At several points during this campaign, Barack Obama has urged voters to support Hillary Clinton not because of her long experience, or because of his estimation that Donald Trump is “uniquely unqualified” for the Presidency, but in order to preserve his own legacy. He said this most explicitly at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual dinner, in September, where he implored African-Americans to back the Democratic candidate.
“After we have achieved historic turnout in 2008 and 2012, especially in the African-American community, I will consider it a personal insult—an insult to my legacy—if this community lets down its guard and fails to activate itself in this election,” Obama said. “You want to give me a good send-off? Go vote.”
Obama’s two Presidential campaigns were defined in part by the black voters they brought to the polls. In both 2008 and 2012, African-American women voted at a higher rate than any other demographic group in the country. In recent months, Obama has been asking those voters to preserve the work of his Administration: Trump has promised to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Iran deal. But, aside from his desire to protect those policies, by appealing to black voters to go to the polls he was also asking them to counter a new effort to suppress the black vote, which grew in strength during his Presidency.
On November 5, 2008, the morning after Obama’s election, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