KFF/theGrio Survey of Black Voters - Voter Motivation

KFF/theGrio Survey of Black Voters

Liz Hamel, Follow @lizhamel on TwitterShannon Schumacher, Grace SparksFollow @gracesparks on Twitter, Mellisha Stokes, and Mollyann Brodie 

Follow @Mollybrodie on TwitterPublished: Oct 18, 2022

The Survey of Black voters, the first under a new partnership between KFF and theGrio, examines the mood and opinions of an important group of voters as the 2022 midterm election approaches. A group that has historically been a solid voting bloc for Democrats, the views of Black voters are often examined as one monolithic group or even sometimes overlooked in midterm election polling. This survey goes beyond the insights that can be gleaned about Black voters from polls of the general public by collecting data from a large enough sample of Black voters to examine variations within the Black electorate by factors such as age, education, political affiliation, and ideology. The survey explores Black voters’ voting intentions, motivations, and views on key electoral issues for the upcoming midterm. It also examines Black voters’ attitudes toward the Democratic and Republican Parties, views on electoral integrity, and past experiences with voter suppression. In addition to these election-related topics, the survey sheds light on how Black voters feel about timely topics including recent Supreme Court decisions, policies affecting LGBT individuals, and policies aimed at improving health for Black people in the United States.

The survey sample is comprised of 1,000 Black adults who identify as Black or African American (including those who identify as Hispanic and/or multi-racial) and who say they are registered to vote.

Half Of Black Voters Say They Are More Motivated to Vote This Year

Half (51%) of Black voters say they are more motivated to vote this year compared to previous elections, while 36% say they are about as motivated and 13% say they are less motivated to vote this year. The share of Black voters who say they are more motivated is similar to the share of White voters (53%) who said the same in another KFF survey fielded in September. Substantial shares of Black voters across groups say they are more motivated this year, but motivation is somewhat higher among older vs. younger Black voters (58% vs. 46%), among those who say they always vote in midterms vs. those who vote less often (65% vs. 42%), and among those who approve of Biden’s job performance vs. those who disapprove (58% vs. 37%). About half of both Black men voters and Black women voters say they are more motivated to vote this year, as do similar shares of those who identify as or lean Democrat and those who identify as or lean Republican. A much smaller share (27%) of those who say they are independent and don’t lean toward either party say they are more motivated to vote this year.

Black voters who are more motivated this year are largely driven by a desire to vote for Democrats or keep Republicans out of office or a general desire for change. Among the 51% of Black voters who say they are more motivated to vote this year compared to previous elections, 28% cite party-related reasons, such as a desire to elect Democrats or to keep Republicans and Trump supporters out of office, and 27% cite a desire for change or dissatisfaction with the status quo. About one in five cite specific issues (21%) or reasons related to democracy, voting rights, and the importance of voting (18%) for their greater motivation. Among the specific issues mentioned, 6% cite abortion rights and 5% cite economic issues as the source of their motivation.

Those who are less motivated largely say that they don’t think their vote will make a difference (22%), that they dislike the candidates (16%), or that they feel all politicians are dishonest (10%).

Majorities of Black voters say they consider candidate’s issue positions, character and experience, and political party when deciding how to vote, but fewer say a candidate’s race is a major factor. Large majorities of Black voters say that a candidate’s position on issues (86%) and character and experience (79%) are major factors in making their decision about how to vote for Congress this year, and a smaller majority (55%) say the same about the candidate’s political party. A much smaller share (21%) say a candidate’s race is a major factor in their decision.

Despite reporting they will consider many things beyond the candidate’s party, three-quarters (77%) of Black voters say that if the election were held at the time of the survey, they would be most likely to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district, while 11% say they would be more likely to vote for a Republican and another 11% for a candidate from another party.

This article originally appeared at KFF.org, October 18th, 2022.

Please support and visit The Brooks Blackboard's website, our INTEL page, OPEN MIND page, and LIKE and FOLLOW our Facebook page.

Follow me on Twitter at @_CharlesBrooks   

Right-Wing Justices Appear Ready to Eviscerate Affirmative Action in College Admissions

 "Killing affirmative action will have a devastating impact on Black, Hispanic, and Native students," wrote one journalist, "and such a ruling would be totally unjustified by the text or history of the Constitution."

