US Politics

At times, the Trump administration has seemed like a wrecking ball, careening from floor to floor of a building being destroyed, observers never quite knowing where the ball will strike next. At others, it has worked stealthily to undermine rules and norms, presumably fearing that, as the great supreme court justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “sunshine is the best of disinfectants”.
These changes, far beyond politics or differences of opinion on policy, should trouble all those who care about the future of the American republic. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, veterans of Republican (Bush) and Democratic (Clinton) administrations, are students of the presidency whose scholarship is informed by their service. They have combined to write a field guide to the damage and serious proposals to undo it.
Presidencies do not exist in a vacuum, and many of the excesses of which the authors complain did not begin in 2017. But Trump upped the stakes: the violations of rules and norms are not merely quantitatively more numerous but qualitatively different. Whether seeking to fire the special counsel investigating him, making money from his businesses or attacking the press, he has made breathtaking changes.
As the authors write, “Trump has merged the institution of the presidency with his personal interests and has used the former to serve the latter”, attacking “core institutions of American democracy” to an extent no president had before.
The American constitutional system, unlike the British, is one of enumerated powers. But over 230 years, norms have arisen. Unlike laws of which violations are (usually) clear, norms are “nonlegal principles of appropriate or expected behavior that presidents and other officials tacitly accept and that typically structure their actions”. In an illustration of the great American poet Carl Sandburg’s observation that “The fog comes on little cat feet”, norms “are rarely noticed until they are violated, as the nation has experienced on a weekly and often daily basis during the Trump presidency”.
Those two axioms – that Trump’s offences are worse than others and that norms can easily be overcome by a determined president – show reform is essential.
The first section of After Trump deals with the presidency itself: the dangers of foreign influence, conflicts of interest, attacks on the press and abuses of the pardon power.
Here the reforms – political campaigns reporting foreign contacts, a requirement to disclose the president’s tax returns and criminalizing pardons given to obstruct justice – are generally straightforward. Regarding the press, where Trump has engaged in “virulent, constant attacks” and tried to claim his Twitter account was not a public record even as he happily fired public officials on it, the authors would establish that due process applies to attempted removal of a press pass and make legal changes to deter harassment of or reprisals against the media because “the elevation of this issue clarifies, strengthens, and sets up an apparatus for the enforcement of norms”.
Goldsmith and Bauer’s second section focuses on technical legal issues, specifically those surrounding special counsels, investigation of the president, and the relationship between the White House and justice department.
The American constitution is far more rigid that the British but it too has points of subtlety and suppleness. One example is the relationship between the president and an attorney general subordinate to the president but also duty bound to provide impartial justice, even when it concerns the president.
The issues may seem arcane, but they are vital: “Of the multitude of norms that Donald Trump has broken as president, perhaps none has caused more commentary and consternation than his efforts to defy justice department independence and politicize the department’s enforcement of civil and criminal law.”
And yet even as the attorney general, William Barr, sought a more lenient sentence for Roger Stone, stood by as Trump fired the US attorney in New York City, and kept up a “running public commentary” on an investigation of the origins of the investigation into the Trump campaign, the authors oppose those actions but remain cautious. They decline to endorse some of the more radical proposals, such as separating the justice department from the executive branch. More

The decisive rejection by the US supreme court of an attempt by one state, Texas, to throw out election results in four other states might prevent the recurrence of such an effort in future presidential elections.But the Texas lawsuit was not the only unprecedented attack to be leveled on US democracy during the November presidential election, and other such efforts could escalate in, or echo through, future elections for an unknown time to come.Historians could mark 2020 as the moment when Republicans applied the same zeal they have used to attack democracy in advance of elections, through voter suppression and gerrymandering, to attacking democracy on the back end, by trying to deny and overturn the results.Here is a list of five post-election attacks on democracy by Donald Trump and Republicans that were new in 2020 but might haunt elections for years to come.Especially reckless and sustained election fraud chargesFalse accusations of election fraud are a fixture of US elections, but Trump has professionalized the enterprise, making more audacious and systemic claims of election fraud than ever before and coaxing more elected officials to go along with the lies than seemed possible before the Trump era.Republicans normalized Trump’s false charges by treating them as “legal challenges”. But by declining to acknowledge the election result, Republicans lent weight to the notion that something unusual was afoot apart from Trump’s effort to subvert the popular will, and they held open a months-long window for Trump’s lies to circulate, during which faith in US democracy