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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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