Has the Democratic Party lost its “monopoly” over the Black vote?

Trump is courting Black voters while corporate Democrats court disaster.

Last Monday, more than a few of my friends pointed out the irony of Trump’s swearing in taking place on the day we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. But the irony is more than the juxtaposition of ceremonies and commemorations or two very different historical personalities.

The new president (who launched his political career race-baiting the first Black president over his lineage and birthplace) made a very explicit appeal to Black voters in his inaugural address and signaled that he is dead serious about continuing to draw core working-class votes away from the Democrats, including Black voters, Latino voters and labor union members. Liberals who choose to mock or dismiss this are sleepwalking closer to the abyss they have been lurching toward for the better part of a decade. In his speech, Trump thanked Black and Hispanic voters “for the trust and love you gave to me.”. We set records,” he said, “and I will not forget it”. NPR’s dismissive knee-jerk response was to smugly fact-check the president, “He only won 11% of Black voters.”.

Shortly after the November election, another friend asked for my thoughts on the exodus of young Black and Latino voters away from the Democrats. I told him I was not baffled or surprised, as most of my friends and colleagues were, by the defection of Black voters or the apathy of younger voters in general. Democrats haven’t been listening to working-class Black voters for a long time—or any working-class voters for that matter. If they did, they would not have been surprised by the results.

I reminded this same friend that we met in 2008 while working on the historic presidential campaign of a young Black man who publicly defied his own party’s establishment, insisting he could win the presidency despite a dishonest campaign to discredit him by many in that same party establishment. Whatever we think of Obama’s presidency today, in 2008 he was a rogue insurgent who represented a threat and a dramatic break with the status quo during a time of monumental economic failures for working people (and especially Black middle and working-class families¹) and years of disastrous and stupid neo-colonial wars. In 2024, the same establishment Democratic Party, very publicly guided by its billionaire donor class, ordained a Black woman (a former prosecutor) to run as the defender of the status quo establishment against a rogue insurgent during a time of severe economic hardship for working people and after decades of widening wealth and income inequality, while billions were flying overseas to a new series of disastrous and deeply unpopular wars.

The defection and discouragement of Black voters should be a great cause for alarm for Democrats, but I won’t be at all surprised if they get it wrong again. Their reliance on Black voters today is filled with too many contradictions and conflicts of interest (especially class interests). Their donors, experts, and consultants are largely out of touch with ordinary people of all backgrounds, and they seem oblivious to the very significant economic, demographic, and geographical changes that have taken place over the past four decades and how those changes impact where and how Black and brown (and white) working-class people live.

Black voters may not be a monolith, but they come damn close…or at least they did.

Paul Robeson, once asked by a foreign journalist if Black Americans “are organized,” and “of one mind?” replied, “Whichever way we decide will decide who’s president of the United States. That’s how organized we are.” ²

Black voters, more than any other group in America have voted as a reliable and unified block in every election cycle in my lifetime, whether for Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama in contested Democratic primaries or for the Democratic nominee in every general election.³ After the Civil War and well into the 1920s, Black voters (when they were not prevented from voting) voted solid Republican despite a string of betrayals after Reconstrction.⁴ Anyone who knows this history knows that the migration and consolidation of Black votes into the Democratic Party from the 1930s to the 1960s was accomplished as much through Republican duplicity and neglect as it was through Democratic courting. And it wasn’t a passive one-way street. It was brokered by powerful Black leaders, including A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King’s father, Rev. Martin Luther King Sr.⁵, who made demands on both parties and extracted concessions before using their Mosaic-like influence to signal an exodus from the party of Reconstruction to the party of the Confederacy. ⁶

Many Democrats today feel they can take comfort in the fact that Black voters are still overwhelmingly loyal to their side (over 80% voted for Harris) or that the overall decline in Black voter turnout offset Trump’s gains since 2016. These are all dangerous rationalizations, delusions, and distractions from the reality that their perceived dominance over their last reliable and unified working-class voting block is unraveling. For decades, the frequent displays and occasional revelations of raw racism from Republican Party leaders and operatives acted as a reliable firewall against Black defections from white Democrats. That the wall could be breached by the likes of Donald Trump (who didn’t seem to know who Fredrick Douglass was when he entered the White House in 2017) must be mind-boggling to them.

