2020 Democrats Are Dramatically Changing the Way They Talk About Race

Democrats thinking about running for president in 2020 are dramatically changing the way the party talks about race in Donald Trump’s America: Get ready to hear a lot more about intersectionality, allyship, inclusivity and POC.

White and nonwhite Democratic hopefuls are talking more explicitly about race than the party’s White House aspirants ever have — and shrugging off warnings that embracing so-called identity politics could distract from the party’s economic message and push white voters further into Donald Trump’s arms.

While the 2020 primary will feature debates about Medicare for all and college affordability, the Democratic base also wants to know how candidates will address systemic racism and what they think it means to be an ally to people of color.

The shift is largely a response to Trump. His words and actions on issues infused with race — from NFL players protesting police violence during the national anthem, to proposing a ban on all Muslim immigration, to family separations at the southern border — have roused Democratic activists to demand a full-throated response, according to interviews with dozens of progressive activists and aides to several potential 2020 candidates.

So with mixed results, white Democrats such as Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand are earnestly embracing the language of racial justice advocates. And potential candidates of color like Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Julián Castro are leaning into race in a way that Barack Obama did not — and felt he could not — throughout his first campaign and much of his presidency.

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After coasting to reelection this month in New York, Gillibrand declared in her victory speech that “it all started with the Women’s March — an intersectional moment when you could march with your sign — regardless of what it said — women’s reproductive rights, Black Lives Matter, clean air and clean water, LGBTQ equality.”

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And in Sanders’ forthcoming book, “Where We Go From Here,” the Vermont senator argues that “[s]everal years ago, the abominations of our criminal justice system were not widely discussed.” He goes on to credit Black Lives Matter and the ACLU for fighting a system “that was racist and that criminalized poverty.” {snip}

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Many progressive grass-roots organizations are instituting new training and programs to improve their approach to race. Indivisible, the largest “resistance” group of the Trump era, recently held its first mandatory virtual training; more than 300 group leaders across the country tuned in. The topic: “Direct Voter Contact through a Racial Equity Lens.”

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The recent, more explicit rhetoric on race among potential 2020 Democratic hopefuls — who, to varying degrees, have addressed racial issues for years — is at least partly strategic. Black voters are likely to be decisive in many 2020 primaries, especially in the South.

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Strategically sound or not, “identity politics” isn’t going anywhere. And candidates are learning the hard way that there’s less room for error than ever, especially if they are white.

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Other white potential candidates, such as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Vice President Joe Biden, are receiving renewed scrutiny over their records. Bloomberg stirred controversy this fall when he defended his controversial stop-and-frisk policy as mayor and said he thinks Democrats will agree with him on policing.

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Perhaps to avoid gaffes, several of the potential 2020 candidates are taking steps to become more fluent when talking about race.

Warren has been consulting with the think tank Demos, which focuses on inequality, to integrate their language about combining race and class into a single narrative into her speeches, a flurry of which she’s given to civil rights groups. {snip}

Sanders, for his part, has been holding rallies with Black Lives Matter organizers and asking allies like activist Shaun King and Our Revolution President Nina Turner how he can improve.

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Still, some people close to Sanders say he has not added enough people of color to his inner circle or his staff, pointing to the fact that 82 percent of his Senate staff is white, according to the recently instituted Senate Democrats Diversity initiative, which provided data on all the Senate offices as of mid-2018. By contrast, Warren’s office is 64 percent white, Gillibrand’s is 47 percent, Booker’s is 37 percent and Harris’ is 34 percent. (An aide to Sanders said four of the senator’s eight hires the past year have been people of color.)

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Booker regularly gets onstage and tells the crowd that he’s there to “get folk woke.” Harris has said that the phrase “identity politics” is deployed “to minimize and marginalize issues that impact all of us. It’s used to try and shut us up.” And Castro’s PAC, dubbed Opportunity First, made a point of supporting candidates of color in 2018; more than half of its endorsees were people of color.

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The frank talk about race contrasts with Obama’s first campaign and time in office, when he and his team took great pains to appear more a candidate who happens to be black than the black candidate. “[T]here’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America,” he said in his famous 2004 speech at the Democratic convention.

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Trump’s dog whistles have made white liberals far more receptive to discussions of systemic racism. From May 2015 just before Trump declared his candidacy to June 2017, Democratic support for the statement “immigrants today strengthen the country,” increased 20 points, from 62 percent to 82 percent, according to Pew Research Center. The percentage of Democrats who agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days” went from 44 percent in February 2014 to 66 percent in June 2017, also according to Pew Research Center. Among white liberals, 79 percent agreed with that statement.

An early sign of the hunger for a Democratic politician to talk about race — and the potential political consequences — came in August, when Democratic Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke took a question at a town hall about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. While the questioner was a Republican plant wanting to help Ted Cruz on a topic that he believed would help Republicans, O’Rourke’s nuanced but unequivocal defense of athletes like Colin Kaepernick went viral on the left and helped O’Rourke, a potential 2020 candidate himself, raise a record-shattering $38 million over three months. Still, Cruz, who narrowly won the race, used O’Rourke’s answer to attack him with a campaign ad featuring a veteran who lost two legs in Vietnam.

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