KENNY STANCIL

October 31, 2022

During the course of roughly five hours of oral argument on Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court's far-right supermajority seemed open to rolling back decades of precedent allowing public and private colleges and universities to make race-conscious admissions decisions.

Referring to Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina—cases he contends were "manufactured to abolish affirmative action in higher education"—Slate's Mark Joseph Stern argued that "all six conservative justices are poised to declare that colleges' consideration of race violates the Constitution's equal protection clause and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applies equal protection standards to private institutions."

"Because that argument was cynically engineered by white conservatives aggrieved by 'reverse racism'—and is so clearly at odds with an original understanding of the 14th Amendment—progressives have lined up to defend Harvard and UNC," Stern noted, citing "the amicus briefs filed in support of the universities by seemingly every liberal group under the sun."

Late last week, ReNika Moore, director of ACLU's Racial Justice program, said in a statement: "Race-conscious admissions practices help create a diverse student body that benefits the educational experiences of all students. Time and again, lower courts and the Supreme Court have recognized universities' ability to consider race in the admissions process in order to help foster this."

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill, former president of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, also alluded to the high court's previous decisions upholding race-conscious college admissions, adding that new challenges keep cropping up because "opponents to affirmative action know they have an open door to continue to try and overturn it."

Although the court is not scheduled to hand down an opinion in the pair of cases until next summer, its right-wing justices on Monday questioned the legitimacy of race-conscious admissions, expressing doubt that schools would ever concede an "endpoint" in their consideration of race to build more diverse student bodies.

"The question," according to The Washington Post, "is how broad such a decision by the court's conservative majority might be, and what it would mean for other institutions of higher education."

"Overturning the court's precedents that race can be one factor of many in making admission decisions would have 'profound consequences' for 'the nation that we are and the nation that we aspire to be,' Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the justices during arguments in the Harvard case," the Post reported.

"But the court's conservatives used the two cases to revisit decades of Supreme Court decisions that tolerated a limited use of racial classifications," noted the newspaper. "They seemed unsatisfied with assertions from lawyers representing the schools that the end was near for the use of race-conscious policies. Under repeated questioning, the lawyers conceded they could not provide a date-specific answer to the question: 'When will it end?'"

Notably, as The New York Times pointed out Sunday, both sides in the debate claim to be upholding the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that found racial segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. While proponents of affirmative action argue that assembling diverse student bodies is consistent with the civil rights landmark, opponents insist that the decision requires "colorblind" policies.

For instance, Edward Blum, the founder of Students for Fair Admissions, the anti-affirmative action group behind both cases, told NPR on Monday that "the Constitution and our civil rights laws forbid the consideration of race in higher education."

As Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz wrote Monday: "That is not what previous courts have ruled. Since Regents, Grutter, and the 2016 Fisher v. University of Texas decision, the high court has generally upheld universities' race-conscious admissions policies. But this court, with its 6-3 conservative supermajority, has shown little reverence for long-standing precedent—it did away with 50 years of settled law in overturning Roe over the summer—and seems poised to obliterate this one, too."

Justice Clarence Thomas—a beneficiary of affirmative action who has long opposed the policy on the grounds that it is discriminatory—on Monday questioned the meaning and "educational benefits of diversity."

In response to Thomas' inquiry about the original meaning of the 14th Amendment, "the lawyer who wants to abolish affirmative action said that the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was the foundation for the amendment, was race-neutral," tweeted journalist Cristian Farias.

Farias shared a recent interview he conducted with Eric Foner, in which the esteemed historian of Reconstruction denounced originalism as "intellectually indefensible."

"Colorblindness is not the only original meaning of the 14th Amendment," said Foner. "It was the original meaning in the eyes of some people, but not a lot of others."

In his Monday essay, Stern argued that "killing affirmative action will have a devastating impact on Black, Hispanic, and Native students and such a ruling would be totally unjustified by the text or history of the Constitution."

"But it doesn't follow that the schools in this case use race-conscious admissions for exclusively noble purposes," he wrote, adding:

Instead, elite institutions often use these programs as a Band-Aid to cover deeper structural barriers to genuine diversity among their student bodies—because addressing those problems would require sacrifices that administrators aren't willing to make. A Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action will become a scapegoat for universities that see a plunge in enrollment among underrepresented minorities. Progressives should not let them get away with it.

