Liberals Envisioned a Multiracial Coalition. Voters of Color Had Other Ideas.

[brooklynite]

New York Times

The proposition seemed tailor-made for one of the nation’s most diverse and liberal states. California officials asked voters to overturn a 24-year-old ban on affirmative action in education, employment and contracting.

The state political and cultural establishment worked as one to pass this ballot measure. The governor, a senator, members of Congress, university presidents and civil rights leaders called it a righting of old wrongs.

“Women and people of color are still at a sharp disadvantage by almost every measure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in an editorial endorsement.

Yet on Election Day, the proposition failed by a wide margin, 57 percent to 43 percent, and Latino and Asian-American voters played a key role in defeating it. The outcome captured the gap between the vision laid out by the liberal establishment in California, which has long imagined the creation of a multiracial, multiethnic coalition that would embrace progressive causes, and the sentiments of many Black, Latino, Asian and Arab voters.

I think that too many progressive Democrats view African Americans and Latinos monolithically, and assume that support for police reform or immigration reform (respectively) is adequate to gain their political support.

[ananda]

1. I'm trying to figure out how this makes sense.

Anyone?

[KayF]

9. the answer may be behind the paywall

I'm interested too in why this happened but I don't have a NYT subscription.

[SheltieLover]

17. Same here.

[greenjar_01]

2. Never tires of attacking Democrats and liberals

Non-stop all day every day.

[brooklynite]

3. Facts are stubborn things...

Trump increased his share of both groups.

[Turin_C3PO]

5. So are we supposed to

emulate Trump’s policies in order to keep voters of color? I don’t understand your point here.

[greenjar_01]

6. Doesn't have a point

If he's attacking progressives or Democrats it's a good day, period. There is no other purpose.

[brooklynite]

12. Feel free to elaborate...

[JonLP24]

7. That doesn't mean we should abandon reform or enact Trump's policies on immigration

Latino voters were key in ousting Joe Arpaio from office because they did the ground work & activism for years. Why? Because of his anti-immigration & discriminatory police tactics. They were also key in putting Biden over the edge in Arizona.

Besides I don't support those issues to win people over. I support them because they are the right thing to do.

[brooklynite]

10. Nobody is saying that we SHOULDN'T advocate for them...

...but advocating for them ALONE won't be enough.

[Turin_C3PO]

4. I don't get

why I’m supposed to be happy that the proposition was defeated? Am I missing something?

[brooklynite]

8. The article isn't about voting down the Affirmative Action initiative...

Its about liberal activists assuming that it would pass because minority groups would automatically support it. They are more complex voting blocs and need to be approached accordingly.

[Turin_C3PO]

11. Well,

of course all voters should be treated as complex human beings. But I’m not sure we did anything wrong in California.

[JI7]

13. The problem is California's term limits on state legislature

They should be the ones passing these things .

[KayF]

14. I'd be interested in more details

I don't have a NYT subscription, do they explain why Latino and Asian-American voters rejected this?

[brooklynite]

15. from the article...

Asian-American Californians opposed the affirmative action measure in large numbers. A striking number of East and South Asian students have gained admission to elite state universities, and their families spoke to reporters of their fear that their children would suffer if merit in college selection was given less weight. That battle carried echoes of another that raged the past few years in New York City, where a white liberal mayor’s efforts to increase the number of Black and Latino students in selective high schools angered working- and middle-class South and East Asian families whose children have gained admission to the schools in large numbers.

“There’s more texture to California blue politics than you might think,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and policy director for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run. “Identity politics only go so far. There is a sense on affirmative action that people resent being categorized by progressives.”

Latinos, too, appear sharply divided. Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down.

Latinos make up more than half of San Bernardino County’s population, although significantly fewer turn out to vote. More residents there voted on the affirmative action proposition than for president, rejecting it by a margin of 28 percentage points. In rural Imperial County, in the southeastern corner of the state, 85 percent of the population is Latino. The voters there who gave Joseph R. Biden Jr. a nearly 27-point margin of victory went against the affirmative action measure by 16 percentage points.

[JonLP24]

16. "Identity politics"

Sounds like a Progressive. I do know progressives complaining about "Identity politics" hurt Bernie Sanders in both primaries.

