President Joe Biden departs the U.S. Capitol after speaking at the House Democratic Caucus meeting, Thursday, October 28, 2021. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
In his recent public comments, Joe Biden invoked the likes of Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis, George Wallace, and the Ku Klux Klan to describe his opponents. That sort of fear mongering is all Biden seems to have left after a year of mishandling everything from COVID, to the border, to the Afghanistan withdrawal. Jason Riley explains in The Wall Street Journal that “With the White House struggling to advance its economic agenda, the president’s job-approval rating stuck in the mud, and midterm elections looming, it’s no great shock that Mr. Biden is resorting to racial demagoguery.”
Democrats Don’t Want to See the Truth About Voting
Riley explains that Democrats aren’t interested in seeing the truth about voting by minorities, because it fails to bolster their preferred fear narrative. He writes:
You would never know it from listening to Mr. Biden’s nasty tirade in Atlanta, but black voter turnout has been rising since the mid-1990s even as more states have passed voting requirements that the president and his backers insist are “Jim Crow 2.0.” Nationally, the black voter-turnout rate exceeded white turnout for the first time in 2008, when President Obama was elected. It happened again when Mr. Obama was re-elected in 2012, prompting the Census Bureau to note that the “increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend.” True, black turnout dipped in 2016, but only to the pre-Obama level. And the decline almost certainly reflected apathy toward Hillary Clinton more than any efforts to disenfranchise blacks. Two years later, “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout,” according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
In 2020, Asian and Hispanic voting levels made history again, while black turnout was the third-highest on record for a presidential election. When minority voters are sufficiently motivated, they seem to have no trouble casting a ballot. And when asked their views on voter-ID laws—as they were in surveys conducted last year by National Public Radio, Monmouth University, Rasmussen and others—large majorities of respondents, regardless of race or political affiliation, expressed support.
Democrats and voting-rights activists aren’t unaware of these facts but hush up about them so as not to undercut the voter-suppression story line. Liberals who complained about Donald Trump’s relentless demagoguery on such issues as illegal immigration are giving Mr. Biden a pass because their criticisms of Mr. Trump were based on political expediency, not principle.
Denial Is All Democrats Have Left
Democrats and Joe Biden keep pointing to a relaxation of voting oversight rules in 2013 as something that made voting unfair, but the evidence, as Riley explains, doesn’t support them.
Democrats continue to assert, as Mr. Biden did in his Atlanta speech, that in 2013 the Supreme Court weakened the 1965 Voting Rights Act to the detriment of blacks when it ruled that federal oversight of voting protocols in states with a history of voter suppression could no longer be justified. The oversight, always meant to be temporary, was based on decades-old data, and the court concluded that times had changed. “There is no denying,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, “that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions.”
Since that ruling, black registration and overall voter turnout have continued to improve, yet Democrats have no choice but to remain in denial because acknowledging racial progress would upend their identity politics and risk putting the party out of business. Thus the nation was subjected to the spectacle of a president in 2022 trying to convince us that the black franchise is as precarious as it was six decades ago.
C’mon, Joe. You’re better than that.
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