This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Now this really energized me. Interesting and encouraging analyses of the Latina/o vote by the Latino Policy & Politics Initiative at UCLA based not on exit poll data, but actual ballots cast, resulting in the most reliable data possible.
The results are impressive, demonstrating "a 30.9% increase, nearly double the nationwide 15.9% growth in ballots." Overwhelming, votes went toward Biden even in Florida where Biden beat Trump by a margin of 2 to 1.
Now, our task is to protect the franchise, not only challenging voter suppression laws, but also resisting the miseducation of our youth that the republican party seeks via its bogus anti-Critical Race Theory agenda. And while we're at it, let's eliminate mental testing and create assessment systems that honor the wealth, wisdom, knowledge, and ways of knowing that our communities bring to our local contexts everywhere. After all, we are all mostly indigenous, including Afro-Indigenous, to this continent and we have survived over 500 years of domination driven by European expansionism and on-going colonialism (e.g., Mexicans Didn't Immigrate To America -- We've Always Been Here by Pedro Garza.)
Notwithstanding current attempts to disenfranchise Latinas/os and other people of color, Latinas/os are poised to propel this country toward a bright and prosperous future. In fact, it's already happening. đ
SĂ se puede! Yes we can!
You can download the full report at their website here. I share the executive summary or overview below.
-Angela Valenzuela
Overview:
This report offers a comprehensive look at the Latino vote in the 2020 presidential election by analyzing votes cast in 13 key states that are home to 80% of the nation’s Latinos. By analyzing ballots cast rather than relying on exit polls, we reduce errors that emerge in exit interviews due to small samples, unrepresentative selection of survey respondents, incomplete understanding of early and absentee voters, and language bias.
Main Findings:
We estimate that 16.6 million Latino voters cast a ballot for the 2020 presidential election nationally. This represents a 30.9% increase, nearly double the nationwide 15.9% growth in ballots cast between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. This was the single largest 4-year increase in Latino vote ever.
Latino voters supported the Democratic candidate, Joseph R. Biden, by very wide margins across the country, and consistent with margins won by Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Latino voters supported Biden over Trump by a nearly 3 to 1 margin in the counties we analyzed in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Latinos chose Biden over Trump with a 2 to 1 margin or larger in the counties we analyzed in Texas, Georgia, and Washington, and in Florida outside of Miami-Dade.
In Arizona, the size of the Latino electorate and their overwhelming support for Joe Biden flipped the state from Republican to Democrat for the first time since 1996.
In Georgia and Wisconsin, where the difference between the winning and the losing candidate was roughly 12,000 and 21,000 votes, Latino voters’ strong support for Biden and growth in votes cast helped tip the state in favor of the Democratic candidate.
In Florida, the Latino vote is diverse and unique from the rest of the nation. Latinos in Miami-Dade supported Trump by a 2 to 1 margin, but Latinos in the rest of the state preferred Biden with a 2 to 1 margin. Overall, a majority of Latinos in Florida voted for Biden, not Trump.
I got a lot out of this presentation moderated by Dr. Victoria DeFrancesco Soto out of the LBJ School titled, "A Deep Dive–Texas & the Latino Electorate," featuring TĂo BernieauthorChuck Rochaand journalist and anthropologist Dr. Cecilia BallĂ to help explain why specific counties, namely Cameron, Starr, and Zapata in S. Texas voted for Trump, as opposed to Biden—when these same counties voted for Bernie during the primaries.
Specifically, in the primary election, Bernie Sanders won both Cameron and Starr Counties by large margins with Zapata County nearly tied with Joe Biden (see USA Today primary results).
You can read BallĂ's important Texas Monthly report from which she derives her analysis and talking points here.
My major takeaway is that Bernie had a good ground game coupled with a robust communication strategy that further consisted of successive investments over time—as opposed to investing in Texas in the last two months of the presidential race when many had already cast their vote.
Identity, which connects to outreach also matters. So-called Latinos from South Texas don't identify with the term, "Latino" or "Latinx," which means that messaging didn't quite resonate. Note: Nor did "Tejano" or "Chicano" resonate except for some slivers of the population.
In contrast, what did resonate were national origin identifiers like "Mexican," "Mexican American," and "Guatemalan," and so on. She attributes this to the ongoing history of migration to Texas.
Related to the ground game, personal contact that consists of political engagement and empowerment cannot be underestimated.
I really appreciate Dr. BallĂ's statement that unlike what is often experienced by the African American community, people in South Texas did not have a sense of working from "a sense of collective history or shared struggle." And yet we know that fighting for the franchise, as well as for civil and human rights is very much a part of our history in our state.
The issue is that this collective memory is not only fragile but—except for Mexican American Studies courses offered as elective courses in some high schools—excluded from our public school curriculum. This despite our current curricular struggle for Mexican American Studies courses in the schools. It's shameful that this history is not already taught as a matter of course.
To this end of curricular inclusion, call whoever represents you and support Texas State Representative Christina Morales' (Houston-D) HB 1504 that call for incorporating at least a half credit in Mexican American Studies and a half credit in African American Studies.
