[…]
Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion.
Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing 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.
Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in D.C., socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.
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, as Kahlenberg pointed out:
The insistence of white liberals on racial preferences has a very negative effect on Democrats. In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of U.C. Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas — including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza — in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates.
They 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.
[…]
Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, has been a leader in the struggle to strengthen Democratic centrism for four decades. His take on the evolution of politics over those years:
“In 1988, Jesse Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination on a coherent and comprehensive social democratic platform. It thrilled readers of The Nation and would easily have found favor on the European left. But it made Jackson the wrong answer to the big strategic question facing his party then: how to halt the steady defection of more socially traditional blue-collar voters that was unraveling the New Deal majority.
They didn’t see a place for themselves in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. That’s why he won mostly Southern states with lots of Black voters but struggled in the Wisconsin primary.”
Over the last two decades, Marshall continued in his email, “Democrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads,” noting “that between the 2012 and 2024 elections, the party’s performance among nonwhite working-class voters fell by 37 points, while improving among white college grads by 17 points.”
Now, Marshall added,
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.
[…]
