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It states that race is "to be the single most important factor in American democracy, determining which candidates win elections, which voters win at the polls, and who is on the losing end of policy." Many Americans are aware to this racial divide and have seen it increase in modern years.

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Race is shown to be the single most important factor in American democracy, determining which candidates win elections, which voters win at the polls, and who is on the losing end of policy. These conclusions are at the center of a new book entitled "Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics," by Zoltan Hajnal, professor of political science at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy.

"Arguably, we are now more divided by race than at any other time in modern American history," Hajnal said. "Even those who are well aware of America's racial divide may be shocked by the degree to which it is a force in virtually all U.S. elections."

Hajnal's research draws on sweeping data to assess the political impact of the two most significant demographic trends of last 50 years. While the U.S. has become more racially diverse, income inequality has increased. Yet, Hajnal argues that the country is still more divided by race, than class. "Ironically, as the nation has become more diverse, it has become more divided by the diversity," Hajnal writes.

The book provides insights into how immigration has become a major contributor in our deepening divide, as it has triggered a backlash that has increased white defections from the Democratic Party. Hajnal covered this topic extensively in his last book, " White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics," co-authored with Marisa Abrajano, professor of political science in the Division of Social Sciences at UC San Diego. Their 2015 study, which is the basis for the book, predicted the outcome of the 2016 election and was voted among the top 10 social science studies of the last decade by Vox.com.

Winners and losers of elections defined by actions of the federal government

Hajnal used data from a range of public opinion surveys over the last half century that polled about half million Americans on their preferences on a wide range of policy issues. These surveys represent the thoughts of American voters on whether there should be increases or decreases in government spending across 11 different areas of public policy: military spending, healthcare, transportation, gun control, minimum wage, etc.

Zoltan Hajnal has authored award-winning books on racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, immigration and political behavior.
Courtesy photo

Hajnal (above) is professor of political science at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy and is director of the school's Master of Public Policy Program.

Hajnal then evaluated if federal government spending eventually reflected the preferences of the majority of Americans over four decades. While the data revealed that American democracy is fairly responsive to constituents; one variable stood out-black voters were 5 percent more likely than whites to have their policy preferences ignored by the federal government.

"Blacks are losing to whites significantly more than any other comparison group-men vs. women, rich vs. poor, liberal vs. conservative," he said. "One could argue that white voters represent the majority so why wouldn't they have more of a say? However, when I dug deeper, the issue is more problematic because of the consistency at which the will of black voters is not enacted by the federal government in issue after issue, year after year."

Hajnal does not have an explanation for this pattern; however, he points out that even when blacks have the same policy preferences as white voters, their preferences are weighed less heavily than that of whites, so there does appear to be some discrimination in the process.

Political parties are singularly the greatest determinant of the racial balance of power

Hajnal notes that there are some years where black voters do not lose that much in comparison to whites, and other years where election outcomes respond equally to the desires of both black and white constituents. He found the variation could be explained by which political party controls the levers of power, revealing that when there's a Republican president and congress, the gap is large. When there's a Democratic president and Republican congress, the gap is smaller but still exists; and when there's a Democratic president and congress, the gap disappears.

Additional data reveals that black incomes went up by an average of $753 more per year under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. Black unemployment also fell substantially under Democratic control, while it grew significantly under Republicans. In 22 years under Democratic presidents, black unemployment fell 7.9 points. This is not the case under Republican presidents. By contrast, in 35 years under Republican leadership, black unemployment grew 13.7 points.

"If we care about American democracy and want it to be as fair as it can be, there is in some sense, a pathway forward," Hajnal said.

Making a difference by teaching future generations the power of public policy

A scholar of racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, immigration and political behavior, Hajnal directs the School of Global Policy and Strategy's Master of Public Policy (MPP) program. The two-year, professional degree program prepares students for policymaking in an increasingly global business and legislative landscape.

Hajnal joined the school's faculty in 2017 specifically to oversee the new MPP program. His previous appointment was in the UC San Diego Department of Political Science for more than 15 years.

Zoltan Hajnal on America's racial divide
Credit: UC San Diego

"For me personally, it is important to be involved in a community that cares about and is engaged with policy and to be teaching students who are likely to have a real impact on the world moving forward," said Hajnal. "All of us involved in the public policy realm wholeheartedly believe that policy is an important tool to improve the wellbeing of everyone in society,"

He added that the program trains students to study public policy in a rigorous and systematic way, allowing them to develop better solutions as well as more efficient and equitable policy that can improve outcomes for societies.

