Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by two great political scientists. Hakeem Jefferson is at Stanford University. Jake Grumbach is at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s afternoon for them, just barely—they’re on the West Coast. I’m glad they’re joining us today.
Hakeem Jefferson: Thanks for having us. Glad to be here, Perry.
Jefferson: Out of the gate, man. Out of the gate. Go ahead.
Jefferson: Thanks again for having us, Perry. I’m going to let Jake, because Jake had some insights that I thought were just right on the money in the piece he wrote—so I’ll let Jake talk about the sort of foolishness of the court’s thinking when it comes to partisanship and race, given what we political scientists, I think, and the broad public know about the overlapping nature of partisanship and race in the U.S. So I’m going to let Jake set the groundwork for that.
And so it just so happens I’ve been reading this work by political scientist Katherine Tate. And she, early on, was thinking about: what’s the reason that we might care about Black political representation? What does it matter? And so we have these expectations that Black representatives—who descriptively represent Black constituents—might have preferences, might have priorities that differ from their white counterparts.
So we might have expectations that Black members of Congress are going to be better advocates for issues like criminal justice or for various redistributive programs. You see in the Senate, for example, Black women really holding Secretary Kennedy’s feet to the fire when it comes to access to vaccines or maternal health—Black maternal health.
Bacon: Let me follow up on one question. So today, the district that was eliminated is in the Memphis area. The representative’s name is Steve Cohen. He is not Black. So talk about that—that kind of just helps explain why that’s a loss as well.
And in the context of American politics—as I’m sure Jake’s going to lay out even more eloquently—in the context of American politics, that means, for many and most Black folks, having the opportunity to vote for a Democratic politician and having substantive numbers such that their support for that candidate can get them over the finish line. But I think it’s a really good opportunity for Jake to lay out even more clearly the way that partisanship and race are so intertwined in American life.
Jake Grumbach: Yeah. Great to be with you guys. Thanks, Perry, for organizing this conversation. Always great to be along with a friend and collaborator—and, unfortunately, at an inferior school slightly to myself—Hakeem Jefferson. But otherwise, excellent to see you.
Bacon: Just hear his voice.
Jake Grumbach: Yeah. That dude is Memphis. Like you could be like, “Oh yeah, 8Ball & MJG and Three 6 Mafia, and Steve Cohen.” It actually—
Grumbach: Yeah. You—so he’s a candidate of choice in this way of the Black community of the district.
Jefferson: And importantly, birthright citizenship.
And the 15th Amendment is no ban on voting on the basis of race or previous condition of servitude. And the Jim Crow voting laws violated that. And it wasn’t until the 1965 Voting Rights Act—the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—actually enforces the 15th Amendment, and to some extent the 14th Amendment as well.
The Shelby County [2013] Supreme Court decision ends Section Five with a similar logic. John Roberts says basically: racism’s over, Section Five is done, no more preclearance. We see a wave of election law changes by state legislatures and the changing of voting procedures—purges of voter rolls. The things you know as voter suppression in the 2010s come after the Shelby County decision.
And that the district system is not set up in a way to constantly have a racial majority group—usually white people, but it depends on the place—block those candidates of choice through overwhelming voting against them, either at the primary or general election, such that those candidates of choice of the racial minority group get to be in office. That is the standard of Section Two. The Supreme Court in Callais ended that.
Partisan gerrymandering has long been legal. You can actually say, we are setting up this map to maximize the seats from my party and minimize the seats of the other party. The only thing you couldn’t do is racially gerrymander. If in that partisan map, racial minority groups that are a coherent community, that vote cohesively for candidates of choice, that repeatedly choose candidates that they support in majorities—those candidates have to be able to take office. So you can only partisan-gerrymander so much.
So that’s the outcome, and the biggest casualty is Black representation. For the parties, it’s going to mildly help Republicans, but Democrats can gerrymander more effectively too now, so it’ll even out a little. The big casualty is Black representation—to some extent Latino representation in other parts of the country, but mostly Black representation in the South is the casualty here for the long term.
Grumbach: There can be many more effects of this—
Grumbach: Yeah. So in blue states there’s less racially polarized voting because the racial groups tend to vote more similarly. There are still racial differences in voting in blue states, but in a state like Illinois, Black and white liberals—they vote more consistently. There are still big differences, like Hakeem said—different priorities. But it’s not as different as when you go to a Deep South state, where it’ll be 90 percent of white people vote one way, 90 percent of Black people vote another way.