A final takeaway is that not only that the national and state party structures need to invest in Texas' Mexican American and Latino community, but that the party itself must look more like Texas in the diversity of its leadership and membership.
There are other gems within, too, like Chuck Rocha's political analysis of the Latino electorate and why Sanders had such a strong showing among South Texas voters in the Texas primary.
Do take some time out and listen to the entire episode for yourselves.
Enjoy!
-Angela Valenzuela
LATINO LANDSCAPE SERIES
MARCH 1 | A DEEP DIVE: TEXAS & THE LATINO ELECTORATE
As former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt tells MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell, December 10, 2020 was indeed a "9-11 moment" in U.S. history—a definite before and after moment when 106 republican members of Congress broke with democracy and the vote by the people. By refusing to accept that Biden won the election, they abandoned their own trust and belief in democracy.
The choice is ours as a country. Do we want democracy or do we want autocracy? The 2020 Republican Party Platform suggests as much.
The people did speak in the last election. Through their vote, the people did say they wanted democracy. The thing about democracy, however cherished or manifestly revered, it is still always contingent, negotiated, and fragile. Ominously, Schmidt captures our precariousness as a country in which we find ourselves:
“We’re one election away from losing the country to people who do not believe in democracy.”
Hence, the task of every new generation is to take up the work of rediscovering anew our democratic values, ideals, and institutions not the least of which is the right to vote who will represent us in government.
This piece from Time Magazine reiterates what many of us have been saying, namely, that the so-called "Latino vote" cannot be taken for granted, particular given their making up 18 percent of the population and are rapidly increasing in number, to boot. If you listen to the video that accompanies this story, they report that in Texas, over a half million new voters were Latino. By any measure, this is impressive and extraordinary
It's not at all accurate to say that they're uninformed when as journalist Cecilia BallĂ also appropriately notes in her recent investigative report for Texas Monthly, there is meaningful complexity to this electorate that simply cannot be pigeon-holed.
Most analyses I'm reading these days of the Latino vote converges on a clear need for greater democratic party investment, organizing, and engagement of what truly is a diverse, and yes, energized Latino electorate. Pointedly, strategists and organizers need to address this specific pan-Ethnic diversity.
If the Democratic Party wants to enjoy long-term success, the answer is not to ignore or take Latina/os for granted, but rather to invest like the republicans have been doing through the "Libre Initiative," explaining to some degree the Republican Party's success in deep South Texas.
Cultivating future leadership and supporting Latinx candidates are also necessary steps going forward.
BY JASMINE AGUILERA UPDATED: NOVEMBER 10, 2020 7:53 AM EST | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER 5, 2020 7:27 PM EST
UPDATED: NOVEMBER 10, 2020 7:53 AM EST | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER 5, 2020 7:27 PM EST
Ten years after political science professor Marisa Abrajanowrote about the false assumptions made towardsLatino voters, political pundits and campaigns are still making the same mistakes in this election, she says. The assumption of a singular “Latino vote” is wrong, for one, and actually it should come as no surprise that Cuban Americans in Miami Dade voted for President Trump.
Latinos are not a monolith, and not one unified force. The differences between communities are vast and deep. The U.S. is home to an estimated nearly 61 millionLatinos, according to thePew Research Center, and range in age, race, gender, religion, socio-economic status, political ideology and educational attainment. Most are English proficient, and most were born in the U.S.
Despite these nuances, on Election Day the “Latino vote,” was analyzed as a single, unified entity by some political pundits, journalistsandcampaign officialswithout acknowledgment of the complexities of a demographic that makes up an estimated 18% of the U.S. population—a symptom of a wider trend of limited Latino outreach during political elections.
Latinos in the U.S. come from all parts of Latin America, Central America and Mexico. Some Latinos have lived in the U.S. for generations. There’s a variety of Spanish dialects, languages, foods, and traditions. It should come as no surprise that there are also differences in political ideology.
“The assumption is that Latinos are a monolithic group of voters, and the reality is that Latinos make up individuals hailing from more than a dozen different countries,” Abrajano, who teaches at UC San Diego, tells TIME. “The Latino vote in Florida is different from the Latino vote in California, and from Nevada, Arizona—and so to make broad strokes, or using this pan-ethnic term, can be problematic, and the same trend was evident 10 years ago.”
In the aftermath of Election Day, many took to social media to express their concern that analysts were painting Latinos with a broad brush. “It’s laughable that in 2020, this country still needs to be reminded, Sesame Street style, that Latinos are not a monolith & the Latino vote is a mirage,” wrote Los Angeles Times writer Esmeralda Bermudez in a Twitter thread.
“I think the most important thing for people to understand is that there is no ‘Latino vote,'” says Lisa GarcĂa Bedolla, vice provost for graduate studies and dean of the Graduate Division at the UC Berkeley. “What we call Latinos or the Latino community is made up of folks who are very different in terms of national origin, in terms of generation, in terms of language use, nativity, class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, and then it also really matters where people end up living.”