Although the latest legal assault on affirmative action is built on bad history and worse motivations, it did have the benefit of revealing unseemly details about the elite admissions process. The litigation gave the public an unprecedented glimpse into Harvard's standards, which reflect horribly on the school. As Aaron Mak explained in Slate after the trial, Harvard has a preference for four specific groups of applicants known as ALDC: athletes, legacies, those on the dean's list (frequently because of family donations), and the children of faculty. ALDCs constitute about 5% of applicants but 30% of the admitted class. Their admissions rate sits at about 45% compared to the normal rate of less than 5%.

In theory, ALDC preferences are colorblind. In practice, they operate as a massive affirmative action program for white applicants. Over a recent six-year period, 2,200 out of 4,993 admitted white students were ALDC—a figure significantly higher than the overall number of admitted students who are Black (1,392) and Hispanic (1,283). White ALDC students are not overrepresented because they happen to be more qualified; to the contrary, about three-fourths of them would have been rejected without the ALDC boost.

"Elite universities' first response" to the high court's expected elimination of race-conscious admissions in higher education, Stern tweeted, "should be abolishing their affirmative action programs for ultra-privileged white kids."

National Education Association president Becky Pringle said Monday in a statement that "recent events demonstrate that racism and discrimination are not artifacts of American history but persist in every aspect of our society, including our schools, colleges, and universities."

"Affirmative action and programs like it safeguard a stronger future by expanding higher education opportunities to those who have been historically denied a fair shot," said Pringle. "When we ensure the many talents and experiences of students of color aren't overlooked in admissions processes that tend to be biased against them, we create schools, a country, and a future that includes us all. We urge the court to uphold affirmative action in higher education admissions decisions."

Additional Reading:

Supreme Court Poised to Shred What's Left of Voting Rights Act, Plaintiffs Warn,

In 'Dangerous Decision,' Supreme Court Guts Protection of Miranda Rights,

Rishi Sunak is the UK’s new PM. Here’s what he doesn’t want you to know

From offshore dealings to right-wing think tanks, here’s our guide to the UK’s richest prime minister

Adam Bychawski

25 October 2022

Prime minister Rishi Sunak – reportedly the richest MP in Parliament – will be a boon for the financial lobby, tax justice campaigners have warned.

The man trounced by Liz Truss just weeks ago has been confirmed as her replacement with the exit of Penny Mordaunt from the Tory leadership contest. But experts say Sunak has not been transparent with his finances and that his hedge fund background raises questions about his commitment to fighting tax avoidance.

His profile has risen sharply since he became chancellor in early 2020, just weeks before the first lockdown began. But critics say a slick public marketing campaign has disguised a man with an ultra-privileged background, who is a committed Thatcherite ideologue. 

Here’s the openDemocracy guide to the UK’s next prime minister, originally published in January 2022.

He went to private school

Sunak marked his first year in the Exchequer by tweeting two photos of himself: one as a child in school uniform, and one as the chancellor, standing outside Number 11. 

He wrote: “Growing up I never thought I would be in this job (mainly because I wanted to be a Jedi) […] It’s been incredibly tough but thank you to everyone who has supported me along the way.”

The message carefully tip-toed around his privileged upbringing. Until the age of 11, Sunak attended Oakmount Preparatory School and then the Stroud Independent Prep School,  the latter of which now charges fees of up to £18,500 a year. 

From there, he studied at King Edward VI School in Southampton (now £17,000 a year) before moving to Winchester College (now £43,335 a year). 

Five chancellors and one prime minister have attended Winchester, one of England’s oldest public boarding schools and a long-standing rival of Eton, before Sunak.

“[Sunak’s] tweet made me smile,” said Richard Beard, an author whose latest book ‘Sad Little Men: Private Schools and the Ruin of England’ assesses the private education system and the many politicians that have been through it.

“The idea that, while studying in Winchester College, he would have never thought he would be at the top of government is very unlikely to me. Leadership qualities are one of the things that they teach you and you’re bound to think of your future in those terms.

“So he would definitely have thought that that is the kind of job that he’d be in, even if he didn’t explicitly think of chancellor of the exchequer.”

In media profiles, Sunak’s allies describe him as “immaculate”, “calm” and “organised”, qualities befitting of a former Winchester head of college. None volunteer that he is empathetic or compassionate. When given examples of people who are experiencing hardship in Parliament or press interviews, as he was on ‘Good Morning Britain’ last year, Sunak listed policies in response, but offered no consolations.

