Im-Politic: Just What New York City Public Schools Need?

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AAPI, African-American Studies, Asia/Pacific Islanders, black studies, education, Im-Politic, Latinos, math, National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York City, public schools, reading

Let’s say you’re in charge of a big city public school system and you know that students are way under-performing in basics like reading and math. You’d focus like the proverbial laser beam on improving their performance in basics like reading and math, right?

Not, evidently, if you’re in charge of the New York City public school system. Facing these circumstances, the City, reported The New York Times last Thursday, decided to “launch a new Black studies curriculum next fall that could eventually be used across hundreds of schools, part of a local effort to embrace lessons on race and culture that have sharply divided school districts around the country along political lines.”

The Times continued, “The Black studies curriculum in social studies will launch in a handful of classrooms in September, before expanding across grades pre-K to 12. An Asian American and Pacific Islander curriculum, which was taught in about a dozen schools this fall, will also expand across the system in 2024.”

As The Times account noted, it’s not as if these subjects have been absent from New York City public schools. Instead, teaching efforts along these lines are being expanded.

But even if the system never mentioned these identity groups in class (which I would consider a huge mistake), would they really deserve such priority attention now? If you think that mastering basics like reading and math are much more important building blocks of progress for disadvantaged groups, you may well  answer “No,” especially when you consider how poorly New York City students have performed in these subjects compared with their peers in other big city school systems and especially nation-wide.

The evidence is clear from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

As this gold standard evaluation effort makes clear (but aforementioned Times article never mentioned), for fourth and eighth grade reading and math (not the only results it presents, but representative enough), in 2019 (a good starting point since it was the final pre-pandemic year), New York City students almost always lagged their big city and national public school school counterparts in shares of students proficient in these subjects. And in 2022, they kept lagging.

Even worse, in no instance did any of these sets of U.S. students, for either year, remotely approach fifty percent. So it’s not like the bar was high. Indeed, by far the best proficiency rate recorded by any of these groups was the 40 percent of national fourth grade math public school students achieving this level in 2019.

New York City students’ highest score during these two years? Thirty two percent proficiency for fourth grade math students in 2019.

It should be noted, however, that New York City educators may not be solely responsible for choosing their cockeyed priorities. A poll last fall showed that 92 percent of black City voters supported introducing a black studies curriculum in the public schools starting in pre-kindergarten classes, and 92 percent “ voiced support for prioritizing Black studies as a means to improve the education delivered to students in the nation’s largest public school system.”

Here’s hoping these survey results don’t confirm Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

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Im-Politic: A Viable Alternative to Affirmative Action?

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affirmative action, African Americans, college, college admissions, Defense Department, education, higher education, Im-Politic, integration, Latinos, math, minorities, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading, schools, segregation, Supreme Court

One of the most compelling arguments for ending racial preferences in college admissions – a demand that the Supreme Court will address in two high-profile cases – also seems to be one of the most depressing. As some opponents of such affirmative action programs contend (according to what I’ve heard on some cable talk shows), anyone truly interested in helping students from disadvantaged communities climb the education and therefore career success ladders would focus on improving the grade and high schools that are supposed to be preparing them for college, rather than on awarding higher education opportunities to those who don’t qualify according to race-blind criteria.

It’s depressing because for so long Americans have seemed unable to “fix the schools.” So ending or at least thoroughly weakening affirmative action in higher education, even if Constitutionally prohibited, looks like a recipe for perpetuating racial and ethnic achievement gaps.

Except that some impressive evidence has just emerged showing that primary and secondary schools have succeeded in bringing African American and Latino student test scores closer to white test scores. It comes from the latest edition of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Performance (NAEP – “the nation’s report card”).

The NAEP is incredibly data-rich, but one set of findings I regard as especially revealing were those presenting the shares of different racial and ethnic groups performing at or above the level viewed as “proficient” by NAEP. (Here’s a starting point for this section of the report card.) The results go back to 1990 for math and 1992 for reading, and through 2019 for both. Therefore, they show both trends over time and changes achieved in the roughly three decades before the pandemic and related school closings struck – and set back everyone. I chose proficiency as a standard versus “NAEP Basic” because it figures that the proficient students are those likeliest to attend or want to attend college.

It would have been great to describe not only the scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math, but for high school seniors. Unfortunately, those data only cover the short 2015-2019 period.