But though social scientists like GarcĂa Bedolla and Abrajano have for decades studied and even provided advice for how political campaigns could better engage wide-ranging communities with nuance, not much has changed, including this election year. GarcĂa Bedolla says what often happens is that campaign managers wait until late into a campaign to begin Latino voter outreach. Often that comes in the form of a campaign ad in Spanish.
“I have been involved for at least a decade in trying to educate [political operatives] about these nuances,” GarcĂa Bedolla says, but, she adds, often the people in decision-making positions lack the cultural awareness necessary to be effective.
“I literally had somebody ask me in 2016 what’s the bumper sticker that is going to mobilize Latinos?” GarcĂa Bedolla says. “What we actually needed were mobilization strategies that would talk to the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth generation English monolingual Mexican Americans in San Antonio…That’s the kind of specificity that we need.”
GarcĂa Bedolla and those who spoke to TIME all say that political campaigners need to engage with Latinos early and often, year-round, to understand the needs of individual communities. What’s important to Puerto Ricans in New York City, for example, will differ from Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.
Because Latinos nationwide vote for Democrats in larger numbers than they do for Republicans, one misconception is that as the population of eligible Latino voters grows in the U.S., so will votes for Democrats. It’s a myth social scientists refer to as “demography as destiny.” Of the estimated nearly 61 million Latinos in the U.S., Pew estimates 32 million were eligible to vote this year, or 13.3% of all eligible voters.
“Both political parties in this country need to recognize that Latinos are not a given entity, they are a constituency that demands recruitment,” says Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action, a progressive organization in Texas that aims to increase Latino political engagement. Texas is home an estimated 5.6 million eligible Latino voters, coming in second only to California with an estimated 7.9 million, according to Pew.
For that reason, Arellano says, campaigns cannot take Latino voters for granted. “We need to recognize that Latinx folks across the country have been here for decades, for centuries and have…for generations been overlooked, neglected and underrepresented,” he says. “It looks like now more than ever before, Latinos are coming to terms with the fact that the political power in this country is rightly in their hands and you have seen that turnout in Arizona, in Nevada, in Texas, where Latinos are engaged like never before because they know that the next chapter of American history will be written by them.”
Party recruitment, Arellano, Abrajano, and GarcĂa Bedolla stress, cannot be as simple as speaking Spanish during a political debate, or opening a rally with mariachi music—symbolic cultural messaging to relate to Latino voters that lack substance, which GarcĂa Bedolla adds, she finds insulting.
Just like all voters, life’s experiences inform the way Latino voters vote, not just ethnic or racial identity. “It makes it seem that, if I’m a Democrat, it’s just because I’m a Latina,” she says. “It’s not because of anything that’s happened to me in my life.”
In fact according to Pew, in 2018, 62% of Latino voters identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 27% leaned toward or identified with Republicans. But this is not something that is widely recognized and political pundits’ surprise at Latino support for Trump on Election Day—the Cuban vote in Florida, for example—points to a lack of understanding of nuances of Latinos in the U.S., says Geraldo Cadava, a professor of history at Northwestern University who wrote “The Hispanic Republican.”
“I mean it really shouldn’t be a surprise,” he tells TIME. “The fact of the matter is that in every presidential election since Richard Nixon won the election in 1972, between a quarter and a third of Latinos have voted for the Republican candidate…by this point you could say that there has been a half-century tradition of Latinos, a significant minority of Latinos, voting for Republican candidates.”
The Cuban American population of Miami-Dade County, for example, has since the 1970s leaned towards the Republican party. But within that community exists nuances as well. Older Cubans who fled from the Castro Regime are still more likely to vote for a Republican than younger generations, Cadava says.
The Trump 2020 Campaign did make attempts to reach Cuban Americans by propagating an anti-socialist message, one that may also resonate with other Latino groups who have their own anti-socialism sentiments, Cadava adds. Venezuelan’s, for example, who take issue with President NicolĂĄs Maduro.
On the other side of the coin, former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also saw wide support from Latinos in Nevada. Analysts credit that success to the months-long effort to win over Nevada Latinos, who eventually helped him win the state in February. “It’s because he did something that other politicians sometimes forget to do: He asked for their votes,” wrote USA Today’s Ruben Navarrette Jr.
When political campaigns fail to do the robust outreach to individual Latino communities, grassroots organizers are often the one ones to fill the void. In Arizona, a battleground state, grassroots organizers have stepped up to mobilize Black, indigenous and people of color, an effort at least 10 years in the making, since campaigners were not taking the steps to engage with this block of voters.
This year, the state saw a strong turn out for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, something Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), a grassroots organization that works to support communities of color, credits to long-term mobilization efforts of organizations like hers.
For a decade, the organization has mobilized around campaign season, knocking on doors in neighborhoods that went ignored by party officials. They helped to increase Latino voter registration, hosted community meetings in key locations, and developed relationships within communities. Gomez says they considered how an outreach strategy for Latinos who are newly naturalized citizens could differ from a strategy intended for Latinos who have lived in the U.S. for multiple generations.
