Race divides the parties internally, too
Four years ago, as we headed into the last stretch of the 2020 election, the “racial reckoning” unfurled after the murder of George Floyd. Race appeared to drive party politics in a profound way, shaping the differences between parties as well as some of the tensions within them, over issues like “defund the police” for Democrats and how to respond to Trump’s not-infrequent racial provocations for Republicans. We didn’t know, of course, that the election would end with Trump baselessly alleging fraud in cities with large Black populations and sparking an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol, where the Confederate flag would fly. Four years before that, the 2016 election also highlighted identity and put race and immigration at the forefront, resulting in an election driven more by race and immigration attitudes than previous contests.
Debates about party strength and weakness often emphasize procedure and rules. But the racial context of American politics is also essential to understanding how party strength fluctuates over time. Race and racial conflict obviously has powerful electoral implications, but it also profoundly influences who wields power in party coalitions.
Presidents who upend the racial status quo – Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Obama as the nation’s first Black president – are followed by lawless successors who ride political backlash to the presidency
The Obama-Trump years fit into a pattern that I elaborate on in my forthcoming book, The Racial Backlash Presidency (due out in late 2025 with Princeton University Press). Presidents who upend the racial status quo – Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Obama as the nation’s first Black president – are followed by lawless successors who ride political backlash to the presidency and end up facing impeachment. My book traces how each of these impeachment crises was rooted in the racial politics of the day. But it also has implications for what happens afterward, and how party politics reshape racial politics after these tumultuous periods.
Race continues to be a dividing line between parties, though the salience of gender might challenge this in new ways. Some have pointed to the possibility that, in a post-Dobbs era, white women will move toward the Democratic column. Other analyses suggest that the tropes of masculinity advanced by Trumpist Republicanism are attracting support among men across racial lines, improving the party’s standing with Black and Latino men.
Read the whole series: Partisans without parties.
The GOP clearly sought to put its best foot forward on race at the RNC. Vivek Ramaswamy made a pitch for the party’s appeal to racial and ethnic minorities, and Nikki Haley, Marco Rubio, and Tim Scott were all prominently featured speakers. But since then, Trump and Vance have doubled down on racist depictions of immigrants — this even though far-right voices have registered displeasure over Vance’s Indian-American wife, illustrating the dangers of flirtation with these forces. Since the convention, the situation on the right has become increasingly heated, with Trump and Vance making incendiary remarks about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, drawing criticism from the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine.
On the Democratic side, fragmentation around the party’s racial direction was on display even at a convention that stressed unity. There was some criticism of the relative lack of Latino voices at the convention in prime speaking slots. It was also clear that Black leaders, who represent a crucial Democratic constituency, occupy multiple positions within the party: the stalwart establishment like Jim Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries, the pragmatic center (Wes Moore) and the progressive wing (represented at the convention by Maxine Waters and Maxwell Frost). Each of these groups within the party coalition can lay claim to the concerns and priorities of communities of color. By emphasizing toughness on border security, the party has moved right and embraced conservative ways of framing the issue. The Democrats’ internal divisions over Gaza and policy toward Israel also have racial dimensions and pose a threat to the party’s long-standing status as a coalition of minority groups. The contrast with Republicans has given Democrats a way to smooth over differences for the moment, but that probably won’t last forever.
When a party is heavily dependent on informal jockeying to make decisions on such fraught issues, it’s vulnerable to lasting disputes.
It's in these latent intra-party differences that party weakness has the potential to become important. When a party is heavily dependent on informal jockeying to make these decisions on such fraught issues, rather than hashing them out in structured and enforceable negotiations, it’s vulnerable to lasting disputes over issues like race that are difficult to resolve and electorally weighty. This has been a recent problem for Democrats. It has also led to some Republican interest in candidates who might distance themselves from Trump’s overtly racial appeals, though they have failed to coordinate on alternatives.
Political scientists have amply demonstrated that racial polarization is part of what drives strong partisanship. Less is known about how differences over racial politics shape internal party dynamics. The late 1960s provide something of a roadmap, resulting in party splintering and sorting over the issue of race. Despite predictions of an impending racial realignment, today’s party coalitions are much less fluid, making it more likely that serious disputes will play out internally. Weak parties provide little in the way of structure or guidance for how these conflicts will be resolved.
Julia Azari is a professor of political science at Marquette University. She is the author of Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate and co-host of the podcast Politics in Question.
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