The Democrats' Coming Asian Voter Problem Revisited

In light of yesterday's crushing recalls of the three :San Francisco school board members, I thought it was a good time to re-up my piece on the Democrats' evolving woes with Asian voters.

Washington Post:

"The board also argued that Lowell High School, an elite program populated overwhelmingly by Asian American and White students, needed an admissions system that would better represent the city’s Black and Hispanic residents. The board’s abrupt decision to alter the admission rules, switching to a lottery, incensed San Francisco’s large Chinese-American population"

Me:

"Which brings us to the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats are becoming increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools—all areas where Asian children have excelled.

It does not seem mysterious that Asian voters might react negatively to this approach. In fact, it would be mysterious if they didn’t. James Hohmann of the Washington Post captured the drawbacks of the current Democratic approach well in a recent column:

Efforts to lower academic standards and scale back educational opportunities in the name of racial equity are backfiring on liberals from coast to coast, including in the bluest big cities in America….Eliminating gifted and talented programs has become fashionable on the left, based on well-intentioned desires to close the achievement gap for African American and Latino students, but it’s alienating many parents — as well as graduates — who prospered under higher standards. Throwing less-prepared students into classes with motivated children forces teachers to reduce the rigor of lesson plans so that everyone can keep up….

The Virginia governor’s race shows the issue’s potency. While much has been made of Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin’s emphasis on critical race theory, the Republican also promised to fight against weakening standards for magnet schools. He said he would push for Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a top-flight school in Fairfax County, to revert to a solely merit-based admission process. Last year, the local school board eliminated an entrance exam for the school and told reviewers to instead consider “experience factors,” such as a child’s socioeconomic background.

It seems obvious that where this approach will really kill Democrats is among Asian voters. One might wonder how the Democrats did not see this coming. And now they're starting to reap what they sowed. The results summarized above, barring a Democratic change of course, are likely just the beginning."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../san-francisco-school.../

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/.../the-democrats...

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

The Democrats’ Coming Asian Voter Problem

It's Not Just Hispanics Anymore

Place, Not Race, Is a the Best Way to Approach Progressive Policy

John Halpin won't win any popularity contests in the Democratic party with this analysis of place vs. race as focus for Democrats. But he's just right about this.

"America’s infamous political tribalism precludes common action on multiple policy fronts. Democrats think one way, Republicans another—and the twain shall never meet. Caught in the middle are millions of struggling workers and their families who desperately need a hand up but end up as political waste in a never-ending war over competing ideological frameworks and arcane terminology that blocks collective action to assist those most in need.

It doesn’t help matters when political parties present their ideas in ways scripted to generate confusion and sectarian divisions. One major example of this is the often well-intended but politically flawed race-based policy approach favored by the contemporary left and Democrats as a catch-all explanation and solution to America’s economic problems.

The flaws in this approach are obvious: (1) race-based policies are almost always unconstitutional—the government can’t set out to help one group or hurt another based on their race, sex, religion, or national origin; and (2) race-based policies are disastrous politically driving wedges between different groups of working-class people that inhibit majority action on important economic changes and fuel backlash politics that leave everyone worse off.

Yet, much of the policy and political work conducted in the progressive movement today refuses to confront or even acknowledge these limitations. It’s too bad because many smart and committed people within this same network of analysts, activists, and political leaders pursued an excellent alternative approach just a few short years ago: place-based policy analysis."

Read the rest at The Liberal Patriot!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

Think Spatially, Not Racially

Race-based policies are constitutionally dubious and politically counterpr

Open Everything. Now.

Yascha Mounk is just right about this (as he was right about the need for decisive steps at the beginning of the pandemic). At this point, the societal costs of current restrictions considerably exceed their societal benefits (not to mention the political costs!).

Full stems ahead to normalcy.

THEATLANTIC.COM

Open Everything

The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.

The Good Ship Biden Is Going Down and the Left Is Helping Drill the Holes

My latest at The Liberal Patriot argues that the left has never had a better chance to push forward a transition away from neoliberalism and they're completely blowing it. One more reason Biden and the Democrats are in a heap of trouble.

"For forty years or so the left has been preaching against neoliberalism—the view that capitalism and markets should mostly be left alone to generate prosperity with only modest regulation and a frugal welfare state. For forty years the left has polemicized against this economic model, frequently despairing that they could ever get through to ordinary voters, particularly working class voters, who, the left said, were duped by political elites who either promoted this model or were afraid to challenge it.

