{"id":2767,"date":"2026-06-16T13:55:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/marshall-and-kahlenberg-in-the-new-york-times-these-are-the-voters-who-can-keep-democrats-from-going-off-the-rails\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T13:55:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:55:00","slug":"marshall-and-kahlenberg-in-the-new-york-times-these-are-the-voters-who-can-keep-democrats-from-going-off-the-rails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/marshall-and-kahlenberg-in-the-new-york-times-these-are-the-voters-who-can-keep-democrats-from-going-off-the-rails\/","title":{"rendered":"Marshall and Kahlenberg in The New York Times: These are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<br><p>[\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion.<\/p>\n<p>Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing four major issues on which \u201cBlack voters have indeed become a moderating force compared with white liberals:\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crime: A 2024 <a class=\"css-yywogo\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aei.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/Politics-Without-Winners-Can-Either-Party-Build-a-Majority-Coalition.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">American Enterprise Institute survey<\/a>\u00a0found that nonwhite working-class voters opposed reducing police budgets by a 30-point margin, while white liberal college graduates favored reducing police budgets by a 20-point margin.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1e1r8ex e1me5xab0\">Elections and socialism: In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City\u2019s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026\u00a0<a class=\"css-yywogo\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/dc-md-va\/2026\/06\/05\/lewis-george-leads-dc-mayoral-race-many-undecided-post-schar-school-polls-finds\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Democratic primary for mayor in D.C.<\/a>, socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1e1r8ex e1me5xab0\">Patriotism: Some 62 percent of Asian Americans, 70 percent of Black Americans and 76 percent of Hispanic Americans said they were \u201cproud to be an American,\u201d compared with just 34 percent of progressive activists.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1e1r8ex e1me5xab0\">Racial preferences: When asked if Black people should work their way up \u201c<a class=\"css-yywogo\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2019\/3\/22\/18259865\/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">without special favors<\/a>,\u201d white liberals were about 12 points less likely to agree than Black voters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The pro-affirmative action stance among many white liberals, in contrast to the moderate positions of Black Democrats, is striking, as Kahlenberg pointed out:<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The insistence of white liberals on racial preferences has a very negative effect on Democrats. In a <a class=\"css-yywogo\" title=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/osf.io\/preprints\/socarxiv\/bvjtd_v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">recent study<\/a>, the political scientists David Broockman of U.C. Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas \u2014 including immigration, transgender athletes in women\u2019s sports, and Israel and Gaza \u2014 in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1e1r8ex e1me5xab0\">They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.<\/p>\n<p>[\u2026]<\/p>\n<p>Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, has been a leader in the struggle to strengthen Democratic centrism for four decades. His take on the evolution of politics over those years:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn 1988, Jesse Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination on a coherent and comprehensive social democratic platform. It thrilled readers of The Nation and would easily have found favor on the European left. But it made Jackson the wrong answer to the big strategic question facing his party then: how to halt the steady defection of more socially traditional blue-collar voters that was unraveling the New Deal majority.<\/p>\n<p>They didn\u2019t see a place for themselves in Jackson\u2019s Rainbow Coalition. That\u2019s why he won mostly Southern states with lots of Black voters but struggled in the Wisconsin primary.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Over the last two decades, Marshall continued in his email, \u201cDemocrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads,\u201d noting \u201cthat between the 2012 and 2024 elections, the party\u2019s performance among nonwhite working-class voters fell by 37 points, while improving among white college grads by 17 points.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Now, Marshall added,<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left\u2019s cultural agenda \u2014 open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and \u201cequity.\u201d They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren\u2019t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<h4><span style=\"text-decoration: underline\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/06\/16\/opinion\/democratic-party-coalition-minority-voters.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read More in The New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/h4>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/www.progressivepolicy.org\/marshall-and-kahlenberg-in-the-new-york-times-these-are-the-voters-who-can-keep-democrats-from-going-off-the-rails\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Marshall and Kahlenberg in The New York Times: These are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.progressivepolicy.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Progressive Policy Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.progressivepolicy.org\/marshall-and-kahlenberg-in-the-new-york-times-these-are-the-voters-who-can-keep-democrats-from-going-off-the-rails\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link  www.progressivepolicy.org<\/a>\r\n<br>Richard Kahlenberg highlights key shifts within the Democratic coalition, noting that Black voters are becoming a moderating influence compared to white liberals. Key issues include opposition to police budget cuts, support for mainstream candidates over socialists, and higher levels of patriotism among minority groups. Additionally, Black voters are less favorable towards affirmative action than white liberals. Will Marshall emphasizes that Democrats have traded working-class voters for white college-educated voters, resulting in declining support from nonwhite working-class demographics. This group exhibits skepticism towards the left&#8217;s cultural agenda and holds a more moderate political stance, presenting an opportunity for the party to strengthen its base.","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[\u2026] Posing questions about the changing racial and ideological shifts within the Democratic coalition to Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, is like throwing meat to a hungry lion. Kahlenberg immediately replied by email citing four major issues on which \u201cBlack voters have indeed become a moderating force&hellip;","protected":false},"author":358,"featured_media":2768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_analytify_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wokeantifa.org\/topics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}