Election 2026: Fulfilling the Promises of the Declaration of Independence and Providing Black Folk with True Equality

Do you prefer pre-Dobbs or post-Dobbs America?

This was my standard social media response to anyone who had the temerity to suggest that Republicans and Democrats were teh same. Corporate Dems shilling for corporate America, yadda yadda yadda. I get it, but I still prefer Bill Clinton’s and Barak Obama’s America to Reagan’s and W’s, don’t you? And, I certainly am pissed off that we are currently living through the Trump dystopian hellscape.

I figured anyone and everyone would agree with me on this score. The one simple question would inform our electoral decision decisively.

Turns out I was wrong.

For many Black voters, it didn’t matter who was in the White House or who controlled Congress, their neighborhoods and lives remained unchanged.

Unchanged.

Hunh.

Talk about white privilege.

According to the pollster, Terrance Woodbury, most of his Black focus group participants report that they see no difference in their lives based on the person in the White House. Turns out that the worsening of racial wealth disparity brought about by the tax cuts during Trump 1.0 was just more of the same for Black folks.

The financial penalty for being Black that Trump’s signature legislation brought about was indistinguishable from the day-to-day hardship of being Black in America that they were already experiencing.

Then, Biden’s Build Back Better program of sweeping investment in American infrastructure that was so confusing in its portions that no one can keep which bill did what straight and half of the Republicans in the country have taken credit for the deliverables… Anywho, it turns out that all the benefits to the Black community were largely cosmetic, so Biden and Harris didn’t really get any credit for that, either.

It isn’t lost on Black voters that they rescued Biden’s 2020 nomination in South Carolina and put him in the White House, not that I pretend to speak for or understand Black folks in America. I’m just reporting what I heard on Clock It with Symone and Eugene. I guess they don’t speak for Black America, either, but they’re likely closer than I am, and Woodbury conducts polling and focus groups of the Black communities in America, so there’s that.

In an election where messaging is the key to turn out, getting it right is important.

On the very white podcast Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast, he recently interviewed a guest — I heard this only on the promotions for the podcast — who was advocating for the election message of saving democracy. While this message is effective with white people — and let’s face it, as long as white people feel like it is theoretically possible for them to vote sometime or other if they ever feel like, they’ll think we live in a democracy. After all, we say we’ve lived in a democracy from the beginning when it included slavery and excluded non-whites and women from the franchise for much much longer than we ever included them.

For the white progressives, we’ll get het up over the prospect of saving democracy and posts sick memes to our social media and dog pile MAGA trolls and whine over our lattes about it all, but for Black folks — or so I’ve been told — the real messaging is saving our rights, specifically our right to vote.

Luckily, for white Democrats, the Republicans done took care of that messaging for them. Republicans made sure Democrats couldn’t screw it up. Right after the Calais decision by gerrymandering minority-majority districts down to the barest minimum before the ink had dried on the press release. This includes eliminating every Black majority district in Tennessee.

Republicans have awoken the sleeping giant and activated the secret weapon that Democrats had left to rust in the corner. But, it isn’t enough.

As Woodbury points out on the podcast, Democrats had been leaking Black support by a rate of several percentage points for every election for a decade or more. Older Black voters are solidly Democratic because they are closer to the fight for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. But, younger Black voters have been living with the paltry benefits of those acts and being painfully aware of being ignored by the national parties.

The complaint that Democrats only come around to Black communities every four years pandering for votes is accurate. Like I said, I do not purport to speak for the Black community, but it seems like simple logic that to solicit the support of a community, you need to provide some kind of benefit to that community. It may be one reason that the progressive message is resonating throughout the primaries. Medicare for All has clear benefits for Black folks across the country. The Child Tax Credit has immediate impact on families of all communities.

It is more than those individual programs. If we are to elevate our Communities of Color to being truly equal with their white counterparts, we must forge a new path that builds upon the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960’s and the Constitutional amendments of the nineteenth century. Part of the fight really is about fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all people are created equally. Democrats need to make it a central plank of their platform and legislate accordingly if we are to keep our big tent coalition.

Image Attribution

This image was found on Waging Nonviolence and has a Creative Commons license.