MSNBC’s Eric Michael Garcia, looking through the latest Siena poll, is highlighting some of its less-flattering numbers on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani:
Why Siena would bother polling the suburbs of New York, which cannot actually vote in NYC’s election, is a mystery; it makes as much sense as polling the suburbs of any other state in the union, which also can’t vote for NYC’s mayor.
But the more interesting point here is Eric Michael Garcia’s claim that black voters “are the base of the Democratic Party”. What does this actually mean? Intuitively it would seem to mean something like “black voters give Democrats higher margins than any other group” — but that just isn’t true. Take a look at the 2024 presidential exit polls, for example:
It’s true that black voters backed Harris in very high numbers, but they weren’t at all her most reliable demographic. That was liberals. This is because the Democratic Party is ultimately an ideological party rather than some kind of race party, organized not around the diverse interests of black voters but around the specific interests of liberals.
The fact that liberal voters are the base of the Democratic Party is so obvious that it almost seems trivial to point it out, but in cases where black voters disagree with liberals the difference obviously matters. And in the case of Mamdani, that difference is quite sharp:
Few things illustrate the Democratic Party’s utterly cynical attitude towards black voters than its shifting position on whether or not we should defer to their politics. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both had unusually high levels of support among black voters, so when they were the standard-bearers for the party it became a truism among Democratic pundits that Americans should defer to their political opinions. Black support for Biden and Harris was shakier, however, which is why it temporarily became legitimate to disagree with black voters. Now that black New Yorkers are showing some ambivalence about Mamdani, however, it has suddenly become useful again to highlight their supposed position as “the base of the Democratic Party.”
What these polls really show, however, is simply that black New Yorkers are out of touch with the Democratic majority and its overwhelmingly liberal base. Even if black voters were the base of the party, however, I have no idea why the mere fact of their ambivalence would amount to an argument against Mamdani. As Harris learned the hard way in 2024, a significant and growing number of black voters feel no obligation to support liberal-left politics. If Democrats cannot get over their essentialist romanticization of black voters, it is only a matter of time until they are taught this lesson again.
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