What do we do with the Sanders-Trump voters?

A recent study suggests that about 10% of people who supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary voted for Donald Trump in the general election, and that those “Sanders-Trump” voters disproportionately held regressive views on race.
Assuming Sanders supporters defected at roughly this rate in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, they provided Trump’s margin of victory in those states and thus the election.
The study has gotten a lot of attention. It rationalizes the Democrats’ 2016 Presidential loss in a way that doesn’t require the party to do much soul-searching.
The reactions to the study are shaping up to be the latest chapter in an ongoing re-litigation of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. I’ve lost what little interest I had in this navel-gazing pastime, but (I say this as a strategist, not an ideologue) it will hurt Democrats if they avoid a critical analysis of the party’s political losses, which occurred not just in the 2016 Presidential race but have been happening in races up and down the ballot since 2010.
But this raises more fundamental questions about politics and race in America than the tired re-hashing of last year’s primary.
The most prominent analysis of the study by Clinton supporters has been, to put it bluntly: Bernie Sanders’ supporters are a) racists and b) not loyal Democrats.
Implicit in this critique is the takeaway that there’s no place in a left-of-center coalition for these people, they’re despicable racists and we don’t need them or want them.
This analysis isn’t entirely wrong, but there are a couple important pieces of context here.
First, the Sanders-Trump voters represent only 10% of Sanders voters, and the data doesn’t support applying conclusions about that 10% to Sanders supporters writ large (who voted overwhelmingly for Clinton).
Second, there is precedent for supporters of a losing primary candidate defecting to the other party. As the Washington Post pointed out (citing two different studies), about 25% of Hillary Clinton supporters defected to McCain after her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama. Like the Sanders-Trump voters in 2016, Clinton-McCain voters were more likely to hold negative views about black people.
That said, speaking only about the 10% of Sanders voters who defected to Trump (and not broadly about Sanders supporters or the social democratic left), I think the harsh “racists and disloyal Democrats” analysis of those voters is more or less correct. While no group is a monolith, the data bears out their view on race and their defection speaks to their lack of party loyalty.
And, given the data about Clinton-McCain voters from 2008, this is not an issue isolated to 2016. There appears to be a chunk of voters who have some willingness to vote for Democratic candidates — but aren’t attached enough to the party to do so consistently — and have retrograde views on race.
This presents a question: do justice and political reality demand rejecting these voters? Shaming them? Both?
Anecdotally, the overwhelming answer to this seems to be “yes — reject and shame.”
Racism is pervasive in our government institutions, our social mores, the professional world, our subconsciouses, and our geography. It is abhorrent and wrong, and in an ongoing process that has fits and starts, I work to educate myself about racism and to actively dismantle it. I am deeply angry at people who actively support racist beliefs and systems.
There is a theory of change that suggests that a sufficient amount of social shame and pressure will drive people away from racist beliefs (at least, consciously held ones). There is some evidence this is true, and some evidence that it can backfire.
It’s certainly satisfying.
But part of what’s driving America’s increasing political polarization is our social and geographic isolation from people who are different from us. Knowing someone gay makes people more supportive of LGBTQ issues, knowing people of different socioeconomic classes makes people more aware of inequality, and I would venture an educated guess that knowing people of color might similarly lead to more progressive views on race.
Our views on almost everything, including politics, are influenced to a large degree by our social circles and groups in which we claim membership.
So if it’s a goal of progressives to make racists (disproportionately surrounded by other racists that reinforce their racist views) less racist, then shouldn’t anti-racists (disproportionately surrounded by other ostensible anti-racists) find a way to get in a room with racists and start talking to them?
Of course, you’d need to find some common ground in order to get into a room with them in the first place. It could be a shared appreciation for wine, a mutual love of camping— or democratic socialist economic views, which explicitly connect institutional racism with economic injustice and oppression.
My great-grandfather organized one of the first integrated unions in the country: a Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers local at a nickel plant in Huntington, West Virginia. The town had an active Klan and many of the white workers in the plant were hard-core racists.
But the union organizers brought them in with an appeal to their shared economic interest with their black co-workers. I don’t know if those guys were ever reading Frederick Douglass but they were marching (and bleeding) together with black people on the picket lines, demanding equal pay, and making friends. Some refused to join the Klan even though everyone else in their family was a member (not a praiseworthy act in my social circle, but in West Virginia almost a century ago, it was progress).
It would have been easy to write those guys off on the front end, call them racist bastards and call it a day. You wouldn’t be wrong, and I guess they’d deserve it. But by teaching them about their shared self-interest with people of color, the union was able to teach these guys how racism hurt everyone, black and white.
I heard a similar story from a veteran labor organizer about the steel plants in Indiana — the plant management used race to divide their employees, but once they organized together they started to understand their shared interest. They gained respect for each other. Their views on race changed (and thanks to their racially integrated organizing, so did their paychecks). Most of the successful mass education of working class Americans on race, to my knowledge, has been done this way.
So, yes, some of these Sanders-Trump voters (and Clinton-McCain voters) were almost certainly racist.
We can try shouting at them from a pedestal (one which, at least for white people, our inescapable complicity in racism disqualifies us from standing on) because it feels good, but sociology and history suggest that won’t have much real impact.
These people heard an economic message ($15 minimum wage, strong unions, paid maternity leave, universal health care, free college tuition, higher taxes on the rich, regulating Wall Street) that was compelling enough to them that they were willing to vote for a guy who had Black Lives Matter on his platform and on his staff despite their regressive views on race.
Organizing demands that we recognize and explicitly discuss our self-interest, and it is a relatively short road to educate these voters about how institutional racism is contrary to theirs.
Approached properly, this economic conversation leads naturally towards a deeper conversation around race and racism. It’s a tool for the Left to bring people into the movement in places it’s not currently succeeding (and for the Democratic Party to get “disloyal Democrats” to vote for their candidates). That’s how building a mass movement works — people who just showed up don’t come pre-woke, you have to wake them up, and it takes work. But we have to get them in the door.
To be clear: we cannot accommodate or enable anyone’s racist views. We cannot make policy concessions. We cannot give an inch in our dedication to dismantling racism. But we should get in the room with the Clinton-McCain voters and the Sanders-Trump voters and begin a conversation; they are low-hanging fruit in the scheme of the many hearts and minds we have to change, and economic inequality is the best starting point we can hope for.
Building the mass movement we need to achieve the goals that racial justice demands (in criminal justice, housing, education, and environmental quality, to name a few) will require educating and organizing a huge number of white people around anti-racism, and it is the responsibility of anti-racist white people to persuade other white people to be anti-racist.
If we are going to succeed as a progressive movement, we must take the difficult road of agitation, education, and organizing of those folks to build the power we need — not the easy-if-understandable road of looking down our nose at them.