For more information, go to the Master of Public Policy program webpage. Read more about Zoltan Hajnal on the School of Global Policy & Strategy website.

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A nation dangerously divided: How race shapes who wins and who loses in U.S. democracy

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Race is shown to be the single most important factor in American democracy, determining which candidates win elections, which voters win at the polls, and who is on the losing end of policy.

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Joe Biden had addressed the issue of politics being divided in these country when it came to views on racial justice, law enforcement, and other issues. He stated that he was going to try to bridge the division. The racial aspect occurs alot when dealing with voting as well.

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In his first speech as president-elect, Joe Biden made clear his intention to bridge the deep and bitter divisions in American society. He pledged to look beyond red and blue and to discard the harsh rhetoric that characterizes our political debates.

It will be a difficult struggle. Americans have rarely been as polarized as they are today.

The studies we've conducted at Pew Research Center over the past few years illustrate the increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement and a long list of other issues. The 2020 presidential election further highlighted these deep-seated divides. Supporters of Biden and Donald Trump believe the differences between them are about more than just politics and policies. A month before the election, roughly eight-in-ten registered voters in both camps said their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine-in-ten - again in both camps - worried that a victory by the other would lead to "lasting harm" to the United States.

The U.S. is hardly the only country wrestling with deepening political fissures. Brexit has polarized British politics, the rise of populist parties has disrupted party systems across Europe, and cultural conflict and economic anxieties have intensified old cleavages and created new ones in many advanced democracies. America and other advanced economies face many common strains over how opportunity is distributed in a global economy and how our culture adapts to growing diversity in an interconnected world.

But the 2020 pandemic has revealed how pervasive the divide in American politics is relative to other nations. Over the summer, 76% of Republicans (including independents who lean to the party) felt the U.S. had done a good job dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, compared with just 29% of those who do not identify with the Republican Party. This 47 percentage point gap was the largest gap found between those who support the governing party and those who do not across 14 nations surveyed. Moreover, 77% of Americans said the country was now more divided than before the outbreak, as compared with a median of 47% in the 13 other nations surveyed.

Much of this American exceptionalism preceded the coronavirus: In a Pew Research Center study conducted before the pandemic, Americans were more ideologically divided than any of the 19 other publics surveyed when asked how much trust they have in scientists and whether scientists make decisions solely based on facts. These fissures have pervaded nearly every aspect of the public and policy response to the crisis over the course of the year. Democrats and Republicans differ over mask wearing, contact tracing, how well public health officials are dealing with the crisis, whether to get a vaccine once one is available, and whether life will remain changed in a major way after the pandemic. For Biden supporters, the coronavirus outbreak was a central issue in the election - in an October poll, 82% said it was very important to their vote. Among Trump supporters, it was easily the least significant among six issues tested on the survey: Just 24% said it was very important.

Why is America cleaved in this way? Once again, looking across other nations gives us some indication. The polarizing pressures of partisan media, social media, and even deeply rooted cultural, historical and regional divides are hardly unique to America. By comparison, America's relatively rigid, two-party electoral system stands apart by collapsing a wide range of legitimate social and political debates into a singular battle line that can make our differences appear even larger than they may actually be. And when the balance of support for these political parties is close enough for either to gain near-term electoral advantage - as it has in the U.S. for more than a quarter century - the competition becomes cutthroat and politics begins to feel zero-sum, where one side's gain is inherently the other's loss. Finding common cause - even to fight a common enemy in the public health and economic threat posed by the coronavirus - has eluded us.

Over time, these battles result in nearly all societal tensions becoming consolidated into two competing camps. As Ezra Klein and other writers have noted, divisions between the two parties have intensified over time as various types of identities have become "stacked" on top of people's partisan identities. Race, religion and ideology now align with partisan identity in ways that they often didn't in eras when the two parties were relatively heterogenous coalitions. In their study of polarization across nations, Thomas Carothers and Andrew O'Donohue argue that polarization runs particularly deep in the U.S. in part because American polarization is "especially multifaceted." According to Carothers and O'Donohue, a "powerful alignment of ideology, race, and religion renders America's divisions unusually encompassing and profound. It is hard to find another example of polarization in the world," they write, "that fuses all three major types of identity divisions in a similar way."

