The statistics that expose the fundamental flaw in Kamala Harris’s new campaign strategy

Both the Democrats and Republicans make a mistake when assuming that particular racial groups or genders must vote their way

Will identity politics save Kamala Harris’s struggling campaign for the presidency? Until recently, her campaign had appeared to make a strategic decision to forego playing up her identity as a woman of Jamaican and Indian heritage, in order to try to win over moderate and conservative swing voters with tactics such as speaking of her gun ownership and praising Republicans like Dick Cheney and the late John McCain.
But as the race for the White House has tightened, the Democrats in desperation have reverted to race and gender identity politics. In the hope of counteracting insufficient support among black men for Harris, the campaign rolled out an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men”, which ranged from reinforcing stereotypes – legalising marijuana – to probably-unconstitutional reverse racism – one million forgiveable loans limited to black business owners and entrepreneurs – to downright weirdness – greater access for black Americans to cryptocurrency ownership.
And in his first campaign appearance for Harris, former president Barack Obama denounced those “brothers” who did not support the vice-president’s bid for the White House as sexists.  
The condescending assumption that black Americans have a duty to vote for Democrats is not new. When interviewed by the radio host Charlamagne tha God in 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden snapped, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black”.
Instead of insisting that black men have a duty to vote for them, Democrats ought to be addressing the reasons why black and Hispanic voters, particularly black and Hispanic men, have been moving toward the Republicans in recent elections.
One reason is the gap in values and views between highly-progressive white Democrats and more moderate or conservative black and Hispanic voters. White progressive Democrats assume that all non-whites want race-based affirmative action, so they denounced the Supreme Court’s recent ban on affirmative action in college admissions. But majorities of every racial group approved of the ban – not only 72 per cent of non-Hispanic whites, but also 68 per cent of Hispanics, 63 per cent of Asians, and 52 per cent of black voters, according to Gallup.  
Democratic politicians assume that they will please minority voters by denouncing state voter ID laws which require that voters prove their identity by presenting valid photo identification. Such laws are racist, Democrats claim. But requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote is supported by 75 per cent of black Americans, 81 per cent of white Americans, and 84 per cent of Asian Americans. Hispanics, who are invoked by Democrats as potential victims of voter ID laws, approve of the policy by 85 per cent – the highest percentage of any race, including non-Hispanic white Americans.
Democratic pundits and strategists make an understandable but dangerous mistake when they assume that their advantage among non-white voters of all races and among women is greater than it is. “Bloc voting” can be defined as overwhelming support by a racial, gender, or religious group for a particular party. Democrats and Republicans alike tend to equate majorities for one party in a group with bloc voting by that group. But this is an error.  
In reality, the black electorate is the only racial group that can be said to engage in bloc voting in the United States. In 2020, 87 per cent of black voters supported Biden and only 12 per cent Donald Trump.
The votes of all other racial groups were much more closely divided.  Hispanics favoured Biden by 65-32 and Asians by 61-34. White voters – often portrayed by progressives as a monolithic bloc of minority-hating Republicans – were the most closely-divided of all, with 58 per cent preferring Trump and 41 per cent voting for Biden. To put it another way, racial polarisation in partisanship is highest among black Americans – and lowest among white Americans.
The gender gap in voting is also misunderstood. It is true that, in every election since 1996, a majority of women have preferred the Democratic presidential candidate. But this statistic obscures major differences among women voters. Since the 2000 presidential election, a majority of white women have voted for the Republican each time, while black, Hispanic, and Asian women have preferred the Democratic candidate. And black, Hispanic, and Asian voters overall prefer Democrats.
Moreover, partisan differences between races are much greater than gender gaps within each race. In 2020, according to Edison, there was an 11 point gender gap between the 90 per cent of black women who voted for Biden and the 79 per cent of black men who did the same. Among white voters in 2020, the gender gap was much smaller – 6 points. But only minorities of white voters of both sexes voted for the Democrat in 2020 – 44 per cent of white women, 38 per cent of white men.  
Black Americans, then, are outliers in terms of partisanship, skewing the statistics in the case of both the nonwhite/white voting gap and the gender gap. A failure to understand this leads Democrats to complacently overestimate their appeal to “people of colour” and women in general.
Republicans make a similar mistake – but in the area of religion. Republicans often appear to think that their evangelical Protestant base voters are more typical of religious Americans than they in fact are.
For example, gay marriage is supported by most religious groups in the US, including Jews (73 per cent), Hindus (67 per cent), and white mainline Protestants (63 per cent). More American Catholics (67 per cent) support gay marriage than the population as a whole (64 per cent). Even a majority (56 per cent) of Catholics who attend church weekly support gay marriage.
White evangelicals, with support for gay marriage at only 31 per cent, are outliers, along with Mormons (37 per cent) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (25 per cent).
The truth is that neither non-white voters nor women nor religious voters are monolithic blocs. Politicians of both parties who lazily assume that they can rely on bloc voting by entire categories of voters defined by identity of some kind, and build their campaign messages on that assumption, risk a reckoning at the polls.
Michael Lind is a contributor to Tablet, a fellow at New America, and author of “Hell to Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America”