While less committed to many of the broad social and cultural issues important to white liberals, black Democrats remain more committed than their white counterparts to progressive stands on economic issues of the type that characterized the New Deal coalition of the last century that also established the Great Society programs of the 1960s like Medicare and Medicaid.
Asked to rate the importance to them of jobs and wages, 84 percent of black Democrats said both are “very important,” 20 points more than the 64 percent of white Democrats who said so.
Black Democrats showed more caution than their white counterparts when it came to their views of several major changes in public policy that Democratic presidential candidates have proposed.
Asked by CBS “Would you favor or oppose the U.S. creating a national, government-administered ‘Medicare for All’ program, available to all individuals?” 59 percent of white Democrats said they support it, compared with 47 percent of black Democrats.
CBS posed a broad question testing whether Democratic primary voters want a moderate or more radical approach: Should the message in 2020 be that the party and its candidates will try “to return the country to the way it was before Donald Trump took office” or “to advance a more progressive agenda than the country had under Barack Obama”?
On this question, white Democrats preferred to advance a more progressive agenda 64-36, while black Democrats leaned toward a return to a pre-Trump era, 52-48.
Asked if they “must hear” from candidates about their policies on creating jobs, 39 percent of whites agreed compared with 68 percent of African-Americans. Conversely, 76 percent of white Democrats and 48 percent of black Democrats said they must hear candidates’ proposals to combat climate change.
One of the largest divisions was over whether they must hear candidates’ proposals to lower taxes: 25 percent for whites, 55 percent for African-Americans. Another big gap was on the question of keeping the country safe: 41 percent of white Democrats said it was “extremely important” while a much higher percent of black Democrats, 69 percent, ranked it that high.
Tasha Philpot, a political scientist at the University of Texas, emailed in response to my inquiry: “In my own work, I’ve found a growing number of self-identified black conservatives over the last 5 decades.”
She stressed, however, that among African-Americans of all ideological leanings, “levels of group consciousness remain high as does Democratic Party identification.” African-Americans, she argued, “hold two beliefs simultaneously — the belief that blacks should take responsibility for their own success but also that there still are systemic barriers to doing so.”
In her 2017 book “Conservative but Not Republican: The Paradox of Party Identification and Ideology among African Americans,” Philpot reports that “when group consciousness is high, blacks regardless of ideology will identify with the Democratic Party,” adding that “blacks use a different set of criteria when placed on the liberal-conservative continuum than” whites do.
The result? “Black conservatives behave more like black liberals than they do white conservatives,” according to Philpot. “In 2012, for instance, 96 percent of black liberals and 78 percent of black conservatives identified with the Democratic Party.”