Democratic politicians grappled with the issue of racial preferences for decades without much success at reconciling competing beliefs. On the one hand, the American public has long been against the practice. In 2020, even as liberal California voters supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump by an overwhelming 29 points, an effort to reinstate racial preferences was soundly defeated by 14 points. On the other hand, Democratic interest groups in Washington, D.C., have been diehard supporters of racial preference policies, driving positions on these issues that many politicians feared to challenge.
So, for years, Democratic politicians spoke one way, then acted another. In 1995, President Bill Clinton launched a trial balloon, saying he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative action from race to economic need, but he backed down after interest groups rebelled. More than a decade later, presidential candidate Barack Obama said he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did. When I told a top Obama staffer after the election that I would like to help the new administration develop a class-based affirmative action program, however, I was told there was no way Obama could go against powerful Democratic interest groups. The courts would have to force him to make the shift.