was damaged.Political pressure on local elections officialsWill the certification of election results in key counties ever again be taken for granted? And will the partisan poison that reached down to the local level in 2020 corrupt the conduct of future elections at that level?This was the year for local officials from both parties to receive death threats as they worked to finish the vote counting and then certify the result. Many Republican officials, as in Philadelphia, Michigan and Georgia, reacted to the pressure with expressions of outrage and brave statements of principle. But other local Republican officials, as in Detroit, responded to the merest charm offensive from Trump by trying to retract their certification of the county results.In healthier times for the US democracy, no one paid much attention to the certification process because it was taken as an article of unexamined faith that the vote was the vote and the only role officials had was to stamp it. Now there is a plain chance that officials might take direction from the White House, the Republican National Committee or someone else instead of voters.External legal challenges to the certification of state election resultsLawsuits have developed around elections before, but never in US history has an election been followed by a legal battle of the scope mounted by the Trump campaign. Trump, the loser, sued in every state, with multiple lawsuits, where flipping the result could help him win.The fact that Trump lost basically all the lawsuits might not discourage future presidential campaigns from building a national post-election legal strategy into their victory plan: if you can’t win at the ballot box, try the courts.Internal political challenges to the certification of state election resultsGoaded by Trump, legislators in Pennsylvania asked the supreme court to prevent certification by the state of its result. Republican Senate candidates in Georgia demanded that the Republican secretary of state withdraw from the certification there. The Republican party in Arizona demonstrated extremely shrill behavior, demanding that the election not be certified and even challenging Twitter followers to express their willingness to die to prevent certification.On the whole, efforts by these state elected officials to respond to Trump’s sudden demand that they overthrow what everyone had previously recognized as a democratic process were half-hearted and ineffectual. But if state elected officials get serious about disrupting the certification process, they might come more prepared in future elections.The president’s roleShould a president of the United States, after an election, be calling up county election officials in charge of certifying the results? Should a president invite lawmakers weighing an intervention in their state’s certification process for lunch? Should a president call out the mob on Twitter against a local election official or a state secretary of state who has resisted his schemes?Whatever damage US democracy has sustained in 2020, much of it traces back to the source, to a president who did not see anything wrong in 2019 with coercing a foreign leader to try to take out a political opponent, who made the fealty of state governors a condition of pandemic aid, and who now has twisted the arms of elected officials across the United States in an effort to subvert the will of American voters.The role that Trump has played in attacking the integrity of the American system is the most outrageous and unprecedented of all the unholy perversions of democracy that 2020 has seen. Whether that role will be replicated or reprised in future White Houses, and in future elections, could make all the difference. More

Joe Biden is inheriting a mess of a country. The pandemic has killed 290,000 people and threatens many more; another 853,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims last month; and stores are reporting spikes in shoplifting for food and baby formula.If Biden has any answers for us, Americans are keen to hear it.Instead, the Biden team and its media allies have talked up one rather specific aspect of the Biden administration: diversity. Over the past few weeks, Biden has announced the White House team he wants to help lead us out of crisis. Yet instead of touting the skills of those selected or what they’ll do concretely to improve working people’s lives, we’ve been hearing about their “lived experiences”.It started with an unlikely subject, Antony Blinken. Blinken is Biden’s nominee for secretary of state and, for what it’s worth, a white guy. A white guy who happened to support the Iraq war and played a key role lobbying his boss to do the same. A white guy who founded a “strategic advisory firm” that works with defense companies the world over. There’s not much to get excited about, right?Not so fast. As one article put it: “Antony Blinken has two toddlers. This is good for fathers everywhere.” Well, maybe not for fathers in the Middle East – but at least we’ll finally have “a dad-rocker in the state department”. Dads of the world, unite!Some of the other expected senior Biden positions are actually from historically oppressed groups. But these announcements seem to follow the same pattern: foreground identity to the expense of real policy.Progressives, for example, have long argued that the Department of Homeland Security should never have been created by the George W Bush administration to begin with. But why abolish a department that makes us less safe and violates our civil liberties when you can just put a person of color in charge of it?When the Biden team announced that Alejandro Mayorkas had been picked to do just that, they cut to the chase. Instead of explaining their plans to remedy some of the horrors of American immigration policy, the Biden team reminded us that “Mayorkas will be the first Latino and immigrant nominated to serve as DHS secretary”.Just one minute later came the breaking news that “Avril Haines will be nominated to serve as national intelligence director, which would make her the first woman to lead the intelligence community”. Haines was deputy CIA director and one of the primary architects of Obama’s drone program. When out of public service, she found time to defend torture and work for both Palantir and Blinken’s firm. All that and Haines is “a bookstore owner/community activist”.On 30 November, Politico reported that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was putting pressure on the Biden administration. They weren’t pushing him to take stronger action on black unemployment, poverty, or the scourge of mass incarceration – they wanted a black secretary of defense. The campaign seemed to be working. “At the end of the day I would say that it’s going to be hard for Biden not to pick the first female secretary of defense, but Jeh Johnson would be the first Black secretary of defense and there are a lot of white faces,” a former senior defense official told Politico.It wasn’t Johnson, but on Tuesday Biden announced that Lloyd Austin was his pick. Lloyd Austin is African American and has served 41 years in the military. His appointment, and those of other former army brass, has alarmed those concerned about the decline of civil control of the military. Also alarming is the fact that last year alone Austin earned more than $350,000 for serving on the board of directors of the military contractor Raytheon.Democrats are continuing their rebrand from the party of FDR’s New Deal to the party of cultural posturingWhat the CBC thinks about all of this is not clear. Their sole interest seems to be about Austin’s racial identity.At the same time, others were celebrating Biden’s selection of an all-female senior communications staff and the appointment of Neera Tanden as budget director. Sure, Tanden is a woman and south Asian; she’s also someone who’s advocated cuts to social security and the looting of Libyan oil to pay for the US bombing of Libya.Some picks are better than others. Janet Yellen, for example, is a center-left economist who, as Ryan Grim notes, has a mixed record but seems to be a genuine step up from Obama-era appointments like Tim Geithner. When announcing Yellen, though, Biden didn’t mention her Keynesian background or any of her academic work about full employment. But he did joke that he “might have to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda to write another musical about the first woman secretary of the Treasury”.If it’s not clear, I’m not thrilled about these appointments, but beyond their substance, it’s very telling how they were rolled out. The Democrats are continuing their steady rebrand from the party of FDR’s New Deal and economic redistribution to the party of diversity and cultural posturing.Racial minorities, women and LGBT people better like what they see, because that’s all they’ll get. Would any of the establishment figures touting the incoming White House’s composition tell a recently laid-off white person not to worry, because a member of “their community” will be in the Biden administration? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Yet the minority base of the Democratic party is expected to subsist off scraps of representation.It’s a PR trick no different than that one we’ve been recently seeing in corporate America, where your boss will ask you read White Fragility and contemplate your privilege before laying you off. Or where a listing like Nasdaq doesn’t care what unethical stuff you have to do to make money, as long as you’re doing it with a diverse board of directors.This vague touting of backgrounds isn’t just irrelevant to most of our lives, it distracts us from how simple the policy solutions to the crises facing poor and working-class Americans are. If people don’t have healthcare, we can give them comprehensive healthcare through Medicare for All. If they’re struggling financially to raise children, we can provide them with free childcare and universal pre-K. If they’re dealing with housing insecurity, we can expand section 8 vouchers and build affordable housing units. If they don’t have good-paying jobs, we can sturdy up the union movement and create guarantees of public employment.But instead of Democratic leaders actually nourishing the tired, poor and huddled masses with a robust welfare state, we’re told to eat diversity instead. More

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Nearly four decades after the publication of A Very British Coup, a popular novel by member of parliament Chris Mullin, America is in the throes of a very Trumpian coup – desperate, mendacious, frenzied and sometimes farcical and, most importantly, doomed to failure.
But even as Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election result face a knockout blow when the electoral college meets on Monday, the president is winning in other ways that could cause profound collateral damage.
Trump has raised more than $170m since losing to Joe Biden by requesting donations for an “election defense fund”. He has reasserted his dominance of the Republican party, many of whose members have either advanced his lies about a rigged election or maintained a complicit silence.
And his war on democracy, amplified by rightwing media to millions of Americans, threatens to burn long after Joe Biden takes the oath of office on 20 January. There are already signs of a new grievance movement rising from the ashes of Trump’s defeat to shape the future of Republican politics. It is driven by disinformation, rage and the core premise that Biden is an illegitimate president.
“What was a fracture in our democratic process is now a break,” said Kurt Bardella, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project. “The Republican party has shown itself to be completely immune to facts, truth and common sense. There is not going to be a moment where it collectively decides, ‘Oh, my gosh, what have we been doing all this time?’
