For decades, Black women have been the most ardent supporters of the Democratic party. Most recently, in the 2024 election, they voted for Kamala Harris at 92%. Since 1972, Black people’s overall support for Democrats has stayed at about 90% during a presidential election, with Black women voting even more Democratic than Black men. No other demographic has maintained that level of voter loyalty for a political party.
Donald Trump’s victory over the vice-president, and success with certain voting blocs such as Latino men and white women, has drawn attention to just how differently situated Black women are when compared with other voters.
The Guardian spoke to two leading political experts on Black women’s voting behaviors to parse out why they continually participate in the US electorate and support Democrats. What kept resurfacing was the idea that even amid shortcomings in the system – racism, a lack of solidarity with non-Black voting blocs – Democrats’ support of equitable programs and policies has driven Black women’s allegiance and likely will continue to for the foreseeable future.
“For years, Black women [have been] consistently the most Democratic sub group, [when] particularly broken down by race and gender in the US,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University. Black women’s decades-long support for the Democratic party mostly aligns with a larger realignment of Black voters in the mid-1960s, Gillespie continued. Anywhere from 25% to 30% of Black people supported the Republican party prior to the 1960s as the party was largely associated with Abraham Lincoln’s abolishment of US chattel slavery in 1865.
But Black Republican support took a huge hit after Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for US president in 1964, opposed the Civil Rights Act for “libertarian reasons”, Gillespie said, basically “[guaranteeing] that Black people were not going to support him”. Goldwater’s decision to vote against the Civil Rights Act also solidified perceptions that the Republican party was not sensitive to civil rights issues. Democrats, on the other hand, supported such legislation, even at the risk of losing southern Democratic support. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were both eventually signed into law by the Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson, signaling to Black voters that Democrats took civil rights concerns more seriously.
Since then, the idea of Republicans as callous on issues of race still prevents Black people en masse from supporting them, said Gillespie. “[There is] the perceptual disadvantage that the Republicans hold with respect to their perceived sensitivity to civil rights, [which] in fact, maybe have been exacerbated even more in the last decade. It was highly unlikely that Black people in general were going to defect to Trump.”
Republicans have also engaged in anti-Black rhetoric and passed racist policies, said Nadia Brown, a professor of government and chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University. “You [have] instances of the Republican party and [president] Richard Nixon having dog whistles of restoring racial order, the Reagan administration peeling back civil rights gains through neoliberal policies.”
Black women have supported other, more leftist political parties, including Marxist organizations and progressive third party candidates. But overall, Black women have aligned with Democrats due to the “underlying ideology” of wanting to support equality.
“It’s not to say that Black women are so committed to the Democratic party,” said Brown. “But rather are pragmatic and understand that the United States is a two-party system, and [that] if they want their issues to be heard, the best way perhaps to do that is working within the system.”
Outside of the realignment of Black voters in the 1960s, Brown noted that Black women voters also started to gravitate towards the Democratic party as Democrats began to adopt policies from the feminist movement in the 1970s, including support for early childhood education and broader access for sexual healthcare.
American women of color are already more likely to support Democrats, who are seen as being the better party for the “economically vulnerable”, said Gillespie. Yet it’s a category that Black women are more likely to fall into because of wage disparities. “If women make less money than men, then Black women make less money than white women, right? So they might actually care more about those economic and wage policies, because they would stand to benefit the most because it’s more unequal for them”.
Despite Black women’s interest in economic policies for the marginalized, post-election discussions have largely excluded them from conversations on working-class voters. Brown said she is still puzzled about why Harris is being blamed for not reaching out to lower-income voters. “What I think happened is voters have a preference for Republicans and for men to lead the economy, to talk about the economy, and so I think that the work that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden did around the economy just wasn’t landing right,”.
Unlike other groups, Black women are not typically susceptible to the belief of Republicans and men being better at managing the economy because they already have an understanding that the economy is “not set up well to serve them”, Brown said, citing a theory from political scientist Niambi Michele Carter. “Because of their social location [and] dealing with both racism and sexism and classism, Black women have a deeper understanding about how marginalization works and the way that white supremacy manipulates markets”.
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Having access to quality healthcare and education are also major priorities for Black women voters, and they’re issues that Democrats have long advocated for. Republicans, on the other hand, have openly strategized about ways to further privatize education and expand private healthcare.
“[Black women] may care about or be attracted to the Democratic party platform on how to address issues related to education or healthcare, because they’re going to be more likely to depend on the public versions of these programs than to be able to get them on the private market,” Brown said.
Reproductive justice, a feminist issue and major tenet of healthcare, also drives Black women’s support for Democrats, beyond just the question of abortion access, said Brown.
“What kind of medical care do birthing people receive? What kind of support do families receive from the government to have children that are healthy and able to live healthy and fulfilling lives?,” Brown said of how reproductive justice is considered among Black women voters. Democrats historically have supported health policies such as increased access to pap smears and breast mammograms.
Some have speculatedon whether Black women might forgo getting out the vote for future national elections due to disappointment at Trump’s win. The Associated Press reported that some Black women activists had plans to “step back” and prioritize rest and mental health amid the results.
But Brown and Gillespie have questioned if any frustration could result in a decrease in political participation among Black women. Instead, Gillespie said, many Black women voters might be questioning the “efficacy of coalitions,”. “The final result is [that] you see Trump making gains in communities where you wouldn’t have expected him to make gains, or stasis in communities where there was an expectation that there was going to be change,” she said. “Meanwhile, Black women continue to do what they’ve always done, and so it’s just a [feeling of]: ‘Wow. If I’m keeping on my path and everybody else is deviating, then what this means is that we didn’t agree on what the goals of the partnership [are].”
Overall, for Black women, participating in the electoral system isn’t a “luxury”, but a “necessity”, said Brown, citing the work of the historian Martha Jones. “Black women know that they don’t have a choice, right? They have to participate in the system, or else they will be eaten by the system.”
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