“Demographics are absolutely not destiny,” Gomez tells TIME. “We just did something historic…and for us that is incredible, that is the work, that is 10 years of organizing. And those voters, we’re not going to lose them because we’re gonna call them next week and we’re gonna debrief and thank them for having participated.”
Correction, November 10
The original version of this story misstated the last name of Antonio Arellano, interim executive director of Jolt Action. It is Arellano, not Arrellano.
There are so many ways to think of the meaning of the past election. One of these is to consider the youth vote among young people, ages 18-29—in short, the "younger millennial" vote—if you will. To wit, this resulted in high voter turnout, particularly in 11 key battleground states. For example, read this pertinent piece titled, "Surge in youth voter turnout may have helped propel Biden to victory."
Good, but what does this mean? Calvin Cheung-Miaw frames this—and I think correctly—in light of all the social movements we've been witnessing. By this, I mean the Ethnic Studies, Black Lives Matters, Women's, and LGBTQ Movements that, as a whole show that young adults not only reject authoritarian, white supremacy and with that, a monocultural vision of the world, while opting instead for racial justice and with that, a multiracial vision of democracy.
I shared all of this with my students this week, referring to how these map on to the University of Texas students' "8 Demands" in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings.
Great read, particularly for the college classroom as our students are the constituency that helped us to move forward with this progressive vision for the future that they must continue to own as theirs given the polarization and unfortunate fragility of our current democracy.
The contest between multiracial democracy and white authoritarianism was at the center of the 2020 election, and it will be a defining feature of U.S. politics for at least a generation, shaping the political terrain upon which all other struggles take place and necessitating an anti-right front.
The United States will be a multiracial democracy – a democracy in which people of color have full democratic rights — or it won’t be a democracy at all. This is the key lesson of the Trump era, and the necessary starting point for left strategy. It means that even with Trump out of office, racial justice will be the pivot around which U.S. politics turns. That includes class politics, and the question of whether or not a specifically working-class movement takes shape that is powerful and durable enough to grow in the decade ahead.
STARKLY DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVES
The Republicans have made it crystal clear that the alternative to multiracial democracy is not an imperfect democracy, one in which racist flaws can be gradually eroded, but white authoritarian rule. Indeed, this polarization has already remade U.S. politics in the past twelve years, by cohering social forces on the left and the right, generating entirely separate media and information bubbles, reframing how social groups understand their own interests, and pushing political leaders in the GOP to adopt positions they would have deemed beyond the pale just a few years ago.
The left faces a crucial and challenging set of tasks: expanding the broad anti-right front, keeping it together and focused on the danger of the right, while also finding a way to integrate economic struggles as well as issues of climate, gender, and peace more deeply into the politics of the forces committed to democracy. This will require a workers’ movement fully immersed in the struggle for racial justice, a task made more difficult but all the more urgent by the significant numbers of white workers won over by Trumpism. If we can make significant progress on this, if multi-racial working-class forces become key drivers of the broader democratic struggle, we have the best shot at remaking U.S. politics in a way that prioritizes the needs of working-class communities and communities of color.
DYNAMICS DRIVING POLITICAL POLARIZATION
The U.S. was born as a White Republic founded on settler colonialism and slavery. The White Republic survived the Civil War and Blacks did not secure government enforcement of the right to vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The very next year, James Meredith was shot while marching across the South for the right to vote without fear. Black voting rights have been under assault in the decades since, accelerating even further since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down a crucial portion of the Voting Rights Act. Our historic task is to defeat the far right’s attempt to create a new form of white authoritarianism and install a genuine multiracial democracy for the first time.
Struggles over racism and racial equality have often formed the pivot upon which U.S. politics turns. The present intensity of polarization, however, is first and foremost a result of the political strategies pursued by the Republican party and the rise of neoliberalism in the post-civil-rights era. Over the course of decades, Republican party leadership and right-wing grassroots activists have articulated the upward redistribution of wealth with a variety of other social issues – abortion, gun rights, law and order politics, opposition to welfare, busing, and affirmative action – to produce a political bloc with a social base that allowed it to compete in and win elections.
That social base was overwhelmingly dominated by a cross-class coalition of white voters. The political rhetoric that Republican leaders like Reagan deployed to cement its social base typically used dog-whistle racism, especially anti-Black racism. The party’s success on this front tended to push the Democratic party on the defensive, in some cases – as in the attack on welfare – moving it to accommodate rather than confront racism.
Some sections of the GOP, particularly the California Republican party, sought to stoke anti-immigrant (really anti-Latinx and anti-Mexican) sentiment. Through the early 2000s, however, such an approach was moderated by those who believed conservatism ought to appeal to Latinx and Asian American voters, and the party did earn substantial voters from those communities at the national level.
The election of Obama radically shifted the balance between the more racist and more multiculturalist wings of the Republican party. Obama, for all his shortcomings, symbolized the growing weight of voters of color in national elections and the progressive possibilities that power portended. The Republican party’s electoral strategy of pulling in a supermajority of white voters and a much smaller segment of voters of color seemed to be reaching the end of its shelf life.
