Hillary Won Because of Voters of Color

Hillary Won Because of Voters of Color July 27, 2016

I recently came upon an interesting Facebook post by filmmaker Gabriel Diego Valdez, who wrote the following about Hillary:

If you’re uncomfortable with the candidate voters of color chose to an historically overwhelming degree, I don’t care. How many times have Hispanic voters, have Black voters backed candidates with whom we’re uncomfortable because we had faith in the coalition that we keep with you.

Valdez writes that voters of color voted overwhelmingly for Hillary, but it’s more than that. If the Democratic primary had involved only white voters, Bernie Sanders would have won. In other words, it was voters of color who chose the nominee. As Valdez added in another Facebook post:

62% of women, 64% of Muslim, 65% of Hispanic, and 78% of Black voters backed Clinton in the primary.

That’s both a historic margin among women and a historic margin among voters of color.

So while the “real people” who supported Sanders and what he represented complain about their votes not counting, a lot more…whatever you’d call the rest of us…are getting the weird feeling that the first time our votes have counted, the first time we’ve pushed through a candidate despite what the “real people” think, the “real people” don’t really care and are going to do what they want anyway.

And that spits in the face of an alliance that’s seen…whatever you’d call the rest of us…back “real people” candidates time and time again, over decades and generations.

Valdez isn’t wrong about the numbers. Look at this:

black vote

If the Democratic presidential primary had involved only white voters, Sanders would have won the primary election by a hair. In a very real sense, in other words, voters of color determined the results. The same happened in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, when African American voters overwhelmingly supported Obama while white voters supported Hillary by wide margins.

I tried to look up primary results for earlier races, but had difficulty finding popular vote numbers broken down by race. Still, Valdez’ point about voters of color frequently having to suck it up and back a candidate that makes them uncomfortable rings true, both historically and in House and Senate races.

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