The roadmap to Democrats' long-term political power? A multiracial coalition
The key to the Democrats’ 2020 win in the United States is hiding in plain sight: their success in forming a multiracial coalition. Whereas Republicans relied overwhelmingly on white voters alone, poll data indicates that Democrats convinced white voters along with Latino, Black, Asian American and Native American voters to form a powerful coalition. The Democrats’ success in 2020 provides a roadmap to winning future elections.
The US is a multiracial nation, and the Democrats are a multiracial coalition. But this can be hard to recognize from the way most polling is reported. In almost every case, statistics break down voting patterns by race, for instance reporting that 87% of Blacks and 65% of Latinos voted for Joe Biden, while 58% of whites pulled the lever for
Trump. Political reporting is saturated with information highlighting voting patterns by discrete racial groups, but almost nowhere can one find numbers about the assembled coalitions.
The problem is not the statistics themselves. Pollsters provide numerical answers to the questions they’re asked. When it comes to race, conventional political wisdom urges splitting groups into contending racial camps. But that routine splitting of racial groups accepts the Republicans’ basic framing of American politics, blinding Democrats to their great strength as a multiracial coalition.
Since the 1960s, Republicans have campaigned on a message of racial conflict. They urge whites to see themselves as threatened by demands for racial equality as well as by immigration from continents other than Europe. Republican rhetoric is usually coded, replacing racial epithets and frank endorsements of white supremacy with terms like “thugs”, “welfare queens” and “illegal aliens”. Even so, the underlying message remains pervasive:
racial groups are locked into conflict – whites against all the rest – and everyone must choose a racial side.
When Democrats and liberal pundits parse the vote by racial bloc rather than by multiracial coalition, they unintentionally reinforce this mental schema. The group-conflict mindset encourages the view that each racial group has competing interests and strongly implies the existence of inevitable trade-offs when recruiting from different racial groups. No Democratic candidate for president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964, so Democrats know they must assemble a multiracial coalition. Viewing voters through the lens of competing racial teams, however, often pushes Democratic strategists to see the need to build cross-racial solidarity as a liability.
Yet look at the 2020 coalitions. Based on available exit poll data, Black voters were 22% of all of those who voted for Joe Biden, Latino voters comprised 16%, and Asian Americans were a further 5%. In other words, Biden won with 43% of his total vote coming from Black, Latino and Asian American voters, combined with 53% of his support coming from white voters.
In contrast, Donald Trump’s “coalition” barely deserves that name. White voters provided 82% of his support. Just 3% of Trump’s team were African Americans, with Asian Americans at just under that number. Latinos were 9% of Trump voters – but this overstates the racial diversity of Trump’s coalition. Latinos differ among themselves about how they identify racially. In polling one of us conducted in July, 13% of those seeing Latinos as people of color indicated they would vote for Trump, compared with 32% of those seeing Latinos as ethnically white.
Visualized this way, one sees immediately that the notion of contending racial armies – and especially the Republicans’ extreme version, which paints white people as besieged – is obviously false. When viewed in terms of discrete groups, the majority of whites voted for Trump. But when seen in terms of coalitions, white voters also formed the majority of Biden supporters. What sense does it make to describe whites as one racial bloc, let alone as an endangered group?
But one also sees that, in American politics, race nevertheless remains supremely relevant. The question for most voters is not what racial group they belong to – white or Black, Latino or Asian. It’s what sort of racial future they expect – one where they must barricade to protect their family against threatening and unfamiliar strangers, or one where their family will best thrive in communities that promote respect, curiosity and collaboration.
For the most part, Democrats have been slow to sharpen this basic choice between conflict or collaboration, leaving voters to work it out on their own. Even so, many seem to have figured it out. Themselves all too often the targets of racist barricades, African Americans overwhelmingly ( but not uniformly) reject the political party pushing conflict. Most Latinos and Asian Americans do, too, though some seem to believe they will join the mainstream if they help close the gates behind them.