We can understand the present-day Republican party in terms of the range of responses to this dilemma. Trump and those who are ideologically aligned with him have adopted the approach of repudiating wholesale the place of people of color within the U.S. polity, These figures tap into the racism that fueled birtherism and stoke it with chants of “Send them back,” directed against the women of color that form the Squad.
Many traditional leaders and strategists within the Republican party disdain the open racism of this approach. Their difference with Trumpism is, however, merely tactical and for the moment they have proven willing to accommodate Trumpism’s worst impulses, mounting only tepid and sporadic objections to Trump’s most embarrassing statements.
They are committed to gerrymandering, purging voter rolls, reducing opportunities for early voting, shutting down polling stations in working-class communities of color, restricting access to the vote through voter ID laws, rolling back the Voting Rights Act, challenging the legitimacy of the actual votes of voters of color and other tactics of suppression that are aimed squarely at voters of color. They supplement this core strategy with appeals to patriarchy and homophobia, promises of entrepreneurial success, and fear-mongering about socialism. They believe this package, combined with the anti-democratic nature of the Senate and Electoral College, will allow the GOP to remain competitive in elections, requiring only relatively minor gains among voters of color.
And they have good reason to be confident. In 2020, voters of color surged as a portion of the national electorate – growing from 29% to 35% of voters. This was enough to tip the balance to Biden in the presidential contest. But the Republicans gained seats in the House, increased their hold over state legislatures, will at worst suffer a 50-50 split in the Senate, and can look forward to control of the Supreme Court and decades of a federal judiciary packed with right-wing ideologues. All this from a white electorate that declined relative to the total electorate, and a couple percentage points of growth among voters of color.
A layer of the Republican party leadership genuinely believes that bourgeois democracy in a multiracial society is compatible with their conservative economic program. These individuals, grouped most prominently in the Lincoln Project, have mostly split openly with the Trumpists. But it is a thin layer, and one that is thoroughly isolated within the Republican party.
RACIAL JUSTICE AND DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
Because the predominant GOP strategy – uniting both Trumpists and the tepid old guard conservatives of the party – is one of preserving its power through white minority rule, the struggle for racial justice is at the heart of the struggle for democracy. While those of us who were taught in the U.S. school system imbibed the idea that U.S. democracy was the foundation of aspirations for racial equality, we should reverse this relationship. Historically and today, it is struggles for racial equality that have eroded the White Republic and produced what democracy we have in the U.S.
There are specific demands where the struggles for racial justice and democratic rights are intertwined, such as campaigns against voter suppression. But those campaigns are inseparable from the broader struggles against racism – against police brutality, against the murders of transwomen of color, against the criminalization of immigrants, for decent public schools, etc. – that demand a recognition of the dignity of people of color within the U.S. polity.
The broader social transformation required to make gains in these struggles is what will also propel the struggle for democratic rights for people of color. As we’ve seen in the finger-pointing by centrist Democrats after the 2020 election, such racial justice struggles divide, to some extent, the anti-Trump front. Politics is an art, and it will require some finesse to keep an anti-right front together under a Biden administration, but backing away from racial justice struggles will only weaken our long-term capacity to fight the forces pushing white minority rule.
Campaigns to expand democratic rights and thus the electorate, on the other hand, have tended to benefit the progressive wing of the Democratic party. This is why groups like New Florida Majority campaigned for voting rights for all, regardless of prior criminal records, and why New Virginia Majority made a concerted effort to strengthen voting rights in its state. New Virginia Majority succeeded in transforming Virginia from one of the hardest states for people to vote in, to one of the easiest states, and it’s no coincidence that this transformation overlapped with its shift from red to blue.
The aftermath of the 2020 election makes clear the intertwining of antiracist and democratic struggles. Even after the 2016 election, Trump mounted a campaign to convince the people of the U.S. that he had won the popular vote, claiming that 3 million immigrants voted unlawfully. In 2020, as Trump pushes his theory of ‘illegal votes’ and his predominantly white supporters flood polling centers in Philadelphia or Arizona, who do we think his base pictures as illegal voters?
THE WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT IN THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
Today, most of the left takes racial justice struggles seriously. We feel have a responsibility as leftists to dismantle all forms of oppression, and we aspire to remove racism as a form of division among workers, in order to produce a united working-class political subject.
Both of these motivations are important. But they miss the centrality of racial justice struggles to the struggle over democracy, and thus the overall terrain of politics in the U.S. Indeed, for those of us committed to building the power of the working class, an expanded democracy and the demolition of obstacles to political participation offers the best chance for the class to become the driving force within the anti-right front, and in the remaking of U.S. politics more generally.
Developing the multiracial working class into a key driver of the democratic struggle will position us to articulate – and win – a vision of democracy that includes rights to housing, education, health care, safe communities, and unionization. It should be a central component of left strategy, alongside the rebuilding of class power at the point of production. It is no accident that throughout U.S. history – from Reconstruction to the way the 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement birthed the Poor People’s Campaign, spurred the development of second wave feminism and inspired the modern LGBTQ movement – so much of how we imagine a society where all working and oppressed people thrive was incubated in the creative furnace of the Black Freedom Movement.