Of course, there's nothing wrong with disagreement in politics, and before we get nostalgic for a less polarized past it's important to remember that eras of relatively muted partisan conflict, such as the late 1950s, were also characterized by structural injustice that kept many voices - particularly those of non-White Americans - out of the political arena. Similarly, previous eras of deep division, such as the late 1960s, were far less partisan but hardly less violent or destabilizing. Overall, it's not at all clear that Americans are further apart from each other than we've been in the past, or even that we are more ideologically or affectively divided - that is, exhibiting hostility to those of the other party - than citizens of other democracies. What's unique about this moment - and particularly acute in America - is that these divisions have collapsed onto a singular axis where we find no toehold for common cause or collective national identity.

Americans both see this problem and want to address it. Overwhelming majorities of both Trump (86%) and Biden (89%) supporters surveyed this fall said that their preferred candidate, if elected, should focus on addressing the needs of all Americans, "even if it means disappointing some of his supporters."

In his speech, President-elect Biden vowed to "work as hard for those who didn't vote for me as those who did" and called on "this grim era of demonization in America" to come to an end. That's a sentiment that resonates with Americans on both sides of the fence. But good intentions on the part of our leaders and ourselves face serious headwinds in a political system that reinforces a two-party political battleground at nearly every level.

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America is exceptional in the nature of its political divide

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The U.S. is not the only country wrestling with political fissures. But the pandemic has revealed how pervasive the divide in U.S. politics is.

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Senator Tim Scott stated that America is not a racist country. However data has shown differently. Some examples that are in the article include: life expectancy for black and latinos have declined, graduation gap, racial wealth gap, and racial disparities in criminal justice.

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When Sen. Tim Scott gave a rebuttal following President Joe Biden's first address to Congress Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator defended the country's record on race.

"Hear me clearly," Scott said. " America is not a racist country."

The sole Black Republican in the chamber used his rebuttal to say that Democrats ignore the country's racial progress over the past century for political and financial gain.

"Just before COVID, we had the most inclusive economy in my lifetime," he said.
'America is not a racist country':12 CHARTS: How racial disparities persist across wealth, health, education and beyond Tim Scott says in Republican rebuttal to Biden's speech
On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman, first Black person and first Indian American in the role, disagreed with some - but not all - of Scott's statements.

"First of all, no, I don't think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today," Harris said.

Statistics and facts compiled in a number of sectors over a number of years show inequality pervades U.S. society.

Life expectancy for Black, Latino populations declines most

Data through June 2020 shows life expectancy at birth for the total U.S. population dropped to 77.8 years, the lowest since 2006, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.
The U.S. lost a whole year of life expectancy: For Black people, it's nearly 3 times worse
Life expectancy for Black populations declined the most from 2019 - by 2.7 years, to 72 years - its lowest level since 2001. Latinos experienced the second-biggest decline, falling 1.9 years since 2019 to a life expectancy of 79.9 years, lower than when it was first recorded in 2006.

The disparities highlighted in the study add to the mounting evidence of COVID-19's disproportional effect on Black and Latino communities, health experts say.

The graduation gap

Disparities at all levels of education exist.

The racial wealth gap

Although more white Americans live in poverty by total numbers (17 million vs. 9 million Black people), in terms of percentages, Black Americans are almost twice as likely to live below the poverty line as white Americans. They also have lower household incomes and lower rates of home ownership.
USA TODAY's Phillip M. Bailey, Adrianna Rodriguez, Mabinty Quarshie, N'dea Yancey-Bragg, Anne Godlasky, Jim Sergent and Veronica Bravo contributed to this report.
More: Black homeowners are more than twice as likely to have to return to renting

Figures show racial disparities in criminal justice

Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men, according to a study from the University of Michigan, Rutgers University and Washington University. Bias has Disparities have also been documented in plea bargains and sentencing. After decades of rising incarceration rates that followed the "get tough on crime'' mandate of the 1980s, '90s and early 2000s, the problem of mass incarceration is slowly declining, according to Pew Research data.

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Sen. Tim Scott said America is not a racist country. But data shows racial disparities.

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When Sen. Tim Scott gave a rebuttal following President Joe Biden's first address to Congress Wednesday night, the South Carolina senator defended the country's record on race. "Hear me clearly," Scott said. " America is not a racist country."

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The saying does not mean everyone is full blown racist, it just means there are many people that support racist people meaning they are closely supporting racism. Many try to use Obama and Harris as their evidence that America is not racist.

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Last Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on "Fox New Sunday" that "our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country."

Graham argued that the country can't be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule.

In the rebuttal to President Joe Biden's address to a joint session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became an apologist for these denials of racism, saying too that the country wasn't racist. He argued that people are "making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal."

Scott's argument seems to leave open the possibility that America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that it has graduated into egalitarianism.