Among white voters, the greater tendency of those with college degrees and those in urban areas to vote Democratic may reflect more confidence in a collaborative multiracial future. This emerging sense of linked fate across racial lines is evident in the multiracial coalition that delivered the presidency to the Democrats.
Republicans suspect that in 2024 they’re likely to face a mixed-race Black and Asian presidential candidate in the person of the current vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, they certainly see a country with an increasing non-white population. With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflict. If so, they will cast the Democratic party as the party of racial minorities, and if Harris is the Democratic candidate, she will be the inevitable bogeyman.
For Democrats, a successful retort is already on hand. They are not the party of a non-white cabal, as the right alleges. Nor need they be a party that prioritizes whites, as too often happens when Democrats believe they must choose between racial constituencies. Instead, they are the party of racial coalition, and within this new majority, every racial group has an equal and valued role. In other words, for Democrats, the multiracial coalition they need to win has already come together. Now Democrats must lean into it.
One way to do so is to promote the data showing that a multiracial coalition is already taking shape. Rather than almost exclusively relying on statistics that split people into separate groups, Democrats (and the media) should also call for and publicize the coalition numbers. Indeed, Democrats should make their success in building cross-racial solidarity a core aspect of their brand, popularizing the idea that they represent a future in which all groups by pulling together can find security and the freedom to thrive. The numbers – when we make them visible – show that Democrats represent the hope of our multiracial society.
Ian Haney López is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
Kristian Ramos is the founder of Autonomy Strategies and former communications director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus
With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflict
trol big business, and instead emphasizes the role economists and technocrats began to play in shaping the law during the Gilded Age. As part of this narrative, he peddles an incomplete account of the origin of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the most important piece of anti-monopoly legislation ever enacted by Congress. Hovenkamp argues that there is no evidence that the framers of the Sherman Act sought to curtail monopolies brought about as a result of “superior skill or industry”. According to Hovenkamp, US Congress – and by extension Americans in general – never had a problem with big corporations, or even monopolies; we just didn’t like it when those monopolies became predatory.
This elitist and technocratic framework glosses over our rich anti-monopoly tradition. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Frederick Douglass all opposed monopolies on political grounds, and state legislatures in the 19th century began breaking up companies almost as soon as they started issuing corporate charters. Senator Sherman himself explained that the purpose of the federal antitrust act was “to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.”
Judge Learned Hand, whose decisions in contract and corporate law are still read with reverence, laid out the basic federal antitrust framework which was endorsed by the supreme court in 1946 and 1968 and governed our economy for most of the 20th century. In mandating the breakup of the aluminum monopoly of Alcoa in 1945, Hand concluded that monopoly power, in and of itself, was illegal. He explained that the Sherman Act is a law prohibiting monopolies, full stop, no matter whether they are predatory. He pointed out that Congress updated the antitrust laws four times in the 20th century to hit back at courts who attempted to narrow them.
Antitrust theory is dominated by reactionary yet often wildly inconsistent thinkers. Hovenkamp, who for decades resisted any action to rein in large technology firms, argued a year ago that breaking up these giants would send the economy back to “the Stone Age”. This week, reversing his position, Hovenkamp conceded that breaking up Facebook is now warranted – revealing his entire school of thought as largely a reactionary force torn between bending to concentrated financial power and scandalous headlines of abusive market power.
It is encouraging that the government is seeking to break up Google and Facebook, and that policymakers are rejecting flawed legal theorizing. But the resistance to restoring our antimonopoly tradition runs much deeper than Robert Bork and his rightwing legacy. As we’ve seen, it’s just as entrenched within the centrist academic and judicial citadels of well-meaning technocrats who carry a deeply ingrained fear of too much democratic influence over the economy.
Policymakers and judges are going to have to shake off the misleading narrative spun by the current antitrust establishment. Doing so is essential not only for supporting fair markets, but for preserving democracy itself.
Matt Stoller is the research director at the American Economic Liberties Project and the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly and Democracy
Shaoul Sussman is a legal fellow at the Institute for Local Self Reliance