Right-wing populism’s power is in its ability to convince individuals that their material suffering can be alleviated by attacking others who also suffer from capitalism. The Republican party’s open embrace of white supremacy, and its hold on a cross-class bloc of white voters, grew as class politics in the U.S. weakened as a force in shaping people’s lives and their understanding of politics.
One segment of the Democratic Party, ensconced in the Democratic Leadership Council, saw the future of the party in terms of growth among white suburban professionals who were wary of redistributionist politics. Clinton, who emerged from the DLC, embraced the politics of multicultural diversity within his cabinet while passing NAFTA (and welfare reform). The passage of NAFTA proved disastrous for the Democratic party’s base among white workers in manufacturing-based economies. While the trend since 2008 among Democratic presidential candidates has mainly been against the neoliberal orthodoxy promoted by the DLC, even candidates like Biden who on paper had a relatively progressive economic platform tended to downplay class politics as a campaign theme.
If struggles for racial justice and democracy are going to be successful, our side will have to weaken the cross-class front of white voters that forms most of the base of the Republican party, who are being pulled into support of white authoritarian rule. This is impossible without a massive struggle to improve the lives of workers and people of color, a class struggle in the broadest sense.
Right wing populism’s weakness is that it cannot deliver on its promise of improving people’s material conditions. One short video, by NowThis News, followed a set of Obama to Trump voters in Pennsylvania as they followed Trump’s actions during the first two years of his presidency.
While some voters were clearly committed to Trumpism at a deep ideological level, one voter reacted in dismay to Trump’s attack on Obamacare. This voter, a teacher in Luzerne County named Donna, had two parents with Huntington’s disease and lived in fear her entire adult life that an insurance company would find out and kick her off healthcare. Donna also understood how Trump’s cuts to the Shine program, which provides after school programs to under-resourced school districts, would affect her close friend’s own children. After all this, a friend asks her whether she would have voted for Trump knowing everything he would do. She hesitates for a moment, then answers, “yes.”
Donna belongs in the class struggle. It’s our job to organize her.
TOWARDS LIBERATION
A core set of social justice organizations, mostly rooted in communities of color and in unions with large numbers of members of color, have been leading the fight for multiracial democracy. This set of social forces has proven to be the most dynamic left political force in the fight against Trump. They were instrumental in the electoral defeat of Trump and in the tremendous boost in turnout of voters of color and young people in the election.
The uprising in defense of Black Lives thrust the issue of anti-Black racism into the center of national politics, and as it did so it cast a sharp spotlight on all kinds of structural inequities in U.S. society. The Frontline – initiated by the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project and drawing in partners like United We Dream Action and About Face – brought the energy of the uprising into the 2020 election; now it gearing up to press for deep change starting from day one of a new administration.
Our success as a left in moving a broader politics of liberation, encompassing a fundamental social transformation and the redistribution of power and resources, depends on how deeply we engage with these forces and the organizations that represent them, which are predominantly Black-led.
Take, for instance, the question of internationalism. It is currently an open question whether the Biden administration will slide into the mentality of a New Cold War with China, promoted by Trump to virulent effect in order to deflect from his failure to confront the coronavirus, but which has gained adherents in the upper echelons of both political parties. Those of us who believe that our ability to confront climate change depends upon some measure of cooperation with China can and should form our own organizations and campaigns. But we will only be able to move our politics if we are able to win over the racial justice and democratic forces that have been central to the anti-Trump fight. Based on a recent campaign along these lines, however, this is a political goal that is entirely realizable.
CONCLUSION
This article is an attempt at outlining a starting point for political strategy for the next period of struggle. Criticism and discussion is required to overcome its shortcomings, foremost among them the lack of an in-depth exploration of the relationship between the struggle for multiracial democracy and struggles against gender oppression, for queer liberation, disability rights, indigenous rights and decolonization, and for climate justice. Trumpism has intensified all these struggles as a result of its relentless assault on all those marginalized within U.S. society, and they will all play vital roles in reshaping the political terrain, so that another world is possible.
This article grew out of political discussions among Max Elbaum, Whitney Maxey, Melanie Barron, and the author. Thanks also to the Organizing Upgrade editorial collective and Bob Wing for feedback on an earlier draft.
I fully agree that the enfranchisement of our youth and communities must begin with the teaching and learning of the historic fight for voting rights that lead to the passage of the 15th Amendment, understanding as expressed below that textbooks are of little help. The role play exercise mentioned here provides great guidance for teachers desirous of bringing this history alive.
There is a 40 percent-off sale in Rethinking Schools right now on curricula that helps to enfranchise our youth and communities.
Russian interference in our elections should not get taught without also teaching our own unfortunate history of voter suppression. And what better time than right now in the wake of this year's historic election and with the runoff in Georgia that will determine the balance of power in Washington?