What I mean there is: if you wanted to maximize the number of blue seats in a state, what you want to do is get every district to have 51 percent blue voters and make the Republican voters have no ability to set seats. What that does is chop up cohesive racial groups more than otherwise would.
Bacon: So the Supreme Court is ignoring race, or prioritizing partisanship—do you view them—yeah, I guess that’s the question. Are they pretending race doesn’t exist, or are they saying party is the thing that divides us today?
In the South, that’s basically saying you have to hold constant, or control for, party and find racial differences—systematic racial differences in voting—even within the same party, in places that are very polarized by party and also by race, like in the Deep South. That’s basically going to say: you found the two white liberals in some Deep South county that tend to vote with the Black people in a Democratic primary, and because they’re voting with the Black people, we have to ignore all the 90 percent of white people voting against the Black candidates, because they’re from a different party.
So it’s not a “control for party” story—it’s actually that party is a mediator, or an intermediate step between [race and voting behavior]. For that reason, this “control for party” thing—sadly, when my—I, like other political scientists, have really played into that—is a fundamentally problematic and just fallacious way to think of the process of partisanship and race throughout history, or within individual decision-making models.
So in the case of white Americans, for example—imperfect though it may be—one of the things that will consistently help you explain white support, say, for the Republican Party or for the Democratic Party is what they think about Black people. What we scholars call their racial resentment attitudes. And on the side of Black folks, one of the consistent predictors of Black support for the Democratic Party is identity centrality—that is, how important is being Black to their identity?
Now, we’ve seen declines in the level of Black support for the Democratic Party. But these Black folks still aren’t overwhelmingly running to identify as Republicans. If anything, they’re putting the Democratic Party ID on ice, in part because many of them—perhaps especially some young people—are concerned that the party is not advancing Black interests. So it’s just to say that we can’t think about partisan choice, or outcomes related to partisan choice, without thinking about race—even as the Supreme Court in all of its decisions these days wants to convince us that race doesn’t matter. All of the sort of survey evidence and the like that we have would suggest otherwise.
A 20-point gap, and we’re saying… the levels of actual racial sorting in the electorate are just actually high in raw terms. Even though it’s interesting that the presidential candidate who said Mexicans aren’t bringing their best and were criminals and rapists got a solid 45 percent of the Latino vote—that’s very important to understand. At the same time, 55 to 45 is a big gap. It’s still a very racially sorted electorate.
Saying, Hello, new Asian American voter, naturalized Latino American—what is the most predictive attitude? It’s: do you think Black people are poorer than white people because they’re lazier and don’t work as hard, or because of discrimination? Your answer to that question is the most correlated with your vote choice. So racial attitudes are more related to vote choice even as groups change.
Jefferson: Totally.
Because on some level, Black people support a Democratic House—let’s put it that way. On the other hand, Black representation will go down. So Hakeem, talk about that effect: if we have a Democratic-controlled Congress that has fewer Black members, no James Clyburn in leadership, but it’s still a Democratic majority Congress—what is the difference? How is it different than it would be if the pre-VRA Section Two were still in place?
And again, I want to caveat that by saying I don’t know if this holds up in the contemporary era. But I think that’s what we know from the descriptive representation literature: people perceive institutions as more legitimate, as fairer, as more likely to give them outcomes that they desire, when they have descriptive representatives.
But I think what we will observe is a continued decline in Black people’s perception of the legitimacy of political institutions—namely Congress, in this case—as their representation declines. And I think at some level we’ll observe this in the kind of levels of advocacy we observe.
Jefferson: Yes. Yeah.
Jefferson: Yeah—I mean, I have so many memories of Jim Clyburn being very present. His sister-in-law, for a small time, was my piano teacher. I quit piano, though. He was recently on campus, and he and I took a photograph together. And the way that this stuff works on the ground is people just know the guy. I don’t think that people are following all the sort of machinations of what he’s up to, but they perceive—and I think they’re right about it—that they’ve got a powerful representative who has a drawl that is familiar to them, who just by sense of his similarity has their interests at heart.
