Why a "Sistah Souljah moment" won't save Biden

Is it possible that Clinton got some help on Election Day from his bashing of Souljah five months earlier? It’s possible, but unlikely. Campaign effects just generally don’t last that long. It was a very old story by then, and it’s hard to even discern much of an effect when the story was fresh. Polling that year shows that voters were more likely to trust Clinton on issues related to racial politics, but that was true prior to the Souljah moment, as well.

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So why is it important to interrogate this piece of political lore three decades later? Because clearly many opinion leaders take it as an article of faith that a Democratic president can make himself more popular by bashing advocates for racial justice. The evidence doesn’t really support this, but they make the argument anyway.

Boot is right that the stakes are very high right now for both the Democrats and for American democracy in general. However, it’s far from clear that Democrats would gain anything by slamming a Black Lives Matter activist or trashing adherents of critical race theory. Indeed it would only signal to Black people within the party that their leadership considers them expendable when times get tough.

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