In the leadup to Election Day politicians, pundits and pollsters have once again expended considerable effort trying to predict how voters will vote. Will voters choose based on the economy, immigration concerns, climate change, the Israel-Hamas war, or something else?
Author and podcaster Steve Phillips is in the “something else” camp.
Phillips, the host of the podcast “Democracy in Color,” tells Connecticut Public’s “All Things Considered” that race has a profound impact on voter behavior, surpassing factors like class, gender and geography.
"When you look at the data, you see this stark racial divide in how people are voting," Phillips said. "In 2020, the majority of white voters supported Trump, while 87% of Black voters supported Biden. That kind of split doesn't happen with other demographic factors."
He pointed out that historical data back to 1976 shows a consistent trend: African Americans have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party, while a small majority of white voters have favored Republican nominees.
"You've got to really contort yourself to work your way around it, to ignore that as one of the fundamental driving factors of American politics," Phillips added.
Inadequacies of traditional polling
In recent elections, traditional polling methods have often notoriously failed to capture the true sentiments of the electorate.
Phillips cited as an example of conventional polling failure a New York Times/Siena College poll that’s been widely cited in weeks leading to election day. The poll seems to indicate that former President Donald Trump is gaining unprecedented support for a Republican candidate among Black voters. Phillips expressed skepticism.
“I just fundamentally believe the New York Times does not know how to poll Black people very well,” he said.
He pointed to discrepancies in recent polling that reported surprisingly low levels of support for Kamala Harris among Black voters.
“No Democratic nominee ever since 1976 has got less than 83%,” he said. "So they would have us believe that Michael Dukakis and John Kerry and all of these people are doing better with Black people than Kamala, which is also absurd on its face."
Racial identity front and center in Phillips’ ‘New Majority Index’
Phillips believes his New Majority Index (NMI) can do better than traditional polling. It’s a tool Phillips developed that incorporates the racial composition of voters by considering the number of people of color in a district, as well as the number who are not voting.
Phillips believes the NMI provides a clearer picture of the "winnability" of a district and helps gauge how progressive it might be.
Phillips said the NMI takes its name from what’s known as the New American Majority (NAM), a group consisting of people of color, young people aged 18-29 and unmarried women. The NAM largely populated The Obama Coalition, the voting bloc considered largely responsible for Barack Obama’s presidential election victories.
“Obama showed the racial composition of this new American majority. And so it's a high 70% of people of color, and it's around 40% 39% of whites,” Phillips said.
As an example of the efficacy of NMI, Phillips, on his website, has pointed to Georgia's 2020-22 election results, where he said his index predicted a strong likelihood of a Democratic victory long before the major polls did.
“Whereas many political prognosticators aggregate polling data into statistical models and forecasts, the NMI does not use polls at all, since they are dependent on an individual pollster’s highly subjective determination of which people are likely to vote in a given election, among other reasons,” Phillips wrote on his website. “This ‘Likely Voter’ lens completely misses efforts to change the composition of the voting pool by organizing and mobilizing infrequent voters.”
Race-averse polling a symptom of a greater problem
Phillips sees American politics as a continuous struggle over the nation's identity, a battle between a multiracial democracy and forces supporting white supremacy.
He argues that race remains deeply embedded in American electoral politics, manifesting particularly in local election debates around law enforcement and so-called "law and order" issues.
“A lot of the whole issue around police reform and accountability, and then the backlash to that with this whole 'defund the police' was a very racialized conversation,” he said, adding that it often served as a way to talk about race without explicitly naming race as the subject of the conversation.
The future
Despite these challenges, Phillips said he has hope of a future where race is less of a factor at the voting booth.
He cited the country's progress over time, including the election and re-election of an African American president and the current possibility of a Black woman reaching the White House.
"From a historical standpoint," he said, "the Maya Angelou phrase, 'I am the dream and the hope of the slave,' resonates deeply. I'm not sure that the slave would have envisioned having people in the White House who look like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris."
Hear more from best-selling author Steve Phillips on race and political polling
