(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
The last week has been tough. That video of George Floyd’s final moments is tough to watch.
There is obviously a lot going on in this country right now. And as a white guy living in the Midwest, it’s probably not my voice; that anyone is really all that interested in hearing on most of it. But I do think the events since May 25 have provided some illumination about what presently seems like a bit of a background issue: Joe Biden’s pick for vice president.
A lot of polling has been conducted about voters’ preferred VP pick. It’s probably not a big surprise to anyone that Elizabeth Warren has generally been coming out on top among Democratic-leaning voters. She ran a good primary campaign and came to the table with the big, ambitious policy proposals craved by the politically engaged.
What has been more of a surprise, to some, is that minority voters tend to prefer Warren over several women of color who are also in consideration for the second spot on the ticket. A poll of registered voters from Morning Consult/Politico conducted May 22-26 found that picking Kamala Harris as VP would make black voters a net 19 percent more likely to vote for Joe Biden (the net percentage is the share of voters who said a particular VP pick would make them more likely to vote for Biden minus the share who said that particular candidate would make them less likely to vote for Biden). Harris on the ticket was also found to make Hispanic voters more likely to turn out for Biden by a net 13 percent. But, the net gains in likely Biden support were far higher among minority voters for a Warren pick. A net 24 percent of black voters were more likely to vote for Biden if Warren is rounding out the ticket, along with a whopping net 28 percent of Hispanic voters.
Now, some of that difference might be based on name recognition. But it’s a little hard to argue that Warren has a name ID advantage over Harris. Both are sitting senators (although the state Harris represents is more than five times larger than the one Warren represents), and both campaigned hard in the Democratic presidential primary. Perhaps more tellingly, in the Morning Consult/Politico survey, Stacey Abrams, another woman of color being considered as a VP pick, represented a net plus for Biden of 17 percent among black voters, very close to that of Harris considering the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points. Abrams, though potentially a strong VP pick in her own right, almost certainly has nowhere near the name recognition of Harris. Abrams did not participate in the Democratic presidential primary, and does not currently hold public office. With someone who likely has far less name recognition polling similarly to Harris among black voters, maybe it’s something about the candidate herself that is dampening enthusiasm as compared to Warren.
And that makes sense when you consider that Harris worked as a prosecutor for more than a 15 years before she became Attorney General of California. She probably did it with integrity, by all accounts she helped make what reforms she could at the level she was at, but the fact remains that Harris spent a sizable portion of her life as a cog in the criminal justice machine that has a well-documented, centuries-long history of disparately impacting people of color.
Warren, on the other hand, does not have that baggage, and she has a slew of well-developed policies to boot. Warren’s Medicare for All plan would help reduce racially disparate outcomes in the health care system, her super-millionaire wealth tax would help stymie the gaping racial wealth divide, and her criminal justice reform plan would, well, reform criminal justice, to the particular advantage of minority communities disproportionately harmed by the current system. Warren’s policy proposals to fix the things that are broken in America are almost all particularly good for people of color because people of color are bearing more than their share of the burden for everything that’s broken in America.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, much of the media coverage about Biden’s VP pick has focused around how recent events might take Amy Klobuchar out of the running due to her prosecutorial record (why Klobuchar was ever in the mix in the first place remains a mystery). But it shouldn’t be lost that minority communities, right now at least, seem to prefer Warren to Harris. Maybe being a lawyer-cop is just less of a good look at this point in history compared to relentlessly promoting policy that would make the country a more just, more equal place. Maybe minority voters prefer a policy proponent as opposed to a candidate who shares their racial demographics but has not been so vocal in the name of progress. Someone really should ask them.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.