In a recent podcast interview, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., blamed Black voters in part for Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss in the 2024 presidential election. Clyburn typified a retrograde assumption many in the Democratic establishment hold: that certain voters ought to serve the party rather than the other way around. With the midterm elections looming and the start of a high-stakes presidential primary season around the corner, hearing such a dismissive view of voters expressed by a Democrat of Clyburn’s influence is particularly alarming.
Clyburn made that comment during a conversation with Vox’s Astead Herndon, who pressed the 86-year-old, 17-term representative to assign blame for the Democratic Party’s low approval ratings, including with its own voters. Clyburn, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a former House majority whip, blamed everyone but party leadership. The conversation got especially pointed when he and Herndon discussed Harris’ 2024 loss and Herndon asked Clyburn if he thought there was a political lesson to take from an administration whose central goal was to stop Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Clyburn answered: “When the white vote turned out 71% two years ago, and the Black vote turned out 59%, you tell me whose fault that is.” He later added that if that “59% had been 69%, she would have won.” When Herndon followed by asking if Clyburn was saying “Black people let Kamala Harris down,” he responded, “In many instances, absolutely.”
Clyburn’s answer was an astonishing deflection.
Parties are not owed votes; they earn them. And racial minorities and marginalized communities — whether they are Black, women or Latino — shouldn’t be taken for granted as a lock for the Democratic Party just because it’s the party that embraces multiculturalism.
Politicians are supposed to be public servants.
Clyburn’s statement is sadly emblematic of establishment Democrats’ tendency to see ethnic minority voters only as people who vote as monolithic blocs. But they don’t. Just like white voters, they have interests across many policy areas — the economy, immigration, taxes, foreign policy and so on. And just like white voters, they can change their mind, be ambivalent about candidates and think in terms of strategic trade-offs. In the 2024 election, voters across all kinds of demographics were dissatisfied with the economy in the wake of a surge in inflation. The Democratic Party didn’t take their concerns seriously enough, and a candidate deploying Hitlerian rhetoric made gains with Latinos, Black men and Asian Americans compared with his first victory.
There is some historical context that distinguishes Clyburn’s perspective from those of other members of party leadership. He grew up in the segregated South, where the battle for voting rights was won and where, after the Voting Rights Act became law, many Black people saw voting as a sacred duty. Black political power was and is deeply intertwined with participation in Democratic politics. But taking that vote for granted is antidemocratic, and can even be exploitative — and it does not obviate the need to listen to a community’s needs and perceptions. “Is there no reason that Black voters could not have felt heard” by the Democrats, Herndon asked Clyburn. “There might be. I’d like to know what it is,” Clyburn responded, seemingly implying that he couldn’t conceive of a good one or that no such reasonable views are out there.
Politicians are supposed to be public servants, and parties succeed in politics when they recognize the old adage about effective customer service: The customer is always right. (Or least needs to be understood and attended to in some fashion.) Sensitivity to what voters want in real time — rather than banking on the lesser-evil ballot or some fixed notion of what’s best for voters even when they say otherwise — is what helps parties build trust, identify sources of excitement and drive up voter turnout. That’s how you push that number up from 59%.
Clyburn’s blinkered worldview is consequential. He has been in Congress for more than three decades and served as House majority whip multiple times. His capacity as a power broker helped Joe Biden win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Yet in that Vox interview, he strongly rejected the idea that Democratic leaders should engage in any big-picture introspection about what the party stands for. At various points, he blamed “media branding” for its beleaguered reputation. He said progressive challengers knocking out Democratic incumbents in the primaries does not signal a problem with the party but was the fault of individual low-performing candidates. Herndon interviewed Clyburn on his 86th birthday, and not surprisingly, Clyburn rejected the idea that the advanced age of many in the party is cause for concern.
In what may be the most tragicomic example of being out of touch, Clyburn admitted that he hadn’t heard of ChatGPT until the week before the interview. No concern there. ChatGPT only symbolizes the way huge swaths of the workforce may eventually face job market apocalypse. Why should a politician of such influence know anything about the buzziest economic issue of recent years?
Remarkably, Clyburn’s influence within the Democratic Party is still growing — with South Carolina jumping to the start of the Democratic presidential primary schedule, his role as kingmaker is larger than ever. But like so many Democrats of his generation, his ability to understand and influence the world itself is waning.
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