She identifies herself on Twitter as a “Warrior Princess of the #Resistance,” which is a solid clue about how seriously she should be taken. Nevertheless, Danielle Moodie-Mills was a guest on MSNBC this past Monday where she delivered herself not only of the outrageous claim in the headline (more on which shortly) but also posited that “blacks are the backbone of the Democratic Party.”
In view of its behavior in recent months, that’s nothing to be proud of, but the assertion is nevertheless remarkable. Blacks, who do register predominantly as Democrat, have been historically notorious for their weak turnout at the polls.
According to the Census via the Brookings Institution, two notable exceptions were the years 2008 and 2012 when the percentage of blacks who voted jumped up by 5 and 6 percentage points respectively only to drop back down in 2016. The two outlier years were of course the years when Barack Obama ran. According to Debate.org, 70% of blacks who voted in those elections, moreover, admitted to voting for Obama based on his skin color. So much for Moodie-Mills’s wholesale condemnation of identity politics.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
And since we’re back on the subject, how true is her assertion that whites are “always going to vote with their whiteness”? Let’s take the Obama vote again, this time from a white perspective. According to data compiled by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University, in 2012 Obama won 39% of the white vote, while 59% of whites voted for Mitt Romney. The finding appears to lend credence to Moodie-Mills’s assertion until you consider that 93% of blacks voted from Obama that year while a puny 6% voted for Romney.
From Monday night:
"Let us stop pretending that white women and white men are going to save us from ourselves … They're always going to vote with their whiteness." —@DeeTwoCents on @allinwithchris pic.twitter.com/9Qf1XgxU8V
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) November 29, 2018
