Ever since President Bill Clinton advised “shuffle it, don’t end it,” affirmative action has had an awkward place in the Democratic coalition, as ubiquitous as the party’s allegiance to abortion rights and its promises to expand financial aid for higher education, but unpopular with much of the public.
Now, by eliminating race-conscious college admissions, the Supreme Court has given Democrats a way to move from a race-based discussion of preferences to one more tied to class. The court’s decision could prompt a wider outreach to working-class voters who have turned away from the party because of what they see as its elitism.
The question is: will the party pivot?
“This is a great opportunity for Democrats to correct the course on identity-based issues,” said Ruy Teixeira, who upcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” looks at the hemorrhaging of working-class voters over the past decade. “As I like to say, class is back in session.”
Conservative voters have been more encouraged by the composition of the Supreme Court than liberals. But the last two sessions of a high court reshuffled by Donald J. Trump may have reversed that dynamic. Since the court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, energetic Democratic voters have handed Republicans loss after loss in critical elections.
Republicans’ remarkable successes before the new court may have deprived them of combative issues to galvanize voters heading into 2024. Several Republican presidential candidates had focused their campaigns on opposition to affirmative action. And the court’s granting of religious exemptions to people who oppose gay marriage, along with last year’s Dobbs decision, may take the sting out of some social issues for conservatives.
In this sense, the new, staunchly conservative Supreme Court is doing the dirty political work for Democrats. His decision last year to remove the constitutional right to abortion elevated an issue that for decades motivated religious conservatives more than secular liberals.
Friday’s decision to roll back President Biden’s student debt relief plan angered progressive Democrats, who had pressed the president to take executive action on loan forgiveness. A coalition of Gen Z advocacy groups, including Gen-Z for Change and the climate-focused Sunrise Movement, said Friday that the court has “openly declared war on young people.”
But while the Supreme Court made retroactive aid to higher education much more difficult, it may have boosted the Democratic cause of financial aid by expanding grants and Pell grants that don’t burden graduates with overwhelming debt burdens. Democrats have long pushed for expanded grant programs and legislative loan forgiveness programs for graduates embarking on low-paying public service careers. These efforts will gain momentum after the court’s decision.
The high court’s ruling that race-based admissions to colleges and universities is unconstitutional angered key elements of the Democratic coalition — black and Hispanic groups in particular, but also some Asian American and Pacific Islander groups that they said conservatives had used a small number of Asian Americans. as pawns to challenge affirmative action on behalf of whites.
“They were using the Asian community as a wedge,” Representative Judy Chu, D-Calif., said after the decision was handed down Thursday. “I’m with the unified community.”
But while they have expressed anger and disappointment at the conservative decisions, Democrats also acknowledge their inability to do much to restore affirmative action, student loan forgiveness and abortion rights in the foreseeable future , as long as the majority of 6-3 in The Supreme Court holds.
“There’s a constitutional challenge to bringing it back,” said Representative Bobby Scott of Virginia, a top Democrat on the House education committee.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist pushing his party to expand its reach into the working class, said adding a new emphasis on class consciousness to increase racial and ethnic awareness would fit well with Mr. Biden’s argument that his legislative achievements have largely accrued to his benefit. of the workers
Infrastructure spending, investment in electric vehicles, broadband expansion, and semiconductor manufacturing have boosted jobs, especially union jobs, across the country, but especially in rural and suburban areas, often in republican states.
“Next year, Democrats will be able to say we invested in red states, blue states, urban areas, rural areas,” he said. “We are not like the Republicans. We are for everyone.”
But bigotry, discrimination and the erosion of civil rights will remain central issues for Democrats, given the anger of the party’s base, Mr. Rosenberg. The Supreme Court’s decision Friday to side with a Colorado web designer who said he had a First Amendment right to refuse to provide services for same-sex marriages cannot be separated from decisions by ‘affirmative action, student loans and abortion.
Mr. Teixeira said Democrats probably didn’t see their new opportunities at first.
“If you want to solve some of the underlying problems of the party, that should be an idea,” he said of the shift from racial and ethnic identity to class. But, he added, “in the short term, the enormous pressure will be not to.”
Indeed, the initial Democratic response to the Supreme Court’s actions was not to elevate economic hardship as a key preference in college admissions. Instead, Democrats seemed focused on overturning other areas of privilege, particularly the legacy admissions preference given to the children and grandchildren of alumni of elite institutions.
“What we’re fighting for is equal opportunity,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. “If they remove affirmative action and leave legacy admissions rampant, they make merit a slogan, not a reality.”
Republicans saw a political line of attack in the Democratic response to the court’s decision. Even before 1990, when a campaign announcement by Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina filed a white-hands-wringing job walkout to decry “racial quotas,” Republicans had used affirmative action to their political advantage.
Mr. Clinton’s formulation of “fix it, don’t end it” came after a 1995 speech to California Democrats in which he said of affirmative action programs: “We have to ask, ‘Do they all work? ? Are they all fair? Has there been any kind of reverse discrimination?’”
A Pew Research Center June survey found that more Americans disapprove than disapprove of colleges and universities’ use of race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, and that Republican- and GOP-leaning independent voters are party united in their opposition, while Democratic voters are divided.
After Mr. Biden voiced his opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm issued a statement calling out three Senate Democrats vulnerable to re-election in Republican states: Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
“Democrats are doubling down on their racist agenda and want to pack the Supreme Court to get away with it,” said Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “Will Democrats like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown denounce Joe Biden’s support for racial discrimination and state unequivocally that they oppose packing the court?”
The House Republican campaign arm called the Democratic outrage “the great liberal limo crisis.”
But the Supreme Court has offered Democrats a way forward with many of its rulings, based on class. The rich will always have access to abortion, traveling to states where it remains legal, and to elite institutions of higher education, where they may have a legacy and the means to pay tuition.
Those facing economic struggles are not so privileged. Applicants of color may have lost an edge in admissions, but poor and middle-class students and graduates of all races took a hit when the court ruled the president lacked the authority to unilaterally pardon your student loans.
Representative Marilyn Strickland, D-Washington, said her party must now recalibrate away from elite institutions like Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the high court case against the affirmative action, and “respecting all types of education and all types of opportunity,” citing union training programs, apprenticeships, trade schools and community colleges.
Mr. Scott agreed. “This will cause some bitterness,” he said, “but what we have to campaign for is that we are opening up opportunities for everyone.”