Beard, whose book is partly based on his own experiences, believes all-male boarding schools emotionally harden their students. To survive, he says, boys cannot show any vulnerability among their peers.

“If you repress emotion for yourself then ultimately it becomes very easy to repress feelings for other people,” he argues. 

And while boarding schools like Winchester may prepare students well to advance in politics, Beard says they instil a worldview that is far from ordinary. 

“Money is at the centre of it all because everyone knows it costs a lot of money, including the boys, but the actual money is abstract. The needs of everyday life are simply taken care of for you,” said Beard. 

“How can you actually then think in terms of people struggling for five pounds and ten pounds?” 

He cut benefits

Last year, Sunak was heavily criticised for axing a £20-a-week increase to Universal Credit that had helped some of the poorest families through the pandemic. More than 200,000 would have been pushed into poverty as a result of the cut, according to research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. 

Just weeks before the cut was confirmed in July, the chancellor requested planning permission to build a private swimming pool, gym and tennis court at the Grade II-listed Yorkshire manor that Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murty, purchased for £1.5m in 2015. 

After several MPs from his own party spoke out against the Universal Credit cut, Sunak increased in-work benefits in his Autumn Budget – but not by enough to offset the cut.

He has a lot of money

The Sunaks’ Georgian mansion, where locals described attending parties with liveried staff pouring champagne from magnums, is not the only property they own. There is also the £7m, five-bedroom house in Kensington, west London; a flat, also in Kensington, that the couple reportedly keep “just for visiting relatives”; and an apartment in Santa Monica, California.

The chancellor’s extensive property portfolio is just one source of his wealth. After studying at Oxford University, Sunak went on to work for US investment bank Goldman Sachs for four years. He left to pursue a business degree at Stanford University in California, where he said meeting influential figures in the multi-billion US tech industry “left a mark” on him.

From there, Sunak had a stint working at hedge funds back in London. He was a partner at the Children's Investment Fund (TCI) where he is believed to have made millions of pounds from a campaign that helped trigger the 2008 financial crisis.

Sir Chris Hohn, the fund's founder paid himself a record £343m in the first year of the pandemic. TCI is ultimately owned by a company registered in the Cayman Islands, according to its accounts. Its philanthropic arm, the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), donated £255m to charitable causes last year (full disclosure: openDemocracy has received funding from CIFF since 2019).

Sunak then left to co-found his own firm Theleme, which had an initial fund of £536m – and is also registered in the Cayman Islands.

His financial interests aren’t very transparent

The Cayman Islands are one of the world’s top offshore tax and secrecy havens. When an investment is made through a hedge fund in the Caymans, “nobody can possibly know where the money has come from”, said Alex Cobham, the chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.

Not all the money that goes through the Caymans is dirty, and hedge funds argue that they need to keep their investment strategies secret to be competitive.

Nevertheless, “it is probably the best, certainly the most reputable, way of allowing fairly questionable money in large volume to go into mainstream financial markets,” said Cobham.

An estimated $483bn (£357.62bn) a year is lost in cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals hiding assets in havens like the Cayman Islands, according to the Tax Justice Network. 

“Somehow, in the financial sector, we still have this idea that it’s basically smart to game the system. If these are the people, and the culture, that is coming into public life then we’ve got a real problem,” said Cobham.

When Sunak became a minister in 2019, he placed the investments he held from his years of working in finance into a ‘blind trust’. Such agreements are intended to avoid conflicts of interest by handing over control of assets to a third party, but whether that works in practice is questionable.

“These trusts don’t necessarily come with any legal mechanism to prevent the owner of the assets actually dictating what happens, or indeed seeing through any claimed blindness,” said Cobham.

“If politicians were willing to make the arrangement transparent, including the legal documents, we might have some confidence in them,” he adds.

Sunak has declared the trust in his entry on the Register of Ministers’ Financial Interests, but not the contents of it. The rest of his disclosures are remarkably minimal for a man with an estimated net worth of £200m.

Aside from the trust, he has listed his London flat and the fact his wife, Akshata Murty, owns a venture capital investment company, Catamaran Ventures, which the couple founded together in 2013.

