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      Politics
There Is a Very Wrong Lesson to Take From Kamala Harris’ Performance Among Black and Latino Voters


By
      
Ben Mathis-Lilley


Oct 19, 20245:50 AM








Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by John Moore/Getty Images and Rebecca Noble/AFP via Getty Images.








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Why is Kamala Harris doing worse with Black and Latino voters than previous Democratic presidential candidates? That’s the campaign topic of the week after a New York Times/Siena poll found Harris winning only 57 percent of Hispanic voters—a step down from the estimated 63 percent that Joe Biden won in 2020—and 78 percent of Black voters, 15 points less than Biden’s estimated 2020 share. In the New York Times, David Leonhardt suggested an explanation for the disparity that echoes a centrist critique we’ve heard a lot over the past few years: The problem is identity politics, particularly on the issue of immigration.
According to Leonhardt, the Democratic Party is suffering because it has made “the wrong diagnosis of the American electorate” when it comes to race and ethnicity. Democrats, he says, assume that people of color constitute a homogeneous voting bloc whose loyalty can be best earned through acts that speak to their “racial identity,” like the 2022 appointment of a Black woman, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. (That’s Leonhardt’s example, not mine.)




The party assumes that voters of color will be won over by progressive gestures on every issue that touches on race, he charges, and fails to recognize that many nonwhite voters are concerned about problems like crime and undocumented immigration. The Biden administration has exacerbated the impact of this misunderstanding, he says, by loosening rules at the U.S.-Mexico border and waving millions of new residents into the country like a friendly crossing guard.
While the piece makes some fair points (more on that later), there are several problems with this narrative. To begin with, Democrats do seem to understand that Black voters can be concerned about crime; the party’s presidential nominee is a Black woman who worked for nearly 30 years as a prosecutor and wrote a book about reducing crime. As president, Joe Biden has fixated on funneling additional funds to police departments at the expense of pursuing criminal justice reform—to the point that one of Leonhardt’s colleagues, Charles Blow, wrote a column lamenting the relative priorities in 2022. Say what you will about the current administration’s approach to the matter, but it has not been one characterized by soft, progressive appeals to identity rather than enforcement.



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The argument that Biden’s “welcoming immigration policies” have triggered a border crisis, though, is the crux of Leonhardt’s piece. He cites three policies in particular: An early-term attempt to pause deportations while conducting a broad review of immigration issues; a so-called parole program that had admitted 500,000 individuals when CBS reported on it in mid-2023; and a 2021 expansion of asylum eligibility standards to victims of domestic violence or criminal gangs.
It’s true that, under Biden, the U.S. did experience a large increase in the number of individuals crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in order to apply for asylum. Somewhat confusingly, even people who cross the border illegally have the legal right to apply for asylum once they’re here, but it’s happening in such numbers as to overwhelm the systems set up to deal with it, and it’s perceived by a majority of voters as a crisis.
But Leonhardt ignores that the current border surge began during Trump’s presidency, as can be seen in the graph in this piece. At two points, spring 2019 and late 2020, apprehensions of undocumented individuals at the southern border were higher under Trump than they’d ever been under his liberal, Democratic predecessor. In 2019, they were twice as high as what had ever been seen under Obama—whose 2014 launch of “deferred action” programs, which protect certain categories of undocumented immigrants who have established residency inside the country from deportation, is sometimes cited as the starting point of the party’s soft-on-migration era.



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The reality that crossings surged to these levels even under Trump, despite the severe policies he enacted in an ostensible effort to deter them, calls into question the premise that there’s anything Democrats (or Republicans) could do to suppress attempted crossings to a point that voters would find acceptable and “secure.” Bear in mind that for migrants, conditions of impoverishment and/or violence in their native countries are apparently so intolerable that they decide their best option is to make a lengthy trip through a desert, on foot, that has a good chance of ending with deportation back to their original home or “removal” to the makeshift northern Mexico tent camps that the Times’ reporting has described as “squalid” and “filthy.”



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On top of this, Biden’s border policy wasn’t actually welcoming. His deportation pause was terminated by a judge after only five days. Much more impactfully, Biden extended a COVID-era Trump administration policy called Title 42, which allowed the government to immediately expel asylum-seekers on the grounds of public health without granting them a hearing, through 2023. And when Title 42 expired, the administration immediately put into place what the Associated Press described as “a series of new policies cracking down on illegal crossings.”



