Why Black Voters Prefer Establishment Candidates Over Liberal Alternatives

[Gothmog]

83. Dissecting 'the black vote'

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Myth No. 1: Black voters are liberal.

One of the defining phenomena of contemporary American electoral politics is the black electorate’s large and enduring support for the Democratic Party, which has concurrently moved leftward.

Its presidential candidates have received an average of nearly 90% of the black vote for the past six decades. Many conclude that black voters’ liberal preferences, carried over from economic and racially progressive policies of the civil rights movement and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, led this shift.

But black voters’ support of Democratic candidates is a function of electoral pragmatism — voting in a risk-averse fashion to preserve gains, instead of ideologically in hopes of immediate transformative change — not devotion to left-wing ideology.

In surveys, more than half of black Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents prefer a public option for health care over Medicare-for-all, and two-thirds of black Americans favor charter schools and choice programs, which run counter to party orthodoxy.
Only 28% of black Democrats consider themselves liberal, according to the Pew Research Center, while 70% identify as moderate or conservative. And black liberal Democrats constitute just 17% of the left wing of the party, Gallup found.