Black Women Voters Save Democratic Candidates Time and Time Again
Black women are getting the job done, but getting none of the credit.
It’s curious, though fairly predictable, that most postmortems of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races seem to gloss over the fact that Democrats lost the white vote. More specifically, Democrats lost white women, the same demographic of so-called values voters*whose majority support for Donald Trump proved collectively that its most cherished value is white supremacy.
Fifty-one percent of white women and 63 percent of white men cast their ballots for Virginia’s Ed Gillespie, the most Trumpian local choice, whose main campaign strategy was immigration fear-mongering and praising slaveholding Confederates. In New Jersey, 50 percent of white men and 55 percent of white women voted for Kim Guadagno, the former lieutenant governor to Chris Christie who promised to ban sanctuary cities. People of color overwhelmingly rejected both candidates, but no group did so more decidedly than black women, who gave*Ralph Northam and Phil Murphy more than 90 percent of their votes. Coverage of the election almost consistently credited “women,” without using any modifiers, for pushing Dems over the top, but that’s far too generous. Once again, black women got to the polls, got the job done, yet got almost no recognition or credit.
It was déjà vu all over again, as the saying goes. On election day 2016, 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, not because they were monolithically #WithHer, but to keep the unqualified, lying, racist, self-described pussy grabber out of the White House. (#GirlIGuessImWithHer was an expression of black women’s justifiable discomfort with Clinton.)*
In 2008, 2012 and again in 2016, African-American women had the highest voter participation rate of any demographic in the country, and black turnout soared on Tuesday. Black women’s crucial role in getting Northam and Murphy elected wasn’t some kind of fluke, it was par for the political course. While politically diverse, black women’s intersecting marginalized identities also mean they often prioritize racial and social justice, civil rights and protecting the social safety net. The result is that, collectively, black women vote for left-leaning and progressive candidates more consistently than any other demographic cohort, including other groups of color and black men.
According to the rules of voting, numbers and reliability, all this should make black women the undisputed and highly prized core of the Democratic base. The party would be smart to dedicate itself to energizing and engaging black women who didn’t vote in 2016, and focusing its attention on issues black women care about ahead of 2018 and 2020. But, nah. Instead, the fractious left, which finds so much else to quarrel about, has agreed to chase voters it will never win over. “We have got to take on Trump’s attacks...against Latinos and blacks...we’ve got to fight back every day on those issues,” Bernie Sanders stated perfunctorily during a recent interview, before moving on to the people whose feelings really matter. “But equally important, or more important: We have got to focus on bread-and-butter issues that mean so much to ordinary Americans.”
continued at https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-p...ave-democratic-candidates-time-and-time-again
Black women should be embarrassed by this statistic; it paints them as being dumb and gullible. 