I personally don't make much of Scott's ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that "woke supremacy," whatever that is, "is as bad as white supremacy." There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None.

It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: "What, to you, is America?" Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?

When people say that America is a racist country, they don't necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?

Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land's Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote on the Dred Scott case, in an infamous ruling that would be issued in 1857, that Black people "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones "there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."

Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn't exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and became less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.

So, what does it mean for a system to be racist? Does the appellation depend on the system in question being openly, explicitly racist from top to bottom, or simply that there is some degree of measurable bias embedded in those systems? I assert the latter.

America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.

And the precise way we phrase the statement makes all the difference: America's systems - like its criminal justice, education and medical systems - have a pro-white/anti-Black bias, and an extraordinary portion of America denies or defends those biases.

As Mark Twain once put it: "The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this subject contributes to the murkiness - and to the myth that the question of whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of genuine debate among honest intellectuals.

Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.

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Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement

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Last Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on "Fox New Sunday" that "our systems are not racist. America's not a racist country."

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For years, Black Americans have been voting democratic. In the late 1800s most identified as Republican until the the Southerns started to take over. The Democratic party started to carry the Civil Rights movements which increase a surge of Black Americans to become Democrats.

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African Americans are Democrats. Since 1968 no Republican presidential candidate has received more than 13% of the African American vote and surveys of African Americans regularly show that upwards of 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats. However, understanding why African Americans…

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Many Black Americans identify themselves as conservative and moderate. It was found that black votes are to stay with this group due to social pressure from other black voters.

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At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes - the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That's one of the reasons why South Carolina's primary on Feb. 29 is seen as a bellwether for the Democratic field - if a candidate can't win a state where a majority of Democratic primary voters are black, what does that mean for his or her candidacy going forward?

But black voters aren't the monolith exit polls make them out to be. Pew Research Center found that a quarter of black Democrats identify as conservative, and 43 percent identify as moderate.

So how to square that circle? How can a big chunk of black voters be unwavering Democrats who differ ideologically from the party? We spent years investigating that question for our new book, "Steadfast Democrats." We found that black voters are so loyal to the Democratic party in part because of social pressure from other black voters. Rather than throw the whole book at you, we're going to highlight a couple pieces of evidence that show how that dynamic works.

Our first piece of evidence came from survey data collected by the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES). In that survey, interviewers asked respondents face to face which party they identify with. We then looked at the race of the interviewer and the race of the respondents to see if black respondents generally answered differently depending on who asked the question. We concluded black respondents were more likely to report they were a Democrat when they were with a black interviewer (96.4 percent) than a nonblack interviewer (83.9 percent) or an online survey (85 percent).

We ran a separate study around the 2012 presidential election to test the same theory. We wanted to determine the likelihood that black individuals would defect from the norm (supporting Democratic candidates) when offered money. In the study, 106 black students at a midwest college were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Each was given $10 by an interviewer and told the money could be donated to Mitt Romney or Barack Obama. Subjects were informed that they were not obligated to donate the money and that they could decide to keep it. But if they chose to give it to a candidate, $10 would be donated for every $1 they allocated. (This was just a ruse - the money was not actually donated.) They were also told that they should make their decision once they entered a separate room, away from the interviewer, where there would be one contribution box for Romney and another for Obama.

But not all the students were in the room alone. One group of students was, but two other groups were paired with an actor pretending to be another participant. In each scenario, the actor was instructed to walk into the room and immediately say out loud that he or she was donating all the money to Obama, then make the donation. One group paired participants with a white actor; in the other, the actor was black.

People in the first group - the loners - kept most of the money, donating on average $3.74 to the Obama campaign. In the group with the white actor, individuals donated $4.45 to the Obama campaign. This amount was not statistically different from the scenario in which no actor was present. But in the third group, with the black actor, the average Obama contribution increased to $6.85 - a significant increase relative to the group where no actor was present.

In other words, black participants were less likely to pocket the money when another black person said he or she would be donating to Obama. The participant felt pressure to comply with the expectation of behavior by someone similar to them.

As you see the results from South Carolina and other states with a percentage of black Democrats, keep that dynamic in mind. The values of the Democratic party appeal to many black voters, but their steadfast loyalty to the party goes beyond common interest. Social pressure is what cements that relationship between the black electorate and the Democratic party.

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Why So Many Black Voters Are Democrats, Even When They Aren't Liberal

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At first blush, black voters appear to be an almost monolithically Democratic bloc. In 2016, black Americans cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes - the largest share ever. And in the general election, 89 percent of black voters supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That's one of the reasons why South Carolina's primary on Feb.