When progressives say, “It’s all about race,” that’s saying to the white working class “The economic pain that you’re feeling isn’t real.” By focusing on race, progressives are calling people “racist” by definition.
Lisa Pruitt (UC-Davis Law)
Every Democrat from Democracy In Color founder Steve Phillips to Clinton fanboy James Carville agrees the party has a “white” problem. Phillips says his party needs “a sober analysis of how best to expand support among white voters.” After the 2022 mid-terms, Carville said “stupid wokeness” cost Dems a whopping 58% of the white vote (source: CNN). Heading into 2024, Joe Biden is as “woke” as ever.
White Republicans finally have a golden opportunity to kill the “race card” Democrats play every two years: nominate Nikki Haley, whom Biden fears most. She makes it very hard to play identity politics: non-whites won’t cast an anti-racist vote, and whites can’t prove they are innocent of racism. All she’s done is win 28.1% of South Carolina’s black vote way back in 2010, along with a whopping 65.2% of South Carolina’s white voters.
This is as simple as the election-integrity issue. 90% of Blacks had a photo-ID in 2012, and 77% of Blacks today support showing a photo-ID to vote. But, after Biden yelled “Jim Crow 2.0” for two years, Democrats won 73% of 2022 voters who thought Biden “was right on racism,” whereas the GOP won 80% of voters who thought he “was wrong on racism.”
A thinking trap makes Democrats vulnerable; assuming civil rights legislation begat white lash, which begat a GOP “white” winning streak in 1968, which begat a cry of “racism” for the last 60 years. They see a black-white divide in exit polls (see below) and play one race card after another. If it’s not Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, it’s Bush’s “Willie Horton ad” in 1988, or Biden saying “white supremacy” is the greatest threat to our democracy in 2022.
| Presidential Election | Black | White |
| 1980 | 83% D | 56% R |
| 2000 | 90% D | 55% R |
| 2020 | 87% D | 58% R |
How easy to blame “hatred” on one’s opponent, even when it’s not true. The last Democrat to win a majority of the white vote was LBJ, after telling a joint session of Congress to “enact a civil rights law so that we can move forward to eliminate from this Nation every trace of discrimination and oppression that is based upon race or color.” That was November 1963. A year later, he won 61.1% of the popular vote (highest since 1820), including 59% of the white vote (so much for the “hatred” theory).
The more plausible “white” problem is bad Democrats (Hillary Clinton in 2016), good Republicans (Reagan in 1980), and promoting radical policies (black reparations or defunding the police) that don’t help white citizens. So, when anti-racist Phillips calls “white swing voters a shrinking population” and slams the DNC for not “investing in, inspiring, and mobilizing voters of color,” how’s that inspire a white, working-class Democrat?
Nobody likes a scold, and what candidates say matters. Barack Obama scolds rural whites (“they cling to antipathy to people who aren’t like them”) and won 39% of the white vote in 2012. Tim Scott rejects reverse-racism (“you can be better or bitter, but you can’t be both”) and won 73% of South Carolina’s white vote in 2022. If democracy is anything, it is voting one’s self-interest. The view here is that the Democrat “white problem” is completely self-inflicted.
White swing-voters have self-interests that influence their vote, which is exactly how every American voted in the 2022 mid-terms (source: NEP exit polls):
- Biden wanted a “woke” military, Republicans won 62% of veteran vote
- Biden closed churches over COVID, Republicans won 58% of the religious vote
- Biden called “white supremacy” the greatest threat to America, Republicans won 58% of white vote
- Biden supported gender fluidity, Democrats won 84% of LGBTQ vote
- Biden supported unfettered abortion, Democrats won 68% of unmarried women
Democrats also have a “race credibility” problem. For years, they have blamed income inequality on white privilege and black riots on racist cops, but did you know 8,500 articles on “systemic racism” relied on research produced from 2003 to 2019 by a black scholar, Eric Stewart, at Florida State University, who was fired this year for falsifying data?
When FSU Provost James Clark fired Stewart in July, he wrote, “I do not see how you can teach our students to be ethical researchers or how the results of future research projects conducted by you could be deemed as trustworthy.” What Stewart did was manipulate data to prove causation, when it at best proved correlation. Thankfully, other black scholars begged to differ.
Kentucky State’s Wilfred Reilly attributes income inequality to age and location: “The most common age for Blacks is 27, and their highest concentration is in the South” (56%). In contrast, the most common age for Whites is 58, and only 36% live in the South. So, if the average 27-year-old’s wage is $41,000 a year, the average 58-year-old’s wage is $55,000, and the South’s median wage ($59,816) is the US’s lowest, I’d expect the 13% wage gap (source: New York Times).
Harvard’s Roland Fryer did exhaustive research on unarmed Blacks fatally shot by police, and found that Black civilians were more likely than Whites to be cursed at but 24% less likely than Whites to be shot by the police. Reilly and Freyer used data from the US government, but I found their explanations only on Fox News – a “white” problem that’s now creating a Biden “non-white” problem.
Biden’s media cronies can blame his age and tall tales for his 52% favorability rating with minorities, but jump on social media to see the truth. Like white voters, Blacks and Latinos hear Biden’s boasts and grow estranged. He talks up electrical-vehicle progress, but $4.00 petrol is consuming their paycheck. He’s rolling Easter eggs with drag queens, and their daughter’s being ogled by a transgender in the high school locker room.
Biden’s radical positions create color-blind situations, which demand citizens vote their self-interest – and it’s finally catching up with Democrats. What will they do when Biden calls an evangelical Black Republican a “homophobe” in a town hall?
So, yes, Biden has white problem – – and an everybody else problem.