What Our Students Should Know About the Struggle for the Ballot — but Won’t Learn from Their Textbooks
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Illustrator: Boris SĂŠmĂŠniako
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which promised “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Given the dizzying array of disruptions to our lives in this moment of pandemic, one could be forgiven for failing to register this anniversary. But the fight for voting rights enshrined in the 15th Amendment is still very much alive, and more critical now than ever — and needs to be taught to every student in this country.
The coronavirus pandemic makes in-person voting dangerous, literally a potential death sentence. Indeed, when Wisconsin failed to postpone in-person voting in early April, infected people voted and likely infected others. And the people most vulnerable to coronavirus are also the most likely to already face disproportionate obstacles to voting: Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, the elderly, the poor, the incarcerated. Voting rights activists are calling for immediate implementation of measures that are basic, long overdue, and which will protect the health of all voters: extension of early voting, online registration options, universal mail-in-ballots. But Republican legislatures across the country balk, citing logistical barriers and the dangers of “voter fraud.” Voter fraud, as all recent reputable studies agree, is very, very rare in the United States. A 2014 investigation published in the Washington Post found only 31 instances (out more than 1 billion ballots) of voter impersonation fraud. Recently, however, President Trump has dispensed with even the pretense of the fraud argument and made clear the Republican Party’s real concerns. As he told Fox News, implementation of vote-by-mail and other pro-democratic measures would create “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
From voter ID laws to voter roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures, on the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high.
From voter ID laws to voter roll purges, gerrymandering to poll closures, on the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment, the right to vote is under attack and the stakes are high. It is critical that students learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present. Textbooks will be of little use. Though the book adopted by my school district outside of Portland, Oregon, to teach 10th- and 11th-grade U.S. history, National Geographic’s America Through the Lens (2019), mentions the 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, the 19th Amendment, adopted in 1920, and the Voting Rights Act (VRA), passed 45 years later, the story ends there. The text offers the false impression that the history of voting rights in the United States is a hopeful tale of steady progress, culminating in 1965. It provides them no context to understand our current moment.
A good place to begin a study of today’s voting rights struggles is Reconstruction, a time when, as Adam Sanchez notes in an article in the Nation, “Black lives mattered.” Using a role play written by Rethinking Schools curriculum editor Bill Bigelow, students in my classroom imagine themselves newly freed in the months immediately following emancipation and wrestle with the key questions of freed people — how to access land, political power, safety, and education. There is disagreement among my 21st-century students — as there was among the real 19th-century freedpeople — about what should happen to Confederate leaders (execution? amnesty?) and about whether to grow cotton to appease Northern elites or permanently renounce a crop that one cannot eat and that is so closely connected with slavery. But about voting, students rarely disagree. Trying to imagine themselves as freedpeople, they see the vote as critical to all their other aspirations. In follow-up discussion of this activity, we reflect on what really happened during the Reconstruction Era. Students are outraged to learn that plantations were returned to Confederates rather than allocated to freedpeople. But they celebrate the 15th Amendment, which immediately extended the vote to nearly 500,000, mostly formerly enslaved, Black men across the South. Like freedpeople themselves, my students see the right to vote as fundamental to freedom.
Fundamental, but not secure. In the years following the passage of the 15th Amendment, myriad forms of racism — violence, devious new voting qualifications, economic exploitation, denial of education — combined to undermine the 15th Amendment and disenfranchise millions of Black people. By the middle of the 20th century, less than 7 percent of eligible African Americans in Mississippi were registered to vote. Though white supremacists succeeded in their campaign of disenfranchisement, Black people and their allies never stopped demanding the franchise, through legal action, civil disobedience, and mass politics.
Though my textbook makes little connection between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement — indeed they are separated by hundreds of pages in its relentlessly chronological march through history — it was the unceasing activism of Black people, and others, that led to the passage of the VRA and finally secured the promises of the 15th Amendment for millions of voters. In the voting rights mixer lesson I wrote for the Zinn Education Project, students appreciate this full-circle moment. Through role play, students encounter dozens of stories, across centuries, about the fight for voting rights. They learn about the achievements of the Reconstruction Era when they “meet” figures like Frances Harper, Frederick Douglass, and William T. Combash — and how Reconstruction promises were restored, renewed, and reinvigorated by later activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, Lawrence Aaron Nixon, and Lamar Smith. From Elzie McGill, an activist from Lowndes County, Alabama, students learn that by outlawing many of the voting qualifications used to deny Black people their 15th Amendment rights, as well as requiring strong federal oversight of state and local elections, the VRA was one of the most effective pieces of legislation in U.S. history. It resulted in the immediate registration of hundreds of thousands of new Black voters.
In a typical U.S. history textbook, the struggle for voting rights ends in 1965. Textbooks describe the VRA — rightly — as a major victory for democracy and the Civil Rights Movement. My students’ textbook, America Through the Lens, was published in 2019, and even covers the 2016 election, but it does not mention the fight for voting rights — or the rise of new forms of voter suppression — since 1965. A number of other textbooks I consulted end their coverage of voting rights at the VRA too, with a couple mentioning the passage of the 26th Amendment in 1971.