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The purpose of the “parole” program Leonhardt mentions, meanwhile, was to resettle refugees of war (most prominently from Ukraine and Afghanistan) and to reward individuals who applied for residence via their home countries rather than sneaking in through Mexico. The CBS News article he links to as evidence of a loosened border policy actually concludes that “parole authority has allowed officials to divert migration away from the southern border” (emphasis mine).
All told, according to a review published by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute this June, deportations have continued under Biden at the same pace that they did during the Trump administration. When you add that number to the immediate expulsions that were carried out under Title 42, the MPI writes, “the Biden administration’s nearly 4.4 million repatriations are already more than any single presidential term since the George W. Bush administration.” Doesn’t sound very inviting, does it?
So Leonhardt might be wrong about what the Biden administration has done, and about what even the most punitive border policy could accomplish given the limited resources available at the border, the external factors contributing to immigration “flows,” and the troublesome fact—often ignored in mainstream press coverage of the issue—that the right to seek asylum is enshrined in both U.S. and international laws passed in the wake of the Holocaust. (The current limitation on resources at the border, for what it’s worth, has essentially been imposed by the Republican Party.) His case might be more realistically phrased as an argument that Democrats are having problems because they project inclusive “vibes” toward immigrants in general by speaking in broad terms about immigration’s benefits and continuing to favor policies that would provide a “path to citizenship” for undocumented individuals inside the U.S.



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Is he right about that? I think the answer is still no.
To begin with, consider the assumption in his piece’s headline: “Democrats imagined that they would become the majority party as America became more racially diverse. It’s not working out that way.” One might conclude from this that Democrats are in trouble electorally—a minority party, even. But for starters, they’ve won the presidential popular vote in the past four elections. In 2018, at the height of Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, they took over the House; in 2020, they won the White House and both chambers of Congress. In 2022, they lost the House, but held the Senate as Trump-affiliated candidates underperformed across the country. Polling is inexact and the margins involved are currently quite narrow, but most forecasting models are leaning toward Kamala Harris winning the presidency and Democrats retaking the House of Representatives. Leonhardt himself even concedes that “Harris is winning most voters of color.”
Put simply, voters have rewarded Democrats for who they’ve been—the party of pluralism, let’s say—during the Trump era. It might not be desirable, or even possible, to separate that “brand” from a reputation for being broadly pro-immigrant.



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There is, certainly, a line that must be walked. The aggregate position of the U.S. electorate is basically that undocumented immigrants are OK if they are established inside the country, but not when they are crossing the border, which is, of course, the only way that many of them can get inside the country. Voters want border policies that are “tough,” but also for the most part felt that Trump’s policies were too tough. (It seems to have gotten lost that promising  to pull back from Trump programs like the “Muslim ban” and family separation was something Democrats did with the support of the general public, rather than being a minority position they were hectored into taking by activists.)



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In sum, voters generally support inclusion, humane treatment, and “order,” and tend to change their position on which is more important depending on which party is in charge and the extent to which migrant tent encampments or other symbols of dis-order are visible in the places they live or on the news. If you ask them, majorities of voters support deporting undocumented immigrants and providing them with a path to citizenship. Maybe this is a case of boneheaded median-voter brain, akin to supporting lower taxes, higher spending, and a balanced federal budget. Or it could simply be an interest in seeing someone do something about an issue that has become particularly visible—an interest in knowing that things are being, in some sort of organized way, handled.



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Either way, it does not suggest a public verdict so clear-cut that the Democratic Party should give up what has been possibly its most durable asset since the civil rights era—the public sense that it stands for evolving, multiracial democracy. Many United States voters lean that way, and they have already shown that they can be the basis of a winning coalition. Call me an idealist, but I also don’t think all of these voters are simply engaged in progressive virtue signaling. Maybe they simply say that undocumented immigrants should get a chance to work toward citizenship, or that it is a good idea to have a Black woman on the Supreme Court at least once every 235 years, because they think that’s how America ought to work. And shouldn’t they have a party too?





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There are no lessons to take until we know what Kamala Harris's actual performance with black and Latino voters was.