Democrats row over black candidates’ ability to win

Campaigners accuse the Democratic Party establishment of holding back candidates and have challenged them to get behind ambitious African-Americans wholeheartedly, amid allegations that they tend to focus the big-money support on white candidates.

Underlying the race tensions is the party’s reliance on black voters to win national and statewide elections while failing to deliver on topics that they care most about, such as criminal justice reform.

“This donor’s words are not anything different from the Democratic Party itself and how it invests in candidates,” W Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, told The Times. “The Democratic Party is quick to get behind white candidates, even if they are milquetoast [feeble] candidates that have no chance of winning. We see that over and over. Losing an election has a lot to do with how they invest, where they invest and how the money is being spent.”

He pointed to the defeat of Charles Booker, a black candidate for the 2020 Senate race in Kentucky who raised $2 million, but was narrowly defeated by Amy McGrath, a white woman seen as the party establishment choice, backed by more than $40 million.

“The Democratic Party doesn’t say white or black, they say ‘electable’, and it always seems that their definition of electability is white candidates,” Robinson said.

The row was started by an email from Barbara Goldberg Goldman, a significant donor and deputy state party treasurer in Maryland, leaked by the Axios news website. She told fellow party members: “Consider this: three African-American males have run statewide for governor and have lost. Maryland is not a Blue state. It’s a purple one [one Democratic and one Republican senator]. This is a fact we must not ignore. We need a winning team.”

Goldman’s email was in support of Tom Perez, a white former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and an establishment figure in the ten-candidate primary field. A spokesman for Perez’s campaign said: “These hurtful and ill-conceived comments do not reflect the values of our campaign, as evidenced by Tom’s entire career to advance civil rights and expand opportunity.”

One of the black Americans in the running, John King, who was education secretary under Obama, told Axios: “In Maryland we have a very diverse state and a diverse electorate, so we are well-positioned to have our first African- American governor.”

Maryland is 55.5 per cent white and 30 per cent black, demographics not dissimilar from Georgia, which elected its first black senator last year.

Rushern Baker, another black candidate in the Maryland primary, said: “Although those candidates didn’t win, it’s not impossible. They just weren’t the right candidates at the right time.”

A spokesman for the campaign of Wes Moore, the third African-American candidate, said: “The idea that there would be scepticism about a candidate’s electability because they are black should have no place in the Democratic Party in Maryland or anywhere else in America in 2022.”

Goldman told Axios: “I regret making the statement. It neither accurately expresses nor depicts my views, and does not represent my lifelong commitment to supporting Democratic causes and candidates.”

She resigned as deputy party treasurer last night. Yvette Lewis, the state party chairwoman, said: “We do not condone or support the comments in her email and the party embraces diversity.”

Chris Jones, a black governor candidate in Arkansas, said that donors needed to be ready to fund new types of candidates who may not fit preconceptions. Arkansas has never had a black statewide representative but Jones said there were hundreds of thousands of voters who felt overlooked who could be reached. Scepticism from the party establishment was “understandable”, he said, as he challenged donors to take more risks. “There’s a model of how we win that is really not serving as well as it could right now,” he said.

Biden is losing vital supporters
President Biden won the backing of 92 per cent of the black vote in 2020 but recent polling shows a sharp drop in support from this crucial constituency for the Democrats (David Charter writes).

NBC News found in January that black support for Biden was 64 per cent, down from 83 per cent last April. A CNN poll last month put black approval of Biden at 69 per cent. The appointment of the first black female vice-president and the nomination of the first black female judge for the Supreme Court appear to have done little to reverse his decline in support.

Biden knows he owes everything to black voters. They saved his presidential campaign in the South Carolina primary after an appeal from the influential black congressman James Clyburn, leading Biden to swear on his name that he would not forget.

Black campaigners say he and his party in Congress have done just that with the failure to pass reforms in policing, criminal justice and voting rights. Biden’s vow to end the federal criminalisation of cannabis, wipe convictions and free those jailed for possession have come to nothing.

This inability to deliver does not bode well for the midterm elections in November. Some commentators blamed stay-at-home black voters for the Democrats’ failure to hold the Virginia governor’s mansion in last year’s main electoral test. Senior African-Americans in the state said the drop in black support for the party since the 2020 presidential race was no more significant than the decline among other groups or the decision of suburban Biden voters to switch parties.