Murty, who Sunak met at Stanford, is the daughter of Indian billionaire NR Narayana Murthy, who co-founded the IT company Infosys. Her shares in that firm are worth £430m alone, a fortune larger than the Queen’s and enough to make her one of the richest women in Britain.

The Murthy/Murty family (Narayana’s children have dropped the ‘h’ from their name) is reported to have invested part of their wealth through Catamaran Ventures, though how much is unclear. Sunak resigned his directorship of the company in 2015.

Ministers must declare the financial interests of their close family – including in-laws – which might give rise to a conflict, but Sunak has declared only one of the companies that his wife owns. A host of other family assets – including a £900m-a-year joint venture with Amazon in India, owned by his father-in-law – are not mentioned, according to the Guardian.

Sunak is said to have met with the government’s then head of propriety and ethics, Helen MacNamara, before becoming chancellor, to review what interests should be declared. MacNamara said she was satisfied with what had been registered at the time.

He has strong links to right-wing think tanks

Sunak reportedly led the hawks within the cabinet who opposed taking action when scientists recommended a circuit-breaker lockdown in September 2020, arguing that restrictions would be too economically damaging. Johnson delayed the decision and infections spiralled leading to a more punitive and lengthier lockdown in November.

“Sunak’s been the voice most consistently pushing for watering down of COVID restrictions in the cabinet. So, if you like, he is a kind of a logical continuation of that Thatcherite impulse within the Tories,” said Phil Burton-Cartledge, the author of ‘Falling Down: The Conservative Party and the Decline of Tory Britain’.

Soon after becoming an MP in 2015, Sunak wrote a report calling for the creation of ‘freeports’ around the UK for the right-wing think tank, Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which was co-founded by Margaret Thatcher. 

The policy idea – that tax-free, deregulated outposts will revitalise post-industrial coastal cities – was fittingly tried by the former PM in the 1980s, before being dropped by David Cameron in 2012 after proving unsuccessful.

Sunak also worked for another right-wing think tank, Policy Exchange – which, like CPS does not declare its donors – before becoming an MP, and has spoken at the Institute of Economic Affairs since becoming chancellor. All three think tanks have been consistently ranked among the least transparent in the UK.

He has a slick PR operation

During the pandemic, billionaires such as NR Narayana Murthy saw their wealth increase – Murthy’s fortune was up 35% to £2.3bn in 2021– while inequality between the richest and poorest grew. What, then, explains the seeming popularity of a former hedge fund manager like Sunak at a time in midst of a cost of living crisis?

Part of the answer might be the way Sunak has presented himself. Unusually for a chancellor, he hired the co-founder of a social media agency to manage his public image after he was appointed. 

Since then, the content on his social media channels – from casual ‘ask me anything’-style YouTube videos to puppy pictures on Instagram – have more closely resembled a celebrity influencer than a frontrunner for Tory leader.

Jonathan Dean, an associate professor of politics at Leeds University, says this reflects broader political trends: “Forms of celebrity are increasingly prominent within politics, and that can either take the form of people who were conventional celebrities entering electoral politics, or it can also take the form of politicians trying to ape the publicity and performance traditionally associated with celebrity culture.”

Politicians draw on tactics from the world of celebrity influencers, Dean suggests, partly because they can mask their political views. 

“A lot of politicians don’t have a particularly coherent or well-thought-through set of ideological commitments or kind of policy ideas. And I think certain forms of celebritisation allow them to circumvent that,” he said. 

In Sunak’s case, it seems he has been even more successful in influencing journalists than the public. A picture of him working from home in a hoodie became a media frenzy after columnists from Vogue and GQ complimented his looks, which, in turn, spawned mockery on social media. It wasn’t long after that Sunak was being asked how he felt about being described as ‘Dishy Rishi’ in an interview with LadBible.

While Sunak may be the most popular Tory politician among the public, among party members he is second to the foreign secretary Liz Truss, his main rival for Tory leader if Johnson goes. 

Burton-Cartledge suggests that this might be because he has not demonstrated the same zeal as Truss for pursuing a ‘war on woke’.

“He is of the same mould as Cameron: economically Thatcherite, but socially liberal,” said Burton-Cartledge. “That said, I can’t see him rowing back on the tough rhetoric about migrants in the Channel.”

This article was originally published on opendemocracy.net