Well a funny thing happened in the wake of the Great Recession, a worldwide pandemic and persistent, maddening economic inequality: ordinary voters, including working class voters, are sick of neoliberalism. They’ve had it and they’re ready for something different.

The answer to the left’s prayers right? The opportunity—finally!—to push the American economic model in their preferred direction by building up the mass support the left has always lacked.

A great opportunity, yes, and also an opportunity that’s being impressively blown by today’s left and, in the process, is taking the Democratic party down with them. At the very moment when neoliberalism has been comprehensively discredited, the left has become more and more associated with unpopular sociocultural issues and less and less with solving the problems of working class people. This has branded the left as a movement out of touch with the concerns and language of ordinary voters—a movement that is using its increased influence within the Democratic party to promote pet causes and interfere with effective governance. This is undermining the Democrats’ ability to garner mass support for the very economic transition the left has been promoting for forty years."

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

The Left Is Blowing Its Big Opportunity

And They’re Taking the Democrats Down with Them

Farewell Todd Gitlin. If Only We'd Listened to You Back in 1995!

I'd always been a fan of Todd Gitlin's work so I was sad to sse he passed away. RIP. John Halpin at The Liberal Patriot reminds us how prescient Gitlin was about the way culture wars could ruin left politics--way back in 1995! In his piece he excerpts two passages from his 1995 book, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars. Read them and weep that we did not pay closer attention back then.

Excerpt #1:

"On campus, today’s obsession with difference is distinguished, too, by the haughtiness of the tribes and the scope of their intellectual claims. Many exponents of identity politics are fundamentalists—in the language of the academy, “essentialists”—and the belief in essential group differences easily swerves toward a belief in superiority…

The cultivation of difference is nothing new, but the sheer profusion of identities that claim separate political standing today is unprecedented. And here is perhaps the strangest novelty in the current situation: that the ensemble of group recognitions should take up so much of the energy of what passes for the Left. It is often for good reason that differences have multiplied, making their claims, exposing the fraudulence of the universalist claims of the past. Not everyone is male, white, hearing, heterosexual. Very well. But what is a Left if it is not, plausibly at least, the voice of a whole people? For the Left as for the rest of America, the question is not whether to recognize the multiplicity of American groups, the variety of American communities, the disparity of American experiences. Those exist as long as people think they exist. The question is one of proportion. What is a Left without a commons, even a hypothetical one? If there is no people, but only peoples, there is no Left."

Excerpt #2:

"A Left that was serious about winning political power and reducing the inequality of wealth and income would stop lambasting all white men, and would take it as elementary to reduce frictions among white men, blacks, white women, and Hispanics. Could it be more obvious that the Left and the Democrats alike are helpless unless they offer all these constituencies something they benefit from in common? At the same time, a Left is not a Left unless it defends the scapegoated poor, tries to deliver for them (along with the not-so-poor) training, decent jobs, and provision for children, acknowledging that the present welfare state is not kind to the poor. But multiculturalism by itself does not contribute to that political revival. The most insistent multiculturalists do not seem to recognize that there is no Left, there is only more panic, unless a plausible hope emerges for a greater equality of means. The right to a job, education, medical care, housing, retraining over the course of a lifetime—these are the bare elements of an economic citizenship that ought to be universal."

Read the whole thing at The Liberal Patriot....and subscribe, it's free!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

A Politics of Commonalities, Not Differences

Todd Gitlin’s prophetic book "The Twilight of Common Dreams" laid out the problems of identity politics—in 1995.

The Silent Liberal Majority?

It's out there but it desperately needs a leader. So far, Joe Biden ain't been it. That's a problem as astutely pointed out by the Financial Times in a blistering editorial. If only the US prestige press could do as well.

"The number of Democrats who really want a cultural revolution is small. Those who lack the stomach to confront the zealots are legion. They have spent much of the past two years, for instance, pretending that Defund the Police means something else.

This ducking of the issue has a price....A president cannot and should not micromanage local policing and schooling, much less the private decisions of “woke” business. What he can do is state his own liberal-but-not-radical position in the cultural struggles of the day, as did former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama at various times.