Though our students’ textbooks suggest otherwise, the fight to vote is very much alive, which is why the lesson I described above also includes more than a dozen examples of recent voter suppression and activism, presented alongside those of earlier eras. When students encounter side-by-side stories of 19th-century property requirements, 20th-century poll taxes, and 21st-century voter ID requirements, the lesson is clear: Antidemocratic measures that keep the vote out of the hands of the poor are not bygones of a less enlightened era, but recurring motifs in the U.S. story. Why, students wonder, is voting suppression back in vogue?
Over the last decade, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the right-wing group that develops “model” legislation, has sought to transform U.S. politics at the state level, including through voter suppression. ALEC crafts cookie-cutter versions of proposed laws that are brought to states to realize a conservative utopia of deregulation, tax breaks, and massive disinvestment from public spending. In 2011, ALEC made voting qualifications one of its priorities, and 33 states introduced so-called “voter ID laws” in that year alone. These laws require burdensome forms of identification to vote — forms of identification that are less common among poor and nonwhite voters. The calculus is as obvious as it is abhorrent. Poor, Black, and Brown voters are the least likely to support ALEC’s legislative agenda and the most likely to be blocked from voting by these new laws.
As students participating in the voting rights mixer learn from people like Aracely Calderon and Maggie Coleman, ALEC’s agenda of disenfranchisement got a boost from the Supreme Court in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder, when it ruled that a critical piece of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional. Since 1965, the VRA required that locales with an established history of voter suppression or discrimination get permission — “preclearance” — from the federal government before changing voting rules or registration qualifications. State and local governments had to prove to regulators that the new policies had no discriminatory intent toward nor disparate impact upon historically disenfranchised groups — before making any changes. By doing away with preclearance, Shelby gave states the power to pass new legislation related to voting with no oversight.
The lethal combination of conservative activists like ALEC and the hands-off approach signaled by the Supreme Court means voter suppression is on the rise. According to the Brennan Center, 25 states have enacted new voting restrictions since 2010.
Seemingly each day brings a new example. Georgia purged voter rolls. North Dakota refused to allow Native Americans to use their tribal identification to vote. In spite of the overwhelming decision of Floridians to reinstate voting rights of convicted felons, the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted a modern-day poll tax to block them. Although my textbook mentions Russian interference in the 2016 election, it is completely silent on this other kind of “interference” in the democratic process.
The assault on voting rights is fierce, but so is the resistance.
The assault on voting rights is fierce, but so is the resistance. Organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund have been active on the legal front, challenging each new law, appealing each bad ruling. At the heart of these cases are would-be, should-be voters who will not go quietly. Voters like Ms. Rosanell Eaton, a 94-year-old Black North Carolinian, who made 10 trips to the Division of Motor Vehicles and drove more than 200 miles to get a required form of voter identification because the name on her driver’s license did not exactly match her voter registration. Or voters like Gladys Harris, whom students meet in the mixer, a 66-year-old Black woman with disabilities from Wisconsin whose three forms of identification did not satisfy the state’s strict voter ID requirements.
Activists are, as always, critical to the organizing against voter suppression. In North Dakota, the Lakota People’s Law Project raises funds for and organizes volunteers to distribute free identification with street addresses to thousands of Native Americans who would otherwise be turned away at the polls for lack of a proper ID. All over the country, activists use their own cars, often taking unpaid time off of work, to ferry elderly relatives or community members to faraway polling stations or to obtain the new forms of identification required for voting. My textbook details the dueling platforms of the two main-party candidates in the 2016 presidential election, but says nothing about their positions on voter ID laws or the Shelby case.
As I write this article in April 2020, I am sitting in my 2nd-floor office (read: bedroom), with the murmurs of my husband videoconferencing with his middle school science students in the next room, and the tinny sound of my child’s Zoom violin lesson on the floor below. It is hard to recall that there was a time before the coronavirus shutdown of schools, a time when the curriculum calendar showed April as the month in which my U.S. history students would — in our brick- and-mortar classroom — read Fannie Lou Hamer, watch Eyes on the Prize, and learn about the fight for voting rights, past and present.
But here we are. And though I am uncertain exactly how I will carry forward my voting rights curriculum during this period of school closure and emergency online education, it is urgent that I do so.
The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870 thanks to 19th-century anti-racist visionaries and activists. The Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965 thanks to 20th-century visionaries and activists. It will be left to 21st-century visionaries and activists to demand a renewal of our government’s commitment to voting rights. For educators, we need to nurture those visionaries and activists in our classrooms, whether online or in person. One way to start is to push back against textbooks’ erasure of the modern fight for the vote at the same time we teach lessons that bring those struggles to life.
The Zinn Education Project has partnered with Color of Change on a campaign (zinnedproject.org/15th-amendment) to mark the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment. The campaign offers “Who Gets to Vote? Teaching About the Struggle for Voting Rights in the United States” (bit.ly/ZEP_CoC_Voting), a classroom unit with three lessons, and “A Toolkit for Voting Rights Advocates” by Color of Change (bit.ly/ZEP_CoC_Voting2).