Here’s how the shares of white, African American, and Latino fourth graders who have been math-proficient has changed from 1990-2019:

White: 16 percent-52 percent

African American: 1 percent-20 percent

Latino: 5 percent-28 percent

 

Here are the same type of math figures for eighth graders:

White: 18 percent-44 percent

African American: 5 percent-14 percent

Latino: 7 percent-20 percent

 

And now the results for reading proficiency among fourth graders from 1992-2019:

White: 35 percent-45 percent

African American: 8 percent-18 percent

Latino: 12 percent-23 percent

 

And for eighth graders:

White: 35 percent-42 percent

African American: 9 percent-15 percent

Latino: 13 percent-22 percent

It’s clear that in every single case above, African American and Latino scores significantly lag white scores both at the beginning of the time periods examined and at the end. But it’s also clear that in evey single case above, the scores for both minority groups improved at a faster rate than those for white students.

Yes, there’s a baseline effect at work everywhere – that is, when the figure for a comparison year is very low, it’s going to be much easier to generate bigger percentage changes than for a comparison year that’s much higher. But in this instance, what seems most important to me is that bigger is indeed bigger, and undeniably encouraging.

The remaining racial and ethnic gaps remain disturbing, but two other recent findings indicate that faster progress is anything but a pipe dream. First, the U.S. Defense Department runs its own very big school system. In fact, the NAEP compares it to a U.S. state. And even though many of its students come from disadvantaged backgrounds, they’ve been outperforming their “civilian” counterparts for many years in reading and math at both the fourth grade and eighth grade levels. (Twelfth grade data aren’t available for this group.) So maybe the military has long known something about education that it could teach the rest of us?

Or maybe these schools function well because they place disadvantaged kids out of neighborhoods whose many and varied troubles create terrible learning environments? As it happens, there’s some strong evidence for that proposition, too. In other words, as a Washington Post education columnist has put it, the best way to help low-income (including of course minority) students isn’t to try making their local schools better, but to move them into better schools.

Of course, that kind of policy shift would open up a whole can of related “white flight”and “school busing” and housing-segregation worms that have sparked numerous racial conflicts in recent decades – even in liberal cities like New York and Boston. But that only reenforces a conclusion about American attitudes toward making sure that none of our country-men and women are left behind: Too often, failure or inadequate progress stems not from lack of resources or of knowledge, but of will.

Im-Politic: Major Evidence of U.S. Race Relations Progress

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African Americans, Asian-Americans, Census Bureau, Hispanics, housing, Im-Politic, integration, Latinos, race relations, segregation, The Wall Street Journal, white flight, whites

I’ve always liked the expression “voting with their feet” – which conveys the ideas that (1) the best way to understand how Americans (and people everywhere, for that matter) isn’t to listen to what they say, but to look at how they behave; and (2) one of the best measures of behavior is where they choose to live.

And the expression came quickly to mind as I was reading a recent Wall Street Journal examination of how U.S. housing patterns by race and ethnicity have changed in recent decades. Because what the Journal data show is that, although large majorities of every major racial and ethnic group seem keep telling pollsters, other researchers, and journalists that relations among them have worsened over the years (see, e.g., here, here, and here), they’ve kept living closer together during this period.

In other words, housing in America has become much less segregated and much more integrated. In turn, that looks like an unmistakable sign that bigotry, prejudice, and racial and ethnic tensions aren’t remotely as bad as widely portrayed – much less dangerously mounting.   

This trend is surely especially striking for anyone who remembers or who has read about the often hate-filled housing integration battles that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s in places like Queens, New York and suburban Chicago.

But unless you’re deeply skeptical about U.S. Census Bureau findings (the main bases for the Journal report and for the academic research it also cites), it’s clear that major race relations progress has been made by the voting-with-your-feet standards over the last fifty years.

Journal reporters Paul Overberg and Max Rust looked over the Census data and lots of academic research to see “where the homes of whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians remained most clustered along racial lines, and where they have become more intermixed” since 1970. Their conclusion? In general, “segregation of all racial groups continues to decline steadily from a peak that occurred” around that year.

Moreover, with the exception of Asians, whose segregation levels have always been by far the lowest of any of these groups, every individual group is becoming more integrated with every other group. And the upward move of Asian segregation levels has been minimal.

It’s true, according to the Journal, that levels of white-black segregation remain the highest among the groups. But they’ve also been falling the fastest. Even better, especially for those who remember or have studied the early phases of housing integration and the resulting backlash, Overberg and Rust report one leading researcher’s findings of “an emerging pattern in which the arrival of Latinos and Asians in predominantly white neighborhoods doesn’t trigger white flight, even with the later arrival of Black residents.”

