Hmm.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote...
> We began by asking eligible voters how “convincing” they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points... Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos. These numbers do not translate directly into support for the Republican Party; too many other factors are at play. Nevertheless, the results tell us something important: a majority across the groups we surveyed did not repudiate Trump-style rhetoric as obviously racist and divisive, but instead agreed with it.
Shor makes basically the same error as the authors of the New York Times piece above: assuming that opposing immigration and supporting law-and-order are inherently “racist” views.
Progressives need to ask themselves: is opposition to abolishing ICE (to use one of Schor’s examples) actually “racist?” Because if they just run with the assumption that it’s racist, they’ll force themselves into taking an incredibly unpopular position. As Shor himself points out, the people running the campaigns are ideologically progressive. Even if polling shows that abolishing ICE is incredibly unpopular, so long as they accept the premise that it’s the anti-racist thing to do, they will support it (or the far left will make them support it). This was basically the story of the 2019 Democratic primaries, where nearly every candidate embraced incredibly unpopular issues out of fear of being “called out.”
And “demographic destiny” won’t eventually vindicate progressives’ all-consuming view of racism. As the New York Times article above explains, a message focused around racial identity and the idea of pervasive “white supremacy” (like Elizabeth Warren ran in the 2019 Democratic Primary) actually polls poorly among Latinos (who are now the largest non-white group in the electorate). Meanwhile, Trump’s polling is up 100% among Black people and 60% among Hispanic people under 45 compared to 2016: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-is-losing-ground-.... If Republicans can convert that into votes, states like Texas and Georgia will stay solidly red. Shor is ultimately right. Democrats need to get back white voters in a country that will be 50%+ white for the foreseeable future. Because in the long run non-white voters aren’t as much of a lock as they assume. But they really need to introspect about why they would ever have thought otherwise to begin with.