The Black voter gap. Most inactive but eligible Black voters are in suburbs.

Part of what fuels the collective cognitive dissonance on the part of many liberal Democrats are the stereotypes and simplistic assumptions rooted in a segregationist past (and present) about who Black voters are, where they live, and what they care about. We've seen two seemingly contradictory trends with inactive but eligible Black voters over the past four election cycles. Pretty much across the country today, there are as many (in some states more) Black eligible voters in suburbs than in so-called “urban centers” or central cities. These suburban Black voters (even though they are more likely to be middle or working-class and more likely to have more education) are not voting - at least not at the level that Blacks in cities are voting, and not at the levels they voted at in 2008 and 2012. While this may seem counterintuitive, when you think about it, it’s not surprising. The Democratic Party doesn’t prioritize Black voters in places that aren’t disproportionately Black or historically Black, and where there isn’t Black elected leadership with any independence or power. This is why there is a focus on Black voters in Cleveland but not its suburbs or in Philadelphia and not the surrounding counties where at least a quarter of a million Black people live.⁷ They will target a handful of inner-ring suburbs that have experienced nearly total white flight but not the working-class suburbs where there are often more Black voters who are not being reached - especially younger Black voters in these areas.

But there is more to this massive blindspot than just ignorance and nostalgia. Many white Democrats see emerging Black voters in a diverse legislative district as a potential threat, at least in primaries, so there is very little incentive to cultivate or activate (or do much of anything for) these potential voters year round. A 15% Black voter base in a majority white district is more than enough to swing a Democratic primary against an old-school white Democrat if Black voters unify around another candidate. That’s why establishment Democrats are so determined to convince us that Black candidates can’t win in majority white largely suburban districts. But it's white Democrats (liberals, moderates and progressives), that are becoming an endangered species in increasingly diverse state and federal districts.

And what about class?

Dr. King once said Black people in America “are almost entirely a working people.” with “pitifully few” millionaires and employers. This has changed little since 1961. Black Americans have historically been the most disproportionately working-class racial group in America, yet we’ve strangely made the term “working-class” almost a euphemism for white voters. Blacks and Latinos (and other non-whites) now make up almost half the working-class in this country.⁸ But white people still make up the other half. Democrats and Republicans have essentially split the working-class in America, making it impossible for a coalition powerful enough to challenge the power of the ruling class. But Trump is making a play for a larger share of multi-racial working-class America, and Democrats are helping him do it.

It should be no mystery by now that the establishment Democratic Party has decided it no longer needs (or even wants) its white working-class voting base. This was revealed when Chuck Schumer explained how white working-class voters across the Midwest would be replaced by affluent voters from toney suburbs in the 2016 election.⁹ And despite how wrong the senator was then, his party clearly doubled down on this strategy in 2024 as they ignored working-class suburbs while their candidate traversed the exurbs, with Liz Cheney in tow, in search of the elusive “Niki Haley voter”.¹⁰

There are two big problems with this Democratic strategy of ‘dump the “deplorables”’—really, there are three. There aren't enough of these Trump-hating rich people to make up for the loss of the white working and lower middle-class voters that the Democrats are abandoning. The other is that a political coalition of affluent whites with poor and working-class people of color is inherently conflicted and unstable. Their class interests only align if you think an alliance of the “protected class” with the privileged class is a sustainable marriage. It isn’t (at least not around any economic policies), and that’s why it's unraveling. The real “protected class,” in this arrangement today, are the rich.

Throwing out the Black baby with the white bathwater

The third big problem with ignoring white working-class voters is that you will ultimately pay a price with Black and brown voters who are also working-class and likely to live and work near or in the same places that white working people live - and care about many of the same issues.

