Why Black Voters Are the Most Rational Voters of 2016

[YoungDemCA]

Contrary to some nimble-minded pop-culture notions that either we’re not politically sharp or we don’t care about elections or we just vote for people who look like us, black voters (for the most part) are a rather strategically sound bunch. But that’s because the stakes are always ever so high for us. There’s little margin for error, little wiggle room when the wrong people are put in power. When election outcomes go south—or, in our case, symbolically Deep South—we can’t accept it because we’re so busy mentally preparing to pull our political rip cords on a proverbial parachute.

We’re not simply jumping out of a crashing national plane, so to speak (because where else can we go, considering our statistical lack of social mobility, anyway?). Yet we do suddenly find ourselves escalating communitywide survival mode.

White commentators, prognosticators and comedians may yuk it up daily and hurl jokes at orange-faced billionaire Trump, but none of that is changing the 52 percent of white voters supporting him in this Public Policy Poll (pdf)—or how Forbes’ Jeffrey Pfeffer pegged it way back last summer: “Narcissism, not modesty, and self-confident, even overconfident, self-presentation lead to leadership roles.”

All because most white Americans—through dominant social, political and economic norms—still maintain the privilege of shredding up institutions and starting from scratch when the mood strikes. Sure, many may get nervous when visualizing “President Trump.” But that doesn’t stop 30 percent of white Democratic Sanders supporters in this McClatchy-Marist poll from saying that they won’t support Hillary Clinton in the general election. For them, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. You shouldn’t be surprised, then, when Megyn Kelly softball-interviews Trump or when Operation Humanize Trump proceeds at full media speed.

Nonwhite voters, on the other hand—particularly black voters—have a better, more practical sense than that ... given expertise with dark tunnels, broken promises and lots of busted streetlights. We’ve actually been in this episode before. There’s nothing really funny about Trump’s political rise, nothing really reassuring about it. And so, even when 35 percent of African-American voters (in that same McClatchy survey) might say they’d like to see a Sanders nomination, only 18 percent of “nonwhite” voters opt out of voting for Clinton. In the latest YouGov poll (pdf), you also catch that disparity in common sense between insane white voters and largely rational black voters: A near 40 percent of whites believe that Sanders shouldn’t help Clinton win the general at all, compared with a combined 63 percent of African Americans who are like, “Really, son?”

http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/05/why_black_voters_are_the_most_rational_voters_of_2016.html