[Bill] Maher is not the only American who subscribes to liberalism in its old sense while balking at group rights, equivocation over crime (many of whose victims are poor minorities) and the minefield of modern speech. It is not as though Biden need turn into J Edgar Hoover to win these voters over. And if and when they are reassured, the Republicans’ own capacity for cultural over-reach, perhaps in the form of judicial rulings on abortion and other issues this year, will stand out.

At the moment, Biden is relying on his bona fides to get him through. He has spent much of his career at the conservative end of his party. He is a Catholic who came of age before the Permissive Society of the 1960s. If anything, the worry upon his third bid for the White House was that the author of hardline criminal justice laws was too draconian and old-fashioned for modern America.

Perhaps to compensate for that past, however, he has been nervous to shout down the strident voices to his left. He is caught between strict liberals and the kind of progressives for whom liberalism is a polite cover for all kinds of structural inequities. Refusing to pick a side is a good way to maintain the uneasy peace within the Democratic party. Unfortunately, it is also a good way of arousing the mistrust of large parts of the country."

Just so. And so there we are.

FT.COM

Joe Biden must confront the left’s cultural over-reach

Many liberal Americans also worry about the excesses of progressiv

If Only the Old Jim Crow Had Been So Ineffective!

Well, the voting rights bills have crashed and burned (though the more consequential Electoral Counts Act reforms are still alive). That means the many of the various state voting procedure laws Republicans passed are going to be with us for awhile. Republicans claimed that ways these laws tightened up voting procedures would simply prevent fraud though the partisan motivation of reducing Democratic turnout and advantaging Republicans was easy to see.

Democrats on the other hand characterized these laws as voter suppression that amounted to a New Jim Crow, etc. Well, the intent may have been to prevent more Democrats, particularly black Democrats, from getting to the polls....but a New Jim Crow is absurd overstatement for this simple reason: these voting procedure changes don't work and haven't worked to affect outcomes much.

If only the old Jim Crow had been so ineffective!

Alan Abramowitz provides a solid, clean analysis of the very minor league effects of these voting procedure changes. Bottom line: you can relax about these changes, however ill-intended they may be. If the Democrats lose in coming elections it is not likely--in fact, very unlikely--it will have much to do with the various voting procedure laws GOP legislatures have passed.

"An important question raised by both these new laws and Democratic efforts to override them is just how effective such voter suppression laws would be in reducing voter turnout among Democratic-leaning voter groups. In an earlier article in the Crystal Ball, I examined the impact of expanded absentee voting on the 2020 election. I concluded that increased use of absentee voting had only a small impact on turnout and no effect at all on the Democratic margin in the 2020 presidential election. In this article, I expand my focus to look at the effects of other voting procedures that Republicans have targeted, including increased availability of early in-person voting, use of drop boxes for absentee voting, and stricter identification requirements for absentee and in-person.[1]

The results reinforce the findings of my previous research. These voting rules had only minor effects on turnout and no effect at all on the Democratic margin in the presidential election....

Voting procedures that have been falsely attacked by former President Trump and his political allies for contributing to voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election actually had little impact on voter turnout and no measurable impact on the margin in the presidential election at the state level. Voter turnout increased dramatically in 2020 for reasons that had very little to do with the voting procedures used by different states. Moreover, Joe Biden improved on Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016 for reasons that had nothing to do with the voting procedures used by different states.

Both voter turnout and voting decisions in 2020 were driven by the strong preferences held by the large majority of voters between the major party candidates. That is very likely to be the case again in the 2022 midterm elections and especially in the 2024 presidential election. Thus, efforts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress turnout by Democratic-leaning voter groups by imposing restrictions on absentee voting, early in-person voting, and use of drop boxes or by requiring that voters present photo identification in order to vote are unlikely to bear fruit. Such efforts could even backfire by angering voters who are the targets of these efforts and by causing left-leaning voting rights groups to increase their voter registration and GOTV efforts."

Worth your time. Most Democrats seem to be entirely unaware of empirical research like this. Maybe if they were they could calm down a little and focus on the really important stuff.

CENTERFORPOLITICS.ORG

Why Voter Suppression Probably Won’t Work – Sabato's Crystal Ball

Why Voter Suppression Probably Won’t Work Voting procedures, turnout, and vote margins in the 2020 election By Alan I. AbramowitzIn: 2020 President, GeneralPosted February 3, 2022 KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — In the aftermath of the high-turnout 2020 election, many Republican-controlled state ...