Symbolic representation and descriptive representation—we shouldn’t put all of our weight on it. But we know that the way that people think about their citizenship, the way that people think about their place in a broader polity, is in part a function of how much they see themselves represented in the governing bodies of society. And so I think a Congress that has fewer Black representatives—fewer people who look like Jasmine Crockett or Jim Clyburn, and the list goes on—is a Congress that will have an even tougher time convincing Black folks that it’s a legitimate political institution that is advancing Democratic goals. More small-d democratic goals.
Grumbach: I’m back. And I want to talk about Black representation on Hakeem’s last answer.
Grumbach: Sorry, my iPhone overheated, but I would love to jump in on Black representation.
Grumbach: No, I just wanted to say: when we think about the Congressional Black Caucus and Black representation in Congress right now, we have to think about the triumphs and the serious limitations.
And then Black congressional representation represented the end of American authoritarianism and apartheid in the South—to have majority-Black areas, states that are 30, 40-plus percent Black, get their first Black representation since Reconstruction, right? Since the Northern Union military under Lincoln occupied the South and said, You have to allow Black voting for those 12 years. This is a triumph.
And then I’ve got to say the limitations, though. Like Hakeem said, descriptive representation is not a perfect predictor. Clarence Thomas was a key figure behind the rollback of Black representation, period.
Second, young Black Americans are not as interested in descriptive representation as the Boomer and Gen X generations were—and beyond that, the Silent Generation and returning Black veterans. And that’s in part because they see the parity in representation. Now, Black representation in Congress is proportional to the Black population. It’s a triumph, but it has not delivered material equality. The racial wealth gap is greater than it’s been in centuries.
The third thing is—and we have to be real about this—the Congressional Black Caucus, Black representatives in Congress, are 10 of the 15 oldest members of Congress. And they have very serious health issues, and they do not have successors. Even if the Voting Rights Act Section Two stayed and they had these Black districts, many of these members of Congress—I don’t know what happened. There is not a generation lying in wait that they have cultivated, and it’s in some cases become a very personalistic fiefdom in a safe district that is not always aligned with the interests of the Black community more broadly.
And it’s, no. But if you actually look at racial groups in the U.S., Black people are the leftmost on every issue—criminal justice on downward. And we have to remember this—Paul Frymer’s book, Uneasy Alliances, on captured constituencies was about Black people, because of this, being a captured constituency in the Democratic Party. And that’s why swing voters are doubly valuable in these states. But a Black voter whose choice is Democratic Party or bust is not a credible threat to the party in the same way.
Jefferson: And step down.
Are we saying that a Democratic-gerrymandered state and a Republican-gerrymandered state—are we saying that what happened in Tennessee is different than Florida or Virginia because they’re killing off Black districts specifically and targeting them? Is that qualitatively different for you all than what’s happening in, let’s say, Montana—if they gerrymandered an all-white Republican state, or a Democratic state—is this fundamentally different because of the majority-Black districts and the history we’re talking about?
So I just want to put it on the record that my own politics—and if I recall, because Jake signed on and helped to lead the letter-writing campaign to convince Democrats to advance this legislation—Perry, I think that we’re in a bad equilibrium for democracy. This kind of tit-for-tat, what game theorists would have expected. I’ll just put it on the table: I don’t think that the argument is that any form of this is good for democracy. But I’ll let Jake take the particulars of the question.
But without that, you don’t want one-sided warfare, right? An arms race where both sides are doing it gives an incentive for both sides to say, “Let’s both stop this with new rules on both of us.” So still support that—that’s coming back into the agenda. At the same time, I will say, yes, there’s something different historically.
At the same time, there is something—given the long struggle over American democracy—that has been centrally about Black representation and voting rights. Black Americans have been the vanguard. Any push for democracy in the U.S. has been—the vanguard has been a Black democracy movement that has provided—the Voting Rights Act Section Two benefits all types of groups, right?
There is something really special and really consequential about ending that Voting Rights Act triumph of Black representation that paid off. This is no ordinary love. Sade was like—basically, these Black movements were really about—it’s not an ordinary movement. It’s actually a movement that translates into gains in democracy and equality for everyone, and that’s a kind of unique thing in world history. And that’s why every movement around the world emulates the Black American civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.
