Why 1/3 of Blacks are rejecting the pandering Democrats, whose policies HURT Blacks.

 Why 1/3 of Blacks are rejecting the pandering Democrats, whose policies HURT Blacks.

"As Black Voters Sour on Biden, Will They Abandon the Democrats?

Their decades-long loyalty to the party was already beginning to show signs of becoming weaker.

By Jason L. Riley WSJournal op-ed

Feb. 15, 2022 7:07 pm ET

“Why Joe Biden Is Bleeding Black Support” was the headline of a New York magazine article in late January. Not whether, but why. And if the polling since then is indicative, the hemorrhaging continues.

Blacks have been throwing some 80% of their support to Democrats since the late 1960s. Since President Obama left office, however, the party’s grip on this key voting bloc has loosened somewhat. Hillary Clinton’s underperformance among blacks in such swing states as Pennsylvania probably cost her the presidency in 2016, when people in heavily black neighborhoods voted more Republican than they did in 2012.

Democrats normally don’t worry about blacks voting Republican. They just worry about blacks not voting at all. That, too, may be changing. Black voter turnout in 2018 was the highest on record for a midterm election. Yet New York magazine reports that in the House races that year, “Democrats actually won a smaller share of the African American vote than they had in the 2016 presidential election—even as the party’s overall popular-vote edge in the midterm was five points higher than Hillary Clinton’s two years earlier.”

Joe Biden won 92% of black voters in 2020, no doubt benefiting from having been Mr. Obama’s vice president, but it’s been all downhill since then. The president’s job-approval rating among all voters has fallen, but among blacks it has been cratering. An NBC News poll last month found that black support for the president, which stood at 83% last April, had dropped to 64%. A Quinnipiac survey released around the same time showed a 22-point decline in black support for Mr. Biden during his first year in office. And a CNN poll from last week puts black approval of the president’s job performance at just 69%. Democrats know they can’t win elections without much higher levels of black support.

Mr. Biden has been doing what Democrats normally do to buck up black support. He’s resorting to identity politics. He’s promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. He supports legislation that would address imaginary voter suppression. He wants to expand the welfare state. If, as the recent polling suggests, this sort of racial pandering no longer works like it used to, America’s making some progress.

The country has witnessed a lot of political norm-breaking in the Donald Trump era. Less black fealty for the Democratic Party could be part of the trend. It’s easy to forget how bad things were for blacks economically during the Obama presidency. Black unemployment didn’t fall below double digits until the third year of Mr. Obama’s second term. Prior to the pandemic, black unemployment under Mr. Trump reached record lows, and black wages rose at a faster rate than white wages. Mr. Obama symbolized racial progress, but you can’t pay the rent with symbolism.

That black experience partly explains why minority support for Mr. Trump ticked up in 2020. It might also explain why blacks have soured on Mr. Biden. Inflation, which the current administration first denied and then played down, is at a 40-year high. Blacks are overrepresented among low-income workers, who are watching prices rise faster than their wages. In addition, the president wants to raise the taxes that Mr. Trump cut and reregulate sectors of the economy that Mr. Trump deregulated. If black voters aren’t eager to return to the pre-Trump economy, who can blame them?"