Why Have Race and Gender Been Erased from Analysis of the Presidential Election? Part 2

So why wasn’t race or gender the focus of post-election analysis? I choose to focus here on race, because it is the issue about which I believe there has been the most glaring avoidance.

It is important to be truthful about the experience and expertise of our most prominent political analysts and commentators. The vast majority of mainstream media pundits, and the most prominent political party analysts are simply ill-equipped to speak or report with knowledge, context, sophistication, or authority about how race shapes American politics and electoral outcomes. They can read polls along with the best of them. They know about the “Souls to the Polls” method of voter turnout used by Black churches. Some can cite the “Bradley rule” of exit polling. Others – very few – remember that the Republican Party was under a consent decree for thirty years because of racial voter suppression activities in the 1980s. The consent decree ended only in 2018. Very few understand that most Black voters live in red states, how racial gerrymandering effects national politics, or even that the state that contains the greatest number of Black people is Texas.

But the most glaring omission in their racial knowledge is about white voters, even though most of the commentators are themselves white.