And we’re in an industry and a discipline that at times has seemed to lose focus on that as the objective. Our discipline—political scientists have often fallen prey to these arguments about, does voter ID do this thing, does it affect turnout of that thing? And the bigger goal has always been to undermine Black political power. We—of course, we hear some scholars, often scholars of color and Black scholars in particular, using that language to describe these efforts, small though they sometimes seem.
Bacon: Let me close with this subject. You both talked about this idea of Black political power, and we are watching a Supreme Court, an administration—and really, we’ve had five years of this. But I guess the question I’m getting at is: it’s not that I don’t view this as a partisan project at this point, if only because I watched so many universities eagerly kill off any diversity initiatives they had—and they seemed like they almost wanted to, on some level. I watched how many liberal columnists were eager to attack Ibram Kendi and pile on.
Jefferson: I think we’re in a long winter. I think this is a long winter of racial backlash at all levels, across any number of institutions. And Perry, I think you’re right to put your finger on it that yeah, you see a lot of white liberals who might push back against the most egregious forms of this racial backlash. But we should be attentive to the places of agreement between otherwise liberal white people and white conservatives when it comes to race—so often in the language of racial preference, or racial advantage, or the perception that Black folk and other racial minorities are getting goods that they shouldn’t get.
Grumbach: I would say, thinking about the ups and downs in history of this—including since the Voting Rights Act—is very instructive. And the Civil Rights Act, where in the ‘70s we know the stories of the attempt to actually integrate schools, including in the North through that implementation, was different than just during the Civil Rights Act in theory—Black people can join the schools.
All of these things have been battled over. The thing that I think we mistook is that there are some things that won’t backslide that far, right? Yeah, sure—affirmative action, you can try that, that’ll fall back, whatever. The basics of the Voting Rights Act, especially Section Two—that was not something I had on my bingo card. Whereas we had seen a lot of backlash to the equivalent of much more materially substantive DEI—essentially real affirmative action.
We didn’t know—or I didn’t think—it would backslide this far.
Bacon: Are these things—in fairness—are those things related, though? Once you have—it’s clear that you can break—like, once—isn’t John Roberts and Alito saying, Oh good, since white liberals no longer care about diversity anyway, we can go a little further? I know they want to just strike the Voting Rights Act down—they’ve wanted that their entire lives. They’re not denying that. But—
The DEI walkbacks, the fights over all this stuff in places like the ones we inhabit—universities—the fight over the 1619 Project. I’m not saying anything that Jake doesn’t already know. But all of those fights—sometimes as silly as CRT, as silly as they appear—they’re about discursive power, they’re about social power, they’re about power in the boardrooms.
And there’s nothing that enshrines the right of Black people to wield political power in this country more than the Voting Rights Act. And so this is just a natural end state of this hellscape of trying to advance white political power at the expense of Black political power. That was my ginning up a fight with my brother Jake, who agrees with everything I just said, of course.
And I also think in this—like, the white liberal in mind I think you’re painting is the one that symbolically was supportive of some stuff that was convenient but doesn’t actually want any material changes to anything, and has a signaling sort of thing, a sign of In this house, blah blah blah, but doesn’t actually want to live next to Black people, doesn’t want to have their kids go to school with Black people, doesn’t want to do all that.
I’m from the Bay and live in the Bay Area—and how different that politics is, where white politics is very clear in those areas, and you’re betraying white politics by going there—in a way that in these sort of liberal metros, it’s not the same. So it’s just a broader context of where we’re at now.
Grumbach: And building—and these, how these coalitions are built and things like that, and how we understand these racial coalitions—I think that’s just important. And I think right now, racial politics—the real thing is racial politics is just incredibly predictive.
And there’s a lot of signaling and not substantive depth to this. But also—it’s just, we’re in a fascinating, uncertain moment. This wasn’t to push back on anything Hakeem said, as much as to just say: the future is going to be very interesting.
Grumbach: Electoral politics is very volatile, and we don’t even know how—to the extent they’ll do some real backsliding on these next elections going forward, and we don’t know the districts yet.
Jefferson: I agree. And an image that I saw yesterday that heartened even this skeptical and cynical soul is in Tennessee, where you saw images of all of these white folks marching—I believe it was up the statehouse steps and that sort of thing. I think this point about volatility is so key, Jake—we just don’t know how this stuff is going to play out.
