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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There is a remarkable corollary in these statistics:

> Nearly two‐ thirds of Latino Americans (65%) and White Americans (64%) and nearly half of African Americans (49%) have political views they are afraid to share

According to the first chart, 42% of “strong liberals” feel like they can share their political views. That group is disproportionately white: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo.... So there are all these people of color who are substantially more afraid to share their political views than a group of disproportionately white liberals on the far left.

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For those who aren't aware, the reason for this is well-known: the average POC statistically leans right on all social issues except for race.

> For those who aren't aware, the reason for this is well-known: the average POC statistically leans right on all social issues except for race.

Blacks are the most supportive of abortion legality in most or all cases of any race other than Asians, so that's one issue that isn't race that Blacks lean to the left on.

https://www.prri.org/research/legal-in-most-cases-the-impact...

It’s complicated. They are also more likely to say abortion is morally wrong than many other groups, which has political implications. (Legality versus non-legality isn’t really the main issue today.)

You mean "to the right of the Democratic party". It is not in fact the case that black voters lean to the right of the median in US politics.

No, I mean to the right of the median. For example, in poll data from last year 61% of Americans overall but only 51% of black Americans support gay marriage. On some issues like interracial marriage, they're actually even further to the right; 18% of black Americans say interracial marriage is bad for society, while only 12% of Republican-leaners do.

https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-ga...

https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on...

Marriage equality is a notorious outlier. Compare abortion, marijuana legalization, immigration, and taxes. (Rayiner noted earlier that black voters are to the right of Democrats more generally, which is true, but they're right at the median overall, and far to the left of evangelical white voters).

My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion. I can't find any recent statistics - all the polls I'm seeing only break down "white" and "non-white", but black Americans trailing in support for abortion is a historically well-known phenomenon (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3852356/).

The other issues, yeah, you're right. I don't really consider taxes a social issue, but I realized I forgot about gun control.

> My understanding is that black voters are also to the right of the median on abortion

As I point out, with a source, in another subthread, Blacks are more supportive of abortion than the nation as a whole, and second only to Asians. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23936024

Even in your ancient (5 years after Roe!) piece, while Blacks were less supportive of abortion than average, they were also becoming supportive more rapidly than other groups. 40+ years later, that faster change has flipped the starting positions.

because no party has ever represented them, only pandered. the affiliation assumptions aren't as strong as people are led to believe, I would say nonexistent.

> because no party has ever represented them, only pandered. the affiliation assumptions aren't as strong as people are led to believe,

From a different item of the same piece, Black Democrats are less likely than White Democrats to prefer compromise with Republicans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/27/5-facts-abo...

and regarding the two third of Latino Americans?

Blanket statements like these are impolitic at best, and utterly wrong at worst.

but more closer to 50% since literally half of the people don’t openly espouse verbatim party line beliefs and dont want people to know, while a much greater percent of the subset that bothers/is enfranchised to vote sticks with one party

Reinforcing an assumption, useful for pandering, while with this information another approach could be possible

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