I don’t want to sound Pollyanish about U.S. race relations today. But who can seriously deny the importance of choosing where to live – which strongly determines conditions like your family’s safety, where your kids go to school and who they play with, and how promising a nest egg-building investment your home purchase will be? The housing integration progress documented above makes clear that Americans of all backgrounds are less and less prone to believing that the racial and ethnic character of a neighborhood per se influences these hopes and fears. Which sure doesn’t sound like a nation increasingly and even hopelessly divided along racial and ethnic lines to me.        

Im-Politic: Has Everyone Gotten “The Great Replacement Theory” Wrong (Except Me)?

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Buffalo shooting, Center for American Progress, conservatives, Democrats, Great Replacement Theory, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, Payton Gendron, racism, Republicans, Steve Phillips, white supremacy

The question in today’s title has been nagging me for some time, and since the appalling Buffalo, New York massacre has brought the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT) back into the headlines, it seems like an especially good time to explain why.

It’s not that the GRT doesn’t exist, or that it hasn’t played a part in motivating white racist violence in America. The idea that elites have sought to reduce the political influence of native-born white Americans through means ranging from promoting racial integration to supporting mass immigration not only unmistakably exists; it’s got a pretty lengthy history. And it’s been explicitly cited in recent years to justify killings of members of various minority groups (see, e.g., here and here), including (somewhat confusingly), Jews, who evidently are viewed by many adherents as non-white. (Or is their sin being non-Christian?)

Accused Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron was a GRT believer, too – at least if a lengthy statement posted on-line shortly before his assault began really was – as widely believed – written by him.

But the claim that Republicans and other conservatives are the only non-fringe U.S. political figures who have written about the immigration version of GRT is flat wrong. It’s been explicitly in the nation’s political air since the issue achieved hot-button status in the mid-2000s with the outbreak of mass demonstrations by illegal immigrants and amnesty supporters and the Congressional battle over a “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill. And the mentioners have prominently included Democrats and Mainstream Media journalists.

For example, as just reminded by (conservative) columnist Rich Lowry, in 2013, the Center for American Progress (CAP) – closely associated not with the Democratic party’s progressive faction but with its supposedly moderate “Clinton wing” – published a paper arguing that “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain electoral strength in the future.”

Nor was the 2013 report a one-off CAP product. CAP Fellow Steve Phillips’ 2016 book Brown is the New White argued, according to his publisher, that “hope for a more progressive political future lies not with increased advertising to middle-of-the-road white voters, but with cultivating America’s growing, diverse majority.”

And in 2013, journalist Emily Schultheis wrote in that unerring guide to Inside the Beltway political conventional wisdom, Politico, that

“The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.”

Moreover, the haste with which President Biden moved to overturn many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration policies and Congressional Democrats determination to stuff lenient immigration positions into the Build Back Better stimulus bill and the so-called China competitiveness bill strongly suggest they firmly believe these claims.

So are Republicans and conservatives and whites and anyone else worried about GRT right to fear being replaced – that is, about mass immigration’s potential to change America into something they would find odious and indeed un-American? That seems anything but clear.

This post does a good job of presenting the reasons for and against such Republican concerns (though the author is emphatically pessimistic). But these days, it suffers a major flaw: It’s five years old. And since its publication, there’s been abundant evidence not only from polls but from actual voting behavior that Republicanism – including its Trump version, has significant and growing appeal to Hispanic voters. Or is it that this group is increasingly turned off by what it’s been seeing of the Democrats lately? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Either way, that doesn’t sound very Great Replacement-y to me.

Certainly, this latter trend is too short-lived so far to warrant tossing GRT fears onto the ash heap of history. But at the least it argues for immigration restrictionists turning down the GRT volume some, and focusing on what I view as the strongest arguments against the Open Borders-friendly policies so long pushed by most on the political left, along with Big Business’ Cheap Labor Lobby, and globalist and libertarian ideologues (many of course lavishly funded by that Lobby).

These concern the wage-depressing effect of mass immigration throughout the economy, and the national security dangers created by indifference to the matter of who exactly is entering and residing in the country, And given the power and money still at the command of the opposition, they should be more than enough to keep the restrictionists’ plates full for the foreseeable future.

Im-Politic: Race and the Virus

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African Americans, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, ethnicity, healthcare, Hispanics, hospitalization, Im-Politic, Latinos, mortality, Omicron variant, race, senior citizens, Wuhan virus

What role, if any, should race play in medically treating Americans who have contracted the CCP Virus or could be likely victims? The question has gotten awfully important given that the virus’ highly infectious Omicron variant is greatly multiplying the number of cases (though because of asymptomatic spread and a shortage of reliable tests, no one knows how greatly); because for reasons ranging from those much higher case (and therefore hospitalization) numbers to the impact of illness and vaccine mandates on healthcare workers, the hospital system is strained; and because of shortages in treatments.

And the answer that seems best supported by the data is “some role” – because the most comprehensive data does show that race (along with ethnicity) does significantly affect the odds of suffering the most serious infection outcomes (symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization, along with of course death). But by no means should race or ethnicity play a major role – because so many other factors, and above all age, are much stronger determinants of the worst virus consequences.

The argument for prioritizing age begins with the aggregate data – which comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Here’s what’s shown by the latest numbers measuring weekly CCP Virus deaths per 100,000 Americans for the week of January 15 by age group (for the most vulnerable) and by race and ethnicity for non-hispanic whites, non-hispanic blacks, and hispanics (the country’s three largest groups according to this typology).

By age group:

75-plus: 3.00

65-74: 0.79

50-64: 0.37

By race/ethnicity

non-Hispanic whites: 0.22

non-Hispanic blacks: 0.35

Hispanics: 0.41

As is obvious, senior citizens (65 and over) of all racial and ethnic groups are by far the most likely to die from the virus – which argues strongly for focusing prevention and treatment tightly on them.

The same holds for CCP Virus-related hospitalizations (keeping in mind what should be the well-known qualification that the government does a lousy job of making the critical distinctions between deaths and hospitalizations caused by the virus, and deaths and hospitalizations of infected victims that were caused by something else).

In this case, the CDC offers not weekly admissions figures per 100,000, but total statistics for the period March 1, 2020 to January 8, 2022 per identical numbers of Americans belonging to these categories. And helpfully, breakdowns are provided for both age and race/ethnic group. Here are the results:

non-Hispanic whites 65-plus years: 1,938.5 

non-Hispanic whites 50-64 years: 811.9

non-Hispanic whites 18-49 years: 287.4 8

non-Hispanic whites 0-17 years: 46.9

non-Hispanic blacks 65-plus years: 3,835.4

non-Hispanic blacks 50-64 years: 2,165.0 

non-Hispanic blacks 18-49 years: 886.3 

non-Hispanic blacks 0-17 years: 126.7

Hispanic or Latino 65-plus years: 3,550.1

Hispanic or Latino 50-64 years: 2,053.3

Hispanic or Latino 18-49: 924.6 6

Hispanic or Latino 0-17: 115.0

The clear conclusion is that a national public health policy focused on preventing CCP Virus-related hospitalization would focus not on any single racial or ethnic group as a whole, but on the following groups in this (descending) order: Non-hispanic blacks over 65, hispanics and latinos over 65, blacks between 50 and 64 years, hispanics and latinos between 50 and 64 years, and non-hispanic whites over 65.

But these figures make another, comparably important point: The differences between blacks over 65 and hispanics and latinos over 65 are pretty modest. So even between these highly vulnerable groups, targeting treatment or prevention strategies according to race and ethnicity doesn’t seem to provide very useful advice. The differences between blacks among blacks from 50 to 64 years of age, hispanics and latinos of the same age group, and white 65 and over are even smaller, and therefore focusing on racial and ethnic considerations seems that much less warranted.

The CDC has also presented mortality data by age and racial/ethnic group simultaneously, but in a slightly different way – with these statistics showing how their virus-related deaths as a percentage of all deaths for these categories compare with that group’s share of the U.S. population overall. Groups whose shares of virus-related deaths are higher than their shares of the population as a whole are more vulnerable than average, and groups whose shares of virus-related deaths are lower than their shares of the total population are less vulnerable than average. Here’s that breakdown for senior citizens (the over 65s), drawn from Figure 3b in the link above) along with their total numbers as of 2019 (from the Census Bureau according to Table 1 in this link):

85-plus years: 5.89 million

non-Hispanic whites: 0.6 percent below

Hispanics: 1.3 percent higher

non-Hispanic blacks: 1.0 percent higher

75-84 years: 15.41 million

non-Hispanic whites: 7.6 percent below

Hispanics: 5.0 percent above

non-hispanic blacks: 3.8 percent above

65-74 years: 31.49 million

non-Hispanic whites: 14.60 percent below

Hispanics: 8.5 percent above

non-Hispanic blacks 6.7 percent above

As should be obvious, when it comes to the oldest seniors, non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, and Hispanics are experiencing CCP Virus-related deaths closely related to their shares of the overall population, there’s little if any reason to discriminate along racial and ethnic lines for virus-fighting policymakers.

The spreads are wider for Americans between 75 and 84, but mainly for non-hispanic whites. The difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks is anything but dramatic.

The situation changes more dramatically for the younger seniors, but again, mainly for non-hispanic whites. Hispanics’ and non-Hispanic blacks’ seem in the same ballpark.

Interestingly, if you look at the charts, black over-vulnerability stays level from there on for the 55-64 and 45-54 age groups, but keeps rising for Hispanics until the 25-34-year cohort . Non-Hispanic whites’ under-vulnerability stabilizes at the same point.

Even more interesting – for a change, the (rightly) embattled CDC seems to have gotten it about right.  Although the agency notes urge healthcare providers and the state governments that regulated them to “carefully consider potential additional risks of COVID-19 illness for patients who are members of certain racial and ethnic minority groups,” it specifies that “Age is the strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19 outcomes” and its relevant guidance on major risk factors for severe virus outcomes concentrates on medical conditions.

CDC also recommends paying some attention to those who “live in congregate settings, and face more barriers to healthcare,” among other “social determinants of health” that can influence risk, and that “include neighborhood and physical environment, housing, occupation, education, food security, access to healthcare, and economic stability.” 

Such Americans of course are disproportionately black and Hispanic. At the same time, the agency also admits that “we are still learning about how conditions that affect the environments where people live, learn, and work can influence the risk for infection and severe COVID-19 outcomes.” Plus, there’s no shortage of whites facing similar challenges.

Given those uncertainties, the aforementioned healthcare provision shortages, and given that Census pegs the numbers of Americans over 65 at nearly 53 million, it’s clear that protecting the elderly – whatever they look like – should be the unquestioned Job One for U.S. healthcare policy and healthcare providers.              

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Can Crypto Narrow the U.S. Racial Wealth Gap?

Tags

African Americans, bitcoin, blacks, cryptocurrencies, digital currencies, finance, Hispanics, inequality, investing, investment, Latinos, personal finance, racial wealth gap, wealth, wealth gap, whites, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Shares of Americans who say they’re “familiar” with

cryptocurrencies:

 

Whites: 37 percent

Hispanics: 49 percent

Blacks: 50 percent

 

Shares of Americans reporting owning cryptos:

Whites: 11 percent

Hispanics: 17 percent

Blacks: 23 percent

 

(Source: “Black, Latino, LGBTQ investors see crypto investments like bitcoin as ‘a new path’ to wealth and equity,” by Charisse Jones and Jessica Menton, USA TODAY, August 13, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2021/08/13/crypto-seen-path-equity-black-latino-and-lgbtq-investors/5431122001/?gnt-cfr=1)

Im-Politic: Latinos Flocking to a (Still Trump-ian) Republican Party

Tags

Axios-Ipsos Poll, Biden, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, election 2022, election 2024, exit polls, Glenn Youngkin, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latinos, NPR-Marist Poll, Pew Research Center, polls, public opinion, Republicans, The Wall Street Journal, Virginia governor's race

Remember all those those charges that former President Donald Trump made clear from the very beginning of his 2016 presidential campaign that he was an anti-Latino bigot, and the predictions that any political success he enjoyed would doom Republican chances of winning support from this increasingly important group of voters?

Apparently, many Latino voters themselves don’t. Or they’ve concluded that Trump and now dominant Republican views on sensible controls on immigration matter less to them than views on other issues. Or that they actually like Trump and the Republicans on some combination of these subjects – including immigration. Or that maybe the Republican positions aren’t terrific, but that what the Democrats have stood for lately is a non-starter.

That’s the message being sent lately by several recent polls on Latino political views that could decisively shape American politics for the foreseeable future.

First, though, some context. There’s little doubt now that four years of Trump-ism wound up boosting the former President’s support among Latinos, now further shrinking it. In 2016, Trump won 28 percent of their presidential vote. In 2020, this figure had grown to 32 percent according to the eixt polls. (This subsequent study pegs his 2020 total at 38 percent.)  And of course, in some key states, the exit polls showed, his 2020 performance was far better – notably Florida (46 percent) and Texas (41 percent). So the racism and xenophobia charges were showing signs of flopping while throughout Trump’s term in office.

Even so, the results of a Wall Street Journal survey conducted in the second half of November came as a major shock. They showed that if Trump was running for the White House against President Biden today, he’d lose by only 44 percent to 43 percent among Latino voters. And they said they’d be even split at 37 percent in their votes for Democratic and Republican Congressional candidates.

As noted in this analysis, the poll’s sample size was very small, so serious doubts in its accuracy are justified. But similar results have been reported elsewhere. Yesterday, notably, National Public Radio and Marist College released a survey showing that just 33 percent of Latino adults approved of President Biden’s performance in office, versus 65 percent who disapproved. These Biden Latino numbers were worse than his ratings from American adults as a whole (41 percent approving and 55 percent disapproving).

Moreover, only 11 percent of Latino adults “strongly approved” of Mr. Biden’s presidency so far, versus 17 percent of U.S. adults overall, and when it came to strong disapproval, 52 percent of Latinos marked that column compared with 44 percent of the total national adult population.

Nor does the evidence stop there that the longer Mr. Biden has been in office, the less Latinos like his perfomance. As this Washington Post column reminds, “In late May, Biden’s job approval among Hispanics averaged 60 percent, with a net approval margin of 32, a bit larger than his vote margin the prior year.”

Biden backers and Democrats can point to a new Axios-Ipsos survey reporting that “The Democratic Party enjoyed huge advantages over the Republican Party when Latino respondents were asked which party represents or cares about …..” But after that ellipsis comes the finding that “those advantages evaporated when it came to the economy and crime.”

Democrats own a clear edge among Latinos on one major issue, though: the CCP Virus pandemic. According to the Axios-Ipsos results “respondents were much more likely to say Democrats were doing a good job of handling COVID-19 as a health challenge — 37% to 11% for Republicans, with another 17% saying both are doing a good job.” 

But Axios-Ipsos has been a major outlier lately, as made clear in this analysis that looks not only at this year’s polls but the Virginia gubernatorial election, which saw victorious Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin actually win the state’s Latino vote.  The conventional wisdom seems to hold that Youngkin prevailed in large measure because he held Trump at arm’s length. But in light of all the other survey results, maybe that’s wishful Mainstream Media thinking?      

It’s still a long way even to the 2022 Congressional elections, much less the 2024 presidential race. But unless the President and his party can turn their sagging fortunes around, it looks like they’re rapidly running out of time with Latinos – who are increasingly flocking to a Republican Party still strongly influenced by Donald Trump.  

Those Stubborn Facts: Race, Class, and Crime in NYC

Tags

"Defund the Police", African Americans, Bronx, class, crime, Democrats, Eric Adams, Latinos, law enforcement, Manhattan, New York City, police, police brutality, policing, progressives, race, subways, Those Stubborn Facts, whites

Share of college-graduate New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of non-college-grad New Yorkers wanting more policy on the subway: 80%

Share of New Yorkers earning $50K-plus per year wanting more police on the subway: 66%

Share of New Yorkers earning less than $50K per year wanting more police on the subway: 75%

Share of white New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of Latino New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 69%

Share of African American New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 77%

Share of Manhattan-ites saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 65%

Share of Bronx residents saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 43%

(Sources: “Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections,” by Zaid Jilani, Newsweek, July 14, 2021, Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections | Opinion (newsweek.com) )

Im-Politic: Why Democrats’ Latino Problem is Much Bigger Than They Think

Tags

conservatives, David Shor, Democrats, Donald Trump, election 2016, election 2020, Equis Research, Hispanics, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latino men, Latinos, New York magazine, Populism, progressives, racism, Republicans, Ruy Teixeira, sexism, The New York Times, Washington Post Magazine, xenophobia

You know that “Wow!” emoji, with the wide open mouth and eyes? Here’s some political news genuinely deserving that reaction. Remember how all the presidential election exit polls last November showed significant gains by Donald Trump among Latino voters? And how so many analysts attributed this progress to the former President’s “macho” appeal to Latino men – an appeal that was so strong that it overrode Trump’s supposedly obvious anti-Latino racism and xenophobia?

Well, at the beginning of this month, a major survey of Latino voters found that, actually, the Trump Latino vote was driven by women.

“Big deal,” you scoff? Absolutely. Because the results indicate that these voters’ backing for Trump didn’t stem mainly from his personality traits, which are not only pretty peculiar to him, but which repel at least as many voters of all kinds as they attract. Instead, the findings suggest that Latinos’ growing Trump-ism owes more to support for his economic message and record (including on immigration) – which signals big opportunities for other Republican/conservative populists not saddled with Trump’s often -putting character, but who focus on issues that will remain crucial to much of the Latino and overall electorate long into the future.

Examples of the “macho” theory include this piece from the New York Times and a later article in the Washington Post Magazine. And they nicely illustrate how it also reenforced the impression of Trump voters generally as “deplorables” that’s been spread relentlessly by the former President’s opponents of all stripes, and that conveniently strengthens the case for seeking to ignore and marginalize them.

It’s true that both these analyses recognized that Trump’s own business experience and the state of the economy for most of his presidency also attracted many Latino males. But their greater emphasis was on how these voters liked the fact that, as the Times piece put it, Trump is “forceful, wealthy and, most important, unapologetic. In a world where at any moment someone might be attacked for saying the wrong thing, he says the wrong thing all the time and does not bother with self-flagellation.”

The Post Magazine article was much more nuanced and even-handed, but the author nonetheless described a not-trivial number of Latino men (using his own father as an example) as “archconservatives” and “conservative talk radio” fans. He also presented plenty of analyses from supposed experts likening them to low-status males desperately clinging to any patriarchical life-saver to preserve their remaining self-esteem, and consequently as prime suckers for any “self-made man” and any other bootstraps-type myths contributing to the brand Trump cultivated.

The Post Magazine piece also contrasted these Latino male views with

“the experiences of Latinas, many of whom are running their households, managing child care or employed as front-line and domestic workers — nurses or caretakers for the elderly. ‘They are making sure their kids are prepared for Zoom school,’ [one expert] explains. ‘I think there’s a fundamentally different experience that Hispanic men and women have in both what they experience day to day and what information they consume.’”

In other words, Latino men: kind of neanderthal and delusional. Latino women: nose-to-the-grindstone essential workers and heroines who are not only staffing the front lines at work, but keeping ther households together. Therefore, even if you were willing to hold your nose and wanted any opponents of conservative populists to reach out more effectively to Latino men, you’d have to admit that many are too unhinged to be reachable.

Significantly, the new findings – by a data firm called Equis Research – don’t dispute that Trump did better among Latino men than among Latino women. Equis did, however, generate data showing that, between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the Trump Latino male vote grew by three net percentage points, but his Latina vote grew by eight percentage points. That’s what’s called “statistically significant.” And poll skeptics should note that Equis interviewed 41,000 Latino voters in battleground states, and studied voter file data, precinct returns, and focus groups.

Equis didn’t endorse any explanations for this Latina shift, although a Democratic analyst named David Shor believes that “the concentration of Trump’s gains among Latinas is consistent with his hypothesis that ‘defund the police’ influenced Hispanic voting behavior since, in his polling, women rank crime as a more important issue than men do.”

But to me, the new findings matter most for a more fundamental reason:  They further debunk claims from Never Trumpers in both parties that Trump’s Latino gains resulted from appeals to some Americans’ worst (i.e., most sexist) instincts (as mentioned above), or from simple misinformation, or from the Democrats’ alleged failure to court Latino voters ardently enough – that is, from problems that either shouldn’t be fixed, or that can easily be solved without compromising the party’s strong shift to the hard Left on issues across the board.

Instead, Equis’ report adds to the case that  a huge part of the problem is the shift itself – and with Americans of all races, colors, and creeds.

Special thanks to old friend Ruy Teixeira, a distinguished opinion analyst in his own right, for calling this news to my attention. And for a very good summary and analysis of the findings, see this piece from New York magazine (in which you’ll find David Shor’s arguments).

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Reopening, Not Endless Money, is Now the Best Jobs Strategy

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African Americans, American Rescue Plan, Biden, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Covid relief, education, Employment, Federal Reserve, Hispanics, hotels, Jerome Powell, Jobs, Latinos, leisure and hospitality, lockdowns, recovery, restaurants, shutdown, stay-at-home, stimulus package, unemployment, wages, Wuhan virus, {What's Left of) Our Economy

There’s no doubt that the American jobs market has suffered an out-and-out disaster since it got hit by the CCP Virus and the follow-on lockdowns and other restrictions. There’s also no doubt that many workers and their families are still suffering greatly, and will need government aid to make it to the Other Side, and the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan legislation that the President will likely sign into law soon will help fill this gap.

Plenty of doubt remains, however, about whether all, or close to all, of the massive funds approved in this measure are actually needed to cure the economy’s remaining employment woes, and one of the main reasons is the nature of the jobs blow that’s been delivered. Because it’s been so heavily concentrated in the country’s leisure and hospitality industries (encompassing eateries and drinking places of all kinds, plus hotels and motels, and entertainment and cultural venues), it’s entirely possible that nowadays, the most effective way to fix the jobs market fastest would be to lift the lockdowns and other mandated curbs that have fallen so hard on sectors that depend on serving in-person customers.

The case for relying on a virus-relief/stimulus package this big, at this stage of the economy’s recovery from its pandemic-induced recession, has been eloquently stated by President Biden and by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The former warned just before the legislation passed that the U.S. economy “still has 9.5 million fewer jobs than it had this time last year. And at that rate, it would take two years to get us back on track.”

The latter has stated that he won’t be satisfied that full employment has returned until he sees what one reporter has called “broad-based gains in employment, and not just in the aggregate or at the median.” As a result, the Fed Chair is paying particular attention to (the reporter’s words again) “Black unemployment, wage growth for low-wage workers and labor force participation for those without college degrees, categories that historically have taken longer to recover from downturns than broader metrics.”

But it’s precisely these less fortunate portions of the workforce that would be helped disproportionately – and then some – by focusing on reopening steps that would surely affect the leisure and hospitality industries just as disproportionately.

If you doubt the importance of leisure and hospitality job loss over the last year in terms of overall U.S. jobs loss, here’s what you need to know. Of the 8.068 million positions shed by the country’s private sector between last Februrary (the final month of pre-CCP Virus normality for the American economy), fully 3.451 million have come in the leisure and hospitality industries. That’s nearly 43 percent.

Put differently, during that final normal economic month, leisure and hospitality workers represented just 13.04 percent of all private sector workers. Yet their employment plunge was more than three times as great relatively speaking.

Moreover, leisure and hospitality’s progress in getting back to pre-pandemic square one has been slower than that of the private sector overall. Since the April employment trough, leisure and hospitality has regained 4.955 million of the 8.224 million jobs lost during the worst of the pandemic, or 60.25 percent. For the private sector in toto, 13.267 million of the 21.353 million jobs lost in March and April have come back since – 62.13 percent.

It’s also clear that many of the kinds of workers about which Fed Chair Powell has been most concerned are concentrated in leisure and hospitality. For example, in 2019, (America’s last pre-CCP Virus full year), 13.1 percent of these sectors’ workers were African American versus 12.3 percent for the entire U.S. economy (including government workers at all levels), and 24 percent were Hispanic or Latino versus 17.6 percent for the entire economy.

Leisure and hospitality companies tend to employ Americans with low levels of formal education, too. According to the Labor Department, in 2019, 79.9 percent of the nation’s “first-line supervisors of house-keeping and janitorial workers” 25 years and older lack even an associate’s degree, and 76 percent of their food preparation and service counterparts fall into this category. The shares are even higher for the workers they supervise. Meanwhile, only 51.5 percent of all U.S. workers haven’t taken their education beyond high school.

Not surprisingly, therefore, leisure and hositality jobs pay poorly. In February, 2020, just before the arrivals of the pandemic and the lockdowns, their average hourly wages were only 59.28 percent those of all private sector workers. Last month, this figure had fallen to 57.58 percent. (See Table B-3 here.) 

For most of the pandemic period, the U.S. government at all levels pursued a mitigation strategy that aimed mainly at curbing economic and other forms of human activity across-the-board. Now, even with vaccinations and growing population-wide immunity showing strong signs of bringing the pandemic under control, the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress are just as determined to stimulate the economy that’s still significantly shut down by with an American Rescue Plan that seems just as indiscriminate.

As I’ve been writing (see, e.g., here), it should have been clear since late last spring that the anti-virus fight would have much more effective (and less harmful to the economy and other dimensions of public health) had it targeted protecting especially vulnerable populations. I strongly suspect that, with the fullness of time, it will become just as clear that a stimulus and jobs strategy emphasizing accelerating reopening, and thus aiding sectors and workers hardest hit by the remaining shutdowns, will prove a much more effective employment cure than the indiscriminate spending approach on which Washington has just doubled down.