Following on my last piece on How Race Distorts the Electorate, I want to discuss how Republican strategies during the Obama presidency have distorted the electorate. It’s hard to characterize the motives the GOP has had in each individual case but, collectively, they have pursued strategies that have had the effect of polarizing the electorate by race.
The most infamous example is the first-term obsession with the birth certificate. This was a naked example of using massive disinformation to alienate the president from low-intelligence white people. But it also absolutely infuriated black folks and made them more protective of the president than they otherwise would have been.
Similarly, the collective freak-out about ObamaCare and its characterization as some exotic un-American socialist scheme, was perceived by blacks as a barely-veiled racist attack both on the president and on their community.
The decision by Mitch McConnell and other party leaders to oppose Obama’s entire agenda before he even was sworn into office was seen by blacks as a totally unprecedented lack of respect that had never been done to any other president.
The decision to pursue widespread voter ID laws that disproportionately disenfranchise blacks was so toxic that it actually led to higher black turnout in the 2012 election than white turnout, for the first time ever. Following that up with the Supreme Court’s decision to gut the Voting Rights Act is like setting a nuclear bomb off. Attacks on Affirmative Action only exacerbate an already explosive opposition to the GOP in the black community. Holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt is another thumb in the eye.
The refusal to allow a vote on immigration reform in the House is infuriating Latinos.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media machine has been giving whites a steady diet of racial grievance. This has succeeded in driving up support for the GOP among whites, but the cost is an ever-increasing erosion of support among anyone of color.
Some Republican analysts, like Sean Trende, think that the GOP can continue to compete if they can get a greater share of the white voters. But he doesn’t fully appreciate how this is being done in practice. It’s done by stoking white resentment of racial minorities. Having a black president has made this vastly easier to do than it would have been with a white president.
And that’s what you’re seeing show up in the differential between the president’s approval number and the percent of the electorate that indicates support for Hillary Clinton. There will be a sling-shot effect that goes all one way. Ordinarily, we might expect a white presidential candidate to attract a less racially polarized electorate in both senses: they’d get more support from whites, but also less support from black, Latinos, and Asians. But the strategies the GOP has pursued have done two things to change that likelihood. They’ve permanently cut off the chance that people of color will vote for them, and they’ve made sure that people of color will be just as enthusiastic about voting for a white Democrat as they were to vote for a black one. Trying to take away people’s votes and health care, while showing them an unprecedented lack of respect will do that.
Put another way, the Republicans have mortgaged their future by making a deal with the devil. They tried to avoid changing by jacking up their support among whites to the maximal possible level, but they did it in a way that simply isn’t sustainable without a black president to rally against. Remove Obama, and the white voters start to trickle back, but there is no corresponding trickle back in the Republicans’ direction.