Barbara Smith Shares the Real Meaning of Identity Politics, the Most Misused Phrase in Our Lexicon

If you want to know the real definition of identity politics, don’t expect to get it from a bad leftist podcast, a right-wing reactionary, or opportunists who believe that it’s another way of saying “representation.” Instead, ask the black feminists of the Combahee River Collective who coined the phrase in the 1970s to articulate a specific political ideology.

(Snip)

From the New Yorker:

Smith told me, “By ‘identity politics,’ we meant simply this: we have a right as Black women in the nineteen-seventies to formulate our own political agendas.” She went on, “We don’t have to leave out the fact that we are women, we do not have to leave out the fact that we are Black. We don’t have to do white feminism, we don’t have to do patriarchal Black nationalism—we don’t have to do those things. We can obviously create a politics that is absolutely aligned with our own experiences as Black women—in other words, with our identities. That’s what we meant by ‘identity politics,’ that we have a right. And, trust me, very few people agreed that we did have that right in the nineteen-seventies. So we asserted it anyway.”

This also included black women’s right to formulate political agendas in the socialist sphere, which was and still is prone to class reductionism.

The C.R.C.’s renowned mission statement argued that black liberation, feminism, and socialism—together—were essential factors required for the liberation of all people. “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression,” read the C.R.C. statement. If one attempts to extract sexism and racism from the equation, such an outcome would be impossible.

https://jezebel.com/barbara-smith-shares-the-real-meaning-of-identity-polit-1844443249/amp?__twitter_impression=true

Coalition building is very difficult.

[KayF]

20. thank you

the motives for the Asian-Americans makes sense to me, the measure simply isn't in their interest.

What about the Latinos? Did they perceive it wouldn't be in their interest? That's a huge difference, +27 for Biden vs. -16 for prop 16.

[frazzled]

18. My only guess is

that a significant number of Latinx and Asian voters in California are conservative. Neither of these groups represents a homogeneous bloc of voters, and we should not assume they are, nor count on them to be on our side just because of their origins or “race.”

My sister lives in Southern California, and has several friends from South America. They are very liberal, but they’d been horrifiedly telling her all year that so many of their of their friends/acquaintances were Trump supporters. It’s no surprise that many in the varied and diverse (both economically and geographically) Asian community are quite conservative.

These results don’t surprise me one bit.

[Sympthsical]

21. Asian Americans hate affirmative action. It hurts them.

They want strictly merit-based for the most part. Look what’s going on at Harvard and Yale. Asian students are suing because they believe racial weighting is penalizing them.

UC Berkeley has a sky high amount of Asian students. Is that unfair? Should that change?

When you have groups that put high emphasis on higher education, they want merit to speak for itself and not have the slots available artificially limited.

It’s a very common sentiment here in the Bay Area.

The Latino community is much more complex. You could (and someone probably has) write a book about their thoughts on the matter.

[Hortensis]

19. NEVER forget that half are conservative, and that at least half of THOSE

are hard-core conservative, every bit as racist and antagonistic toward other races and groups, including women's rights, as their white counterparts. And many long for authoritarian leaders to direct them in smashing the "other" every bit as much as white authoritarians.

Is it any real surprise that a few of those joined in a giant, intoxicating wave of Trump-lead anger that reflects their own attitudes far more than Democratic liberalism ever did or could? Or that others voted resentment against Democrats instead of Republicans by not voting? This is the real world and real people.

As for the claims of what all of any orientation who refused to vote for Democrats want from Democrats, is there EVEN ONE that wasn't blasted to bits by their enabling Republicans to continue racial divisions, continue assaulting equality and even the right to live, continue demolishing laws and programs meant to serve all, and continue active persecution of others more vulnerable than themselves?

Democrats are not responsible for the choices of conservatives and LW hostiles of any race, religion, sex, or background. They are. And no excuses for them.

Or for anyone who chose for Trump to be able to continue trying to jail political opponents, torment babies because it's unspeakably cruel, conspire in genocide against the Kurds, and execute people known to be innocent among many, many of the crimes they assumed and endorsed by trying to enable him.

Btw, they may not all have known, but everyone should, that law-smashing authoritarian leaders typically become much worse in a second term, seeing reelection rightly as permission to commit and get away with much bigger crimes. All who stood to keep that from happening did really good. All who did not did very bad.

[LeftInTX]

22. I'm not a Californian and I'm always piping up about Texas and Latinos...(which I have knowledge of)

But from what I've read on DU, those ballot measures are hard to understand and get a lot of negative media attention in California.

Maybe someone from CA can say something.