Why the Black vote is different

The polling postmortems of 2020 are going to be long and tough. At this early moment, pollsters seem to be suggesting that Donald Trump has successfully trained or deepened the instinct among his most rabid (largely white and rural) base not to answer the telephone. Well, maybe. If so, and this habit endures, not only will journalistic polling be left in the dark, but also internal campaign polling on which candidates make decisions about resources.

Then there's the polling of non-white citizens. We are nowhere close to understanding the behavior of the various segments of the Latinx electorate; we should wait for more depth of analysis. I've been attending to Latinx polling since 1994 and all I know is that polling among Latinx communities ALWAYS stinks. And it doesn't seem to improve much.

What I want to do here is pass along a very clear, insightful, Twitter thread from Nicole Hannah-Jones (Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones) which explains to journalists how to think about Black voting patterns. Hannah-Jones is the prime mover behind the New York Times 1619 Project, that magisterial exploration of how Black USA came to be. She's got a lot to say:

Again we see how expertise in race, racism, racial history is an essential but underdeveloped journalistic skill. That Latinos, Asian & white votes are split is NOT surprising. It is the uniformity of the Black vote that is exceptional & it stems from a singular racial experience.

Black Americans, because of a history of chattel slavery and racial apartheid, have been forced into a monolithic vote even as they hold diverse political views. That's [because] every aspect of Black Americans' lives was legally and socially constrained by their designation as Black.

A Black doctor, a Black immigrant, a Black Northerner, a Black evangelical all were barred from schools, jobs, housing, libraries, parks, voting, by law, by custom, by policy. Their individual attributes were literally irrelevant. Their citizenship and rights always contested.

This was true until a half century ago! I am part of the first generation of Black Americans in the history of this country for whom it was not illegal to deny me marriage rights, housing, education and employment simply because my ancestors had once been enslaved.

Thus, Black Americans have a shared history and shared racial experience that is singular in its uniformity, and Black Americans have always had to vote their civil and human rights over any other concerns or political issues. That is a different experience from other groups.

We tend to cover elections, our country overall, as if every group who is not white experiences racism, racial inequality and race the same, but there is a distinct experience of being the people on which the established racial hierarchy was built. We need more sophistication here.

Yes, please.