Since the passage of the Fair Housing Act and the outlawing of de jure segregation, white isolation and the “opportunity hoarding"¹¹ that has accompanied it have become largely the domain and “privilege” of upper middle class and affluent whites. There are very few suburbs (at least in our most populated metropolitan regions) where working- and lower-middle-class whites enjoy the kind of exclusive “whiteness” born of redlining and segregation that their parents or grandparents took advantage of. In most regions today, working-class suburbs are diverse suburbs. Suburbs that are all white are either rich or rural.¹²

When you ignore or jettison the blue-collar suburbs, you are ignoring half of the Black and brown voters who live in or near the same towns and send their kids, or pay taxes, to the same school districts. By jettisoning the working-class, you are throwing out the Black voter baby with the white voter bathwater.

With the exception of the not-insignificant issue of race, Black voters care about pretty much the same things that white working-class people care about (and liberals seem to be tone deaf to), including public safety, inflation, the loss of good union jobs, student debt, rising property taxes, declining schools, and the impact that immigration is having on their communities, schools, and jobs—just more so—because they have been harmed more.

The Black Trump voter. ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’

There is emerging evidence that Blacks going for Trump are not likely to be middle class, upwardly mobile, conservative Christians, or “bougie,” like I’ve heard some liberal pundits claim. They are more likely to be people who are in the most isolated and hopeless situations in America. A good example of this is Wisconsin, the state with the most significant Black defection to Trump in 2024 and in 2016—twenty percent of all Black voters, according to exit polls in 2024. This was double the national Black Trump vote and double the 2016 defections. Two things that stand out about Wisconsin. It has the most intense segregation in the nation (Milwaukee is the most racially isolated city in the country), and it has double the national Black incarceration rate. Trump may not know this, but JD Vance will figure out that the key to future growth in Black voter defection from Democrats to Republicans is poverty, hopelessness, and desperation, or as Trump asked in 2016, “What the hell do you have to lose?

The window for Democrats to stop and reverse the decline and poaching of Black voters, whether through defection or apathy, is closing. I have no confidence they will succeed. They had ample warning in 2016 but went into denial and screwed it up again in 2024. In 2016 the Black voter gap (eligible but inactive Black voters) was more than enough to swing every swing state in the country, including Texas (which would be a swing state if two-thirds of the eligible but inactive Black voters voted).

Working-class voters need to rebuild multiracial power—not corporate Democrats.

The response from corporate Democrats will be the same as before. We will see white Democrats twist themselves in knots talking about the importance of Black votes while running as fast as they can away from Black people or anything they really care about. We will see “moderate” Blue Dogs trying to out-Trump Trump with their own “tough on crime” dog whistles. And we will see elite liberals, who four years ago were trying to “check their privilege” while reading White Fragility, now struggling to be less elitist so as not to trigger any more white resentment. And at the 11th hour they will all start lecturing, shaming, and making empty promises to Black voters in the hopes they will gallop to their rescue before it's too late.

This might work again in 2026, but none of these paternalistic approaches will work long term because none are aimed at building multiracial working and middle-class power. The corporate liberal wing of the Democratic Party will not figure this out, and not just because they are out of touch, but because it conflicts with their own economic interests and would threaten their privilege and power. The only people who can build and sustain a multiracial coalition of working-class voters to counter right-wing populism are working-class organizations and the women and men who lead them. That means labor unions, civil rights organizations, and people-based institutions (especially historically Black networks, associations, and churches) whose power and money come more from their people and members than from foundations, corporations, politicians, or rich liberal donors.

Republicans too suffer from conflicts of class interests as they increase their share of middle-class and working-class whites. But the MAGA movement has exploited those contradictions to further dominate the party and to silence, neuter, or even exile traditional constituencies, including the National Chamber of Commerce, the Bush-era neocons, and the whole Ayn Rand wing of free marketers like Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and the Koch Brothers. Unlike the corporate Democrats, the populist wing of the Republican Party seems unafraid of tipping the power scales further away from their donor class by building a bigger and more diverse blue-collar base that includes labor unions and Black and brown voters. We can dismiss them as a party of oligarchs, but the Democrats have more billionaires that they are increasingly dependent on and seem unwilling to stand up to. Whereas Trump’s oligarchs (and even some Democratic donors) are lining up to kiss his ring.

