, 100% an ex-criminal, maybe 5% a Jew. Writing and criming and even Jewing do not form a basis for unity with very many people, but being an American does. So that’s the identity I choose – I am one of 330 million Americans.
BTW, this has been a thing for me for a good many decades, since before the term ‘identity politics’ became a thing. I always believed that identity politics would lead to polarization and division, whereas an emphasis on our commonality as Americans would unite rather than polarize. Was I wrong?
@Gustopher:
I don’t accept stupid rules just because they are stupid rules of long standing. Masters and Slaves was the rule for what, 95% of human history? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, was a radical departure from long-standing rules. (Incidentally, it’s one of the reasons I don’t play games – too many rules and my gut reaction to rules is: fuck your rules).
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m guessing as to what @Skookum might mean, but losing power in an absolute sense. From housing to healthcare to employment, people are losing ground. Smaller towns are collapsing, and the only drivers of growth are the cities, which are overcrowded and facing housing shortages.
If you, a White Man, see your inherent societal power go from an 8 to a 6 (pulling numbers out of my ass, along with the metric), while at the same time Black folks see their inherent societal power go from a 3 to a 5, it’s relatively easy to make the mistake that their gain comes from your loss. This becomes an exponentially easier mistake to make when people are telling you that this is exactly what is happening and that we need to dismantle DEI.
The BernieBros (not saying that Smookum is a BernieBro, just going off on my own here) will claim that “there is no struggle but the class struggle” and that White Supremacy is just a tool of that class struggle. They miss how ingrained White Supremacy is in our culture, and that it functions independently from the class struggle as often as it is a tool of the class struggle. Even when economics are good, people have been steeped in White Supremacy for so long that they’re reaching for their calipers to measure skull shapes.
Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby isn’t economically anxious — he’s just a fucking racist. And Donald Trump is a Tom Buchanan wannabe.
@Gustopher:
Power is relative. If X goes from an 8 to a 6 while Y goes from a 3 to a 5, X has absolutely lost power because power lies in the gaps between numbers. In schoolyard terms, 8 can easily beat up 3, but a 6 will struggle to beat up a 5. And a fear that the next step is X as a four and Y as a 6 is rational. It is the inevitable result of identity politics. And because that’s the rule set we’ve accepted, we fight amongst ourselves, peasant-on-peasant, while the lords in their castles laugh.
There’s an old rule that politics in the U. S. always revolves around race.
There’s another rule, the wealthy and powerful express it as the fear the mob will vote to take their money. It’s also expressed as the fear the wealthy and powerful will hoover up every loose bit of wealth and crowbar up the rest. Politics everywhere and always revolves around wealth inequality.
These two rules are complimentary. It appears more complicated than it is because lying spit Republican elites have managed to coopt populist anti-elitism.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Good question 🙂
No, not really.
I truly do believe that white men are smart enough to know that The Great Recession, Trump’s tariffs, offshoring and automating of jobs has been more of a factor in economic security than racial and gender equity. (Unless government leaders feed enough propaganda to convince them otherwise.)
What younger people (but especially white men) are reeling from is realization of how very hard it is to get educated, have a family, and save for retirement without a hand-up. It’s not race-based, it’s pessimism-based. Minorities of one flavor of another have known this fear from the time they were born, but it’s a cruel reckoning for white men (and anyone else) who were raised during the high standard of living prior to The Great Recession.
@Michael Reynolds:
Boo hoo. Black and gay Americans have been violently villainized and demonized since before this country’s founding, and yet 85-95% still manage not to use that as some lame excuse to vote for a party of imcompetent, economy-destroying pedos.
If more Amerikkkans focused half as much on serious issues like housing and healthcare as most do on their childish, whiny white grievance and fake victimhood, they wouldn’t have engineered 21st century America into the most backwards, flailing, and morally bankrupt white-majority nation in the developed West.
We’ll out find in 2026, 2028, and 2030 whether Americans are ready to grow up and grow a set. When did we become so weak and fragile? Ugh.
I tend to think of partisanship as the outcome of people either having the confidence or culture that causes them to think in terms of what is best for society, versus what is best for my family and me personally.
Generally, republicans/conservatives/libertarians operate from a perspective of fear, authoritarianism and power, while liberals/democrats/leftists operate from a place of community, compassion, and mutual respect.
We can talk about “power” of a person, but it’s a little squishy. Here’s something that isn’t squishy.
If you look at the median income of white males over the last 50 years, it’s mostly flat (after adjusting for inflation) It bounces up and down a bit, and maybe, maybe there’s some growth in the last couple of decades – if you’re young, but not for the older.
In the same period, black male median income has seen growth. It has not reached parity with white males. Women in the same period have seen strong growth which has plateaued recently. It still hasn’t reached the level of white male income.
This is a real thing. Things haven’t got better for this category. For many, in some ways, things have got a lot worse. That good job at the plant disappeared. And so on.
I felt this in my 40’s. Despite having a very good job, my housing costs were eating it up, and I felt that I did not have nearly as good a life as my parents did. Then I got lucky.
I think we should talk about race, but we can talk about it in a way that doesn’t toxify white males as a category. You can find racism in any demographic category, after all.
For instance, I wouldn’t care to dispute the fact that when I was working, I enjoyed a bit of employment privilege. People would more readily accept that I was good at math/CS because I was male. However, this didn’t translate to anybody actually caring about my welfare. They cared about getting me to put in the most hours in an exempt job, and how much I could do for them. Men don’t have those distracting things like pregnancy and child care.
Let me underline this: I never had the experience of having the corporate world actually care about my welfare. I think this is typical. I’m pretty sure it is typical. I am there to have them win. They gave me stock because the competitive environment demanded that I give them stock (and it doesn’t cost them that much up front. The stock might be worthless, after all.)
I think this is the kind of emotional experience that we need to confront more politically. I see it as driving a bunch of politics without being directly mentioned.
I think there’s a way forward for all of us that doesn’t mean we have to kick black Americans to the curb. Or women. But some cherished beliefs will probably have to die.
When did describing a sector of the voting population who are male and white become a toxic label?
I live in rural America comprised of white Europeans, a minority of Paiute, and a sprinkling of other minorities, including blacks and Hispanics.
When I speak of white males losing power, I’m referring to those who live on earned wages and are struggling to make ends meet.
As s a white woman I never received equal pay for equal or better work, until I, too, got lucky and became highly compensated (although I doubt I was not nearly as well compensated as my male peers). Some are really clueless about the the debt, hard work, and personal sacrifice made in terms of re-locating, marrying late in life, no children, etc.
I admit, it’s a bit off-putting to hear complaints from those who buy toys (weapons, 4-wheel-drive vehicles, travel trailers, etc) and then grouse about lack of economic security. It’s not that I don’t have respect or compassion for their pain, but it feels like they expected to have an ace up their sleeve in terms of living the good life, and they still haven’t acknowledged that they have made life choices that limit their economic security.
BTW on a different tangent, I do deplore the lack of respect for education in general. The latest strategy for good pay with good benefits getting a trade certification. I’m all for anything that stops the shortage of skilled plumbers, electricians, nurses, etc. But I volunteer helping students read. You can immediately tell which students have parents who value reading and those who don’t. How can those tho don’t expect their children to thrive? And did they expect to thrive without earnestly trying to soak up all of the benefits of a free K-12 education–or did they just take it for granted?
But bottom line: I don’t believe the voters in my part of the world vote based on race. It’s economics and fear of their children exploring non-traditional genders.