Yes, Democrats can be racist

Faced with increasing GOP diversity, the Democratic Party will be tempted by bigotry for the same reason Republicans long have been: there are votes there. The Democrats’ own heavy minority representation may prevent the kind of crude racial and religious attacks leveled last year by Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann. But there are subtler ways of playing on the same prejudices and fears. In 2012, for instance, the Obama campaign never directly attacked Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. (According to BuzzFeed, the GOP was so afraid it would that the Republican National Committee prepared material on polygamy in Obama’s extended family as a way of hitting back against potential attacks on polygamy in Romney’s.) Still, Montana’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, suggested that women would not back Romney because his father was “born on a polygamy commune in Mexico.” And conservatives claimed that a group named Catholics for Obama called Pennsylvania voters asking, “How can you support a Mormon who does not believe in Jesus Christ?”

Given the increasing diversity of the American political scene, future race, religion, and ethnicitybaiting may come in unusual forms. Imagine, for instance, a Democrat linking Marco Rubio’s lack of support for programs that benefit African-Americans to white Cuban prejudice against their darker skinned co-islanders. Or a group of South Asian Americans slamming Bobby Jindal for abandoning his Hindu heritage.