Joe Biden left office as a deeply unpopular and feckless political placeholder. He started his political career as an ally and something of a generational and geographical bridge to the older segregationist Senators. One of his first acts was to break the Civil Rights Coalition in the Senate by leading the opposition to integrated schools. He did this not by declaring his hostility to civil rights but by cynically suggesting he was for Black power.¹³

So, it's not particularly inconsistent that one of Biden's last performative acts of “racial justice” was to pardon the long-dead Marcus Garvey, the Black nationalist leader and founder of the Back to Africa Movement. Donald Trump re-entered office on Martin Luther King Day with the wind at his back and plenty of room to maneuver. It’s not clear what he will do for Black people, but the bar has been set low. He doesn't need to do much, and he doesn’t need (and probably doesn't want) all Black voters anyway. He and J. D. Vance, and the right-wing populist movement, just need enough votes to keep chipping away at the Democratic party’s once reliable fortress wall of a unified and mobilized Black vote.

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1. The 2008 financial crisis disproportionately impacted Black families, leading to a significant decline in wealth due to high rates of home foreclosure and job loss, further widening the pre-existing racial wealth gap, as Black households were more likely to be targeted by predatory lending practices. According to a report commissioned by the National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB), African Americans lost over half of their wealth since the beginning of the recession through falling homeownership rates and loss of jobs.

2. That year, Democratic Presidential nominee John F. Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican nominee, in the closest Presidential election of the 20th Century. Almost 70% of African Americans voted for Kennedy, and these votes provided the winning edge in several key states.

3. Dukakis 89 percent, Clinton 83 percent, Clinton 84 percent, Gore 90 percent, Kerry 88 percent, Obama 95 percent, Obama 93 percent, Clinton 89 percent, Biden 87 percent, Harris 85 percent

4. In 1912 W.E.B. Dubois initially supported Woodrow Wilson and swung significant Black support to the first Democratic President since the Civil War based on promises that were quickly broken.

5. Even into the 1980s Rev. Jackson made demands and won concessions in his two bids for president before throwing his considerable influence behind a white Democratic nominee. And it’s well known that Congressman Jim Clyburn secured concessions from Joe Biden to nominate a Black woman before rescuing his failing campaign in 2020.

6. Frederick Douglass wrote: "For the life of me I cannot see how any honest colored man who has brains enough to put two ideas together can allow himself under the notion of independence to give aid and comfort to the Democratic party in Ohio or elsewhere."

7. One of the few places where this pattern was reversed was Georgia when a Black pastor was on the ticket and prevailed over his rivals with Black voters in the suburbs outnumbering Black voters in Atlanta.

8. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), "working class people of color" refers to the growing demographic of people of color who will make up the majority of the American working class by 2032, which is significantly earlier than the overall U.S. population reaching a "majority-minority" status. https://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/

9. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) dismissed the possibility that Donald Trump's popularity with working-class voters spelled trouble for the Democratics. "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia," he proclaimed, “And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."

10. “The Harris campaign’s path to win Pennsylvania capitalizes on Trump’s unprecedented weakness in the suburbs,” reads the Harris Campaign memo, which also highlighted the campaign’s focus on Haley voters. “We have flipped the suburbs from red to blue since Trump won them in 2020, and we have also grown our support with women and tripled our support among white college educated voters in the state.”

11. “Opportunity hoarding” is a sociological concept utilized by Charles Tilly in 1998 that has been used to explain a growing range of phenomena related to social inequality. It concerns the control of resources, defined in any number of ways, that allow certain groups to exclude others from access to said resources or benefits accruing to them.

12. Myron Orfield at the Center for Metropolitan Opportunity which studies race and subruban demographics estimates that only 9% of suburbs in America’s largest metroplitan areas are over 80% white.

13. Biden explained his championing of a bill to kill federal support for school integration in 1972 saying: “…that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access, and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride,” Desegregation, he argued, was “a rejection of the entire black awareness concept, where black is beautiful, black culture should be studied; and the cultural awareness of the importance of their own identity, their own individuality.”