And so that’s all to say: the Supreme Court just undermined, just defamed the crown jewel of the civil rights movement—the 1965 Voting Rights Act. If we were at a different period of time, Black political elites would have responded, I think, differently. You would have seen a much more animated response. And I think one of the things that has really stood out to me is that—and of course, I’m exaggerating perhaps for effect—but what stood out to me in the aftermath of this severely consequential decision from the court, that is so about race and Black political power, is just the weakness of Black political elites in this moment. You just don’t—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors the—
Jefferson: Here’s what I mean, Perry—and maybe I’m looking for something that mirrors more the moment out of which the Voting Rights Act came, and maybe that’s a foolish thing to look for. But I think I’m looking for something, and I’m just at my core an ordinary person out in this political world. I think I do want greater expressions of anger and calls for mass political organizing, and for a political project. And maybe I’m looking for that from the wrong people—perhaps this is the role of ground-level activists and not the work of Hakeem Jeffries or the Black Caucus.
Bacon: I know we’re getting to the end here, and Jake’s got to go, but let me make two points in response to that. The first one is—and I think Jake got at this a little earlier—the Black politicians are now embedded fully in a Democratic Party hierarchy, and the Democratic Party decided the last five years that talking about race is bad. They decided there was a backlash to BLM—not sure if that’s there. They decided that Kamala lost in part because she’s Black. So I think that’s part of it—the—
Bacon: Yeah. And the other part is, I would distinguish between—Fair Fight Action, Black—there are groups, Sherrilyn Ifill—if you distinguish between—when I look for Black leadership today, I don’t listen to Kamala Harris and Barack Obama. I’m not sure—that was maybe too blunt, but in a certain sense, or Clyburn. The people who can speak on Black interests in a more direct way are often not prominent Black members of the Democratic Party.
Grumbach: No, I think—I’m in no huge rush—but Hakeem, I think that was so on point. What it speaks to me is the civil rights movement. Yeah, we think of Martin Luther King in his 30s—but that’s pretty young. And also it’s a student group—it’s SNCC, exactly. And students, whether it’s Freedom Riders from the North or Southern students who went to rural Black schools and Rosenwald schools in the rural South—this is a different youth-led movement. And now the relationship between youth and protest politics is very different. There was a youth-led movement the past few years. The Democratic Party and liberal institutions joined in crushing it. It is a signal that that style of youth politics—that may be unwieldy and is not incorporated into these institutions—is not friendly.
Then the last thing I’ll say: in this new era of nationalized politics and social media, where people do not think in terms of their district representative in the same way—except the older ones, like Hakeem’s point about Clyburn being around—that’s true. I’m from San Francisco, where Nancy Pelosi—it’s, yeah, you don’t really think—for me, Nancy Pelosi is not like she’s Frisco like me—like, I really think of her—
Bacon: That is a flex. I like it.
So the Voting Rights Act Section Two going down is absolutely the biggest deal—tragedy, period—for Black representation. But there already was writing on the wall that we needed a new model of representation that’s about coalitions, not your individual district representative. And that’s because in national parties, when you’re in the minority—I talk about Ketanji Brown Jackson as this. This is the Ketanji Brown Jackson theory here: she is probably the most brilliant Supreme Court justice maybe ever—certainly in my lifetime—reading these dissents. Does her role on the court actually matter compared to some replacement in the six–three minority? Yeah, her dissents are so fire, but it would really be different if you had a five–four majority she was on.
A new model will be about the one-person, one-vote standard in coalition—something like proportional representation that says it’s not about just being represented by an individual. We need to think about percentages of Americans—Americans want this direction, that direction. That would actually make Black people not a captured constituency within the Democratic Party, but actually pivotal in coalition. Say, we actually on this issue can coalition here, on this issue coalition there. That would be a different model that would match the times we’re inside. Encourage everybody to think about reforms Congress can do—like multi-member districts for proportional representation—to break out of this idea that your personal representative is the main thing, when actually what matters is who controls the levers of government right now.
Grumbach: Data for Democracy.
Grumbach: Thanks so much, Perry.
Bacon: Thanks, guys. See you soon.
Grumbach: Take it easy.
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