“There is not going to be a great epiphany. They are going to continue down this path of dismantling the country as we knew it because their ideology isn’t about an issue or a specific public policy. Their identity is only the pursuit of power and the means to try to hold on to it and get more of it.” More

The White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has reportedly told the head of the US Food and Drug Administration to authorize Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine on Friday or prepare to resign.Meadows leaned on Hahn during a phone conversation on Friday, according to the Washington Post. It came after Donald Trump tweeted that the FDA was “a big, old, slow turtle”, and told FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn to “get the dam vaccines out NOW”.The warning from Meadows led the FDA to speed up its timetable for potential emergency approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine from Saturday morning to later on Friday, according to the Post. The vaccine would be the first to roll out across the US, after also being approved in the UK and Canada.An unnamed official told Reuters that Meadows’ comment about resigning “wasn’t a red line” but was more of a quip with the intention of urging “the FDA to act quickly and get the job done and stop the delays”.The White House declined to comment, although an administration official said Meadows does request regular updates on the progress toward a vaccine.“This is an untrue representation of the phone call with the chief of staff,” Hahn said in a statement. “The FDA was encouraged to continue working expeditiously on Pfizer-BioNTech’s EUA request. FDA is committed to issuing this authorization quickly, as we noted in our statement this morning.”Earlier in the day, the health secretary, Alex Azar, said the FDA was “very close” to granting emergency use authorization for the vaccine and that vaccination of the first Americans outside clinical trials could begin on Monday.“I’ve got some good news for you here,” Azar told ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday. “Just a little bit ago the FDA informed Pfizer that they do intend to proceed towards an authorization for their vaccine.“We will work with Pfizer and get that shipped out so we could be seeing people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week.”The step followed a vote on Thursday by an outside panel of experts convened by the FDA to recommend authorization of the vaccine. The recommendation signaled that the first approval of a Covid-19 vaccine for use in the US was imminent.That would mark a major milestone in a pandemic that has killed more than 285,000 Americans and 1.5 million people globally. The US would become the third country in the world to have authorized the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the broader public behind the UK and Canada, and it will be the most populous country to do so.A similar advisory panel will review a second vaccine, developed by Moderna with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on 17 December.The United States recorded more than 224,000 confirmed cases on Thursday and 2,768 deaths, slightly down from a record high 3,124 deaths a day earlier, according to the coronavirus resource center at Johns Hopkins University.“If we have a smooth vaccination program where everybody steps to the plate quickly, we could get back to some form of normality, reasonably quickly,” Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN. “Into the summer, and certainly into the fall.”But that was a distant promise for many communities with overtaxed healthcare systems struggling to handle the surge of patients. At least 200 US hospitals were at full capacity last week and in one-third of all hospitals, more than 90% of all ICU beds were occupied, according to a CNN review of weekly data released by the health department.A top coronavirus adviser to President-elect Joe Biden warned that Americans should plan “no Christmas parties”, with weeks of continued pressure on healthcare systems anticipated ahead.“The next three to six weeks at minimum … are our Covid weeks,” Dr Michael Osterholm, the director of the center for infectious disease research and policy in Minnesota and a member of Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, told CNN. “It won’t end after that, but that is the period right now where we could have a surge upon a surge upon a surge.”The US Congress failed again on Thursday to strike a deal on a new package for coronavirus relief, after the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, torpedoed $160bn in state and local funds from what had been an emerging $900bn deal.The Senate adjourned until next week when legislators were expected to resume their efforts.The United Kingdom began administering the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine earlier this week. Azar said that the FDA had reviewed a recommendation by UK health officials that people with a medical history of serious allergic reactions should avoid the vaccine, after two healthcare workers who suffer from severe allergies and carry epipens had allergic reactions to the vaccine, and had to be treated. They have since recovered.“There was really good discussion at the advisory committee yesterday, especially around these issues of the allergic reactions that we saw in the United Kingdom,” Azar said.As a last step before issuing the authorization, the regulator needs to finalize guidance for doctors about prescribing the vaccine and advising patients.“It’s very close, it’s really just the last dotting of Is and crossing of Ts,” Azar said.Azar said earlier this week that he had been in contact with members of the Joe Biden transition team to ensure a smooth rollout of the vaccines. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two does for maximum efficacy. Hundreds of millions of Americans could be vaccinated over the next year.Jessica Glenza contributed to this report More

A wave of outrage from human rights group, activists, elected officials, and others over the execution Thursday night of federal prisoner Brandon Bernard continued to grow on Friday behind a coordinated call for the abolition of the death penalty.Bernard, 40, was executed by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after the US supreme court rejected a last-minute appeal to stay the execution and Donald Trump did not publicly respond to calls for him to intervene.After 17 years without a federal execution, the Trump administration has executed nine inmates since July, and plans five more executions before Joe Biden takes office on 20 January. Biden has pledged to eliminate the death penalty.Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, the sponsor of legislation in the House to end the federal death penalty, tweeted footage on Thursday night of Bernard speaking from prison. “Abolish the death penalty,” she wrote.That call was taken up by activists from Pressley’s progressive allies in Congress to Vanita Gupta, president of the leadership conference on civil and human rights.In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder“Brandon Bernard should be alive today,” Vermont senator Bernie Sanders tweeted on Friday morning. “We must end all federal executions and abolish the death penalty. In a world of incredible violence, the state should not be involved in premeditated murder.”Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty advocate, said she had spoken with Bernard the day before he died. He “told us about everything he was grateful for in his life,” she said. “He died with dignity and love, in spite of the cruel, unjust system that condemned him to die as a result of egregious prosecutorial misconduct.”Prejean called the killing a “a stain on us all”.Bernard was sentenced for a role in the 1999 killings in Texas of an Iowa couple whose bodies he burned in the trunk of their car after they were shot by an accomplice, Christopher Vialva.He directed his last words to the family of Todd and Stacie Bagley, the couple he and Vialva were convicted of killing: “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s the only words that I can say that completely capture how I feel now and how I felt that day.”He was pronounced dead at 9.27pm eastern time.“Brandon Bernard was 19 when he committed murder,” tweeted Julián Castro, the former housing secretary from Texas. “Since then, five jurors and a former prosecutor have said they don’t support the death penalty in his case. Brandon will be the ninth person executed by the federal government this year. We must end this horrible practice.”Advocates for Bernard included the reality show star Kim Kardashian West and others thought to have Trump’s ear, including two lawyers who defended Trump at his impeachment trial this year in the US Senate and who filed briefs in the supreme court appeal, Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr.Todd Bagley’s mother, Georgia, spoke to reporters within 30 minutes of the execution, saying she wanted to thank Trump, the attorney general, William Barr and others at the justice department for bringing the family some closure. She became emotional when she spoke about the apologies from Bernard before he died and from Vialva, who was executed in September.“The apology and remorse … helped very much heal my heart,” she said, beginning to cry and then recomposing herself. “I can very much say: I forgive them.”In a statement when executions were resumed in July, Barr said the government “owed” it to victims to kill the convicts.“The justice department upholds the rule of law – and we owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” Barr said.Alfred Bourgeois, a 56-year-old Louisiana truck driver, is set to die Friday for killing his two-year-old daughter. Bourgeois’ lawyers alleged he was intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty. Several courts said evidence did not support that claim.The first series of federal executions over the summer were of white men, which critics said seemed calculated to make them less controversial amid summer protests over racial discrimination.Four of the five inmates set to die before Biden’s inauguration are Black men. The fifth is a white woman who would be the first female inmate executed by the federal government in nearly six decades. More

The key to the Democrats’ 2020 win in the United States is hiding in plain sight: their success in forming a multiracial coalition. Whereas Republicans relied overwhelmingly on white voters alone, poll data indicates that Democrats convinced white voters along with Latino, Black, Asian American and Native American voters to form a powerful coalition. The Democrats’ success in 2020 provides a roadmap to winning future elections.The US is a multiracial nation, and the Democrats are a multiracial coalition. But this can be hard to recognize from the way most polling is reported. In almost every case, statistics break down voting patterns by race, for instance reporting that 87% of Blacks and 65% of Latinos voted for Joe Biden, while 58% of whites pulled the lever for Trump. Political reporting is saturated with information highlighting voting patterns by discrete racial groups, but almost nowhere can one find numbers about the assembled coalitions.The problem is not the statistics themselves. Pollsters provide numerical answers to the questions they’re asked. When it comes to race, conventional political wisdom urges splitting groups into contending racial camps. But that routine splitting of racial groups accepts the Republicans’ basic framing of American politics, blinding Democrats to their great strength as a multiracial coalition.Since the 1960s, Republicans have campaigned on a message of racial conflict. They urge whites to see themselves as threatened by demands for racial equality as well as by immigration from continents other than Europe. Republican rhetoric is usually coded, replacing racial epithets and frank endorsements of white supremacy with terms like “thugs”, “welfare queens” and “illegal aliens”. Even so, the underlying message remains pervasive: racial groups are locked into conflict – whites against all the rest – and everyone must choose a racial side.When Democrats and liberal pundits parse the vote by racial bloc rather than by multiracial coalition, they unintentionally reinforce this mental schema. The group-conflict mindset encourages the view that each racial group has competing interests and strongly implies the existence of inevitable trade-offs when recruiting from different racial groups. No Democratic candidate for president has won a majority of the white vote since 1964, so Democrats know they must assemble a multiracial coalition. Viewing voters through the lens of competing racial teams, however, often pushes Democratic strategists to see the need to build cross-racial solidarity as a liability.Yet look at the 2020 coalitions. Based on available exit poll data, Black voters were 22% of all of those who voted for Joe Biden, Latino voters comprised 16%, and Asian Americans were a further 5%. In other words, Biden won with 43% of his total vote coming from Black, Latino and Asian American voters, combined with 53% of his support coming from white voters.In contrast, Donald Trump’s “coalition” barely deserves that name. White voters provided 82% of his support. Just 3% of Trump’s team were African Americans, with Asian Americans at just under that number. Latinos were 9% of Trump voters – but this overstates the racial diversity of Trump’s coalition. Latinos differ among themselves about how they identify racially. In polling one of us conducted in July, 13% of those seeing Latinos as people of color indicated they would vote for Trump, compared with 32% of those seeing Latinos as ethnically white.Visualized this way, one sees immediately that the notion of contending racial armies – and especially the Republicans’ extreme version, which paints white people as besieged – is obviously false. When viewed in terms of discrete groups, the majority of whites voted for Trump. But when seen in terms of coalitions, white voters also formed the majority of Biden supporters. What sense does it make to describe whites as one racial bloc, let alone as an endangered group?But one also sees that, in American politics, race nevertheless remains supremely relevant. The question for most voters is not what racial group they belong to – white or Black, Latino or Asian. It’s what sort of racial future they expect – one where they must barricade to protect their family against threatening and unfamiliar strangers, or one where their family will best thrive in communities that promote respect, curiosity and collaboration.For the most part, Democrats have been slow to sharpen this basic choice between conflict or collaboration, leaving voters to work it out on their own. Even so, many seem to have figured it out. Themselves all too often the targets of racist barricades, African Americans overwhelmingly (but not uniformly) reject the political party pushing conflict. Most Latinos and Asian Americans do, too, though some seem to believe they will join the mainstream if they help close the gates behind them.With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflictAmong white voters, the greater tendency of those with college degrees and those in urban areas to vote Democratic may reflect more confidence in a collaborative multiracial future. This emerging sense of linked fate across racial lines is evident in the multiracial coalition that delivered the presidency to the Democrats.Republicans suspect that in 2024 they’re likely to face a mixed-race Black and Asian presidential candidate in the person of the current vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris. Even if that doesn’t come to pass, they certainly see a country with an increasing non-white population. With or without Trump, Republicans are very likely to continue campaigning on themes of racial threat and conflict. If so, they will cast the Democratic party as the party of racial minorities, and if Harris is the Democratic candidate, she will be the inevitable bogeyman.For Democrats, a successful retort is already on hand. They are not the party of a non-white cabal, as the right alleges. Nor need they be a party that prioritizes whites, as too often happens when Democrats believe they must choose between racial constituencies. Instead, they are the party of racial coalition, and within this new majority, every racial group has an equal and valued role. In other words, for Democrats, the multiracial coalition they need to win has already come together. Now Democrats must lean into it.One way to do so is to promote the data showing that a multiracial coalition is already taking shape. Rather than almost exclusively relying on statistics that split people into separate groups, Democrats (and the media) should also call for and publicize the coalition numbers. Indeed, Democrats should make their success in building cross-racial solidarity a core aspect of their brand, popularizing the idea that they represent a future in which all groups by pulling together can find security and the freedom to thrive. The numbers – when we make them visible – show that Democrats represent the hope of our multiracial society.Ian Haney López is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America
Kristian Ramos is the founder of Autonomy Strategies and former communications director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus More