Democrats began this election cycle with what was supposed to be a presidential primary field of unprecedented diversity. But it’s now clear that the nominee will be white.
No one will miss Julian Castro, the latest candidate to drop out. But his exit from the race, like that of Kamala Harris, is already occasioning a new round of baseless assertions that the deck is stacked against nonwhite candidates in the presidential primaries.
In November, Castro was already complaining that Iowa and New Hampshire are just too white to play their first-in-the-nation role in choosing the nominee. He even released an ad in Iowa to that effect later on, arguing that the Hawkeye State, long host to the first-in-the-nation caucuses, has a population too white to be fair to candidates of color.
Harris tried to make a similar argument in December, complaining that her campaign could not compete for financial resources (a lie — she had been raising more money than Joe Biden) and that she had been the victim of the public’s “difficulty in imagining” a black female president.
We would like to throw an ice-cold January-in-Iowa bucket of water on Castro, Harris, and anyone else who tries to argue that some kind of 21st-century Jim Crow is keeping nonwhite candidates out of the White House.
There are indeed meritorious arguments for taking away the special status of Iowa and New Hampshire, but this just isn’t one of them.
First of all, Castro’s argument presupposes that white voters won’t vote for nonwhite candidates. This is demonstrably false. Multiple nonwhite senators (including Harris herself), congressmen, and state officials from both parties have been elected by majority-white constituencies — some of them by some of the nation’s very whitest constituencies.
More to the point, only one of the last two elected U.S. presidents won the Iowa caucuses, and guess what? It wasn’t the white guy.
Against great odds, lily-white Iowa Democrats propelled Barack Obama to the Democratic nomination in 2008 over more experienced white rivals, then gave him their electoral votes in two consecutive general elections.
And in 2016, GOP caucusgoers did not choose Donald Trump. The majority of Iowa Republicans chose a Hispanic or a black candidate; Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio won a combined 60% of the vote. It was Cruz, the son of a Cuban immigrant, who won the state over the white favorite, Trump.
In Harris’s case, New Hampshire merits additional consideration. In late July, she had surged there, before subsequently plunging to eighth place. Did Granite State voters only figure out in August that she was black?
The second faulty assumption is that a more diverse state would be more likely to support a nonwhite candidate. Castro and Harris both disproved this by failing to win black and Hispanic support … well, anywhere. Old, white Joe Biden dominates in South Carolina, a state where black voters have the numbers to determine the Democratic winner.
Third, Castro’s argument presupposes that he was ever worthy of victory in Iowa, but for Democratic voters’ racism. This may be the most unfounded assumption of all. The former housing secretary, whose prior role as San Antonio mayor was essentially ceremonial, came into the race with laughably thin qualifications for a presidential candidate. But he was given a chance — and he bombed.
Castro’s relentless pandering caused him to issue false claims about violence against transgender people and an ill-advised pledge of open borders that he subsequently had to walk back. He also turned his candidacy into a punchline when he promised to protect the right of biological males to have abortions. Yes, it was an error, and he later recanted it, but it was an error that only Castro’s reckless, manic style of pandering could induce.
The only thing that the early exits of Harris and Castro prove is that for all their expressed pride in the party’s diversity, Democratic voters have not made it a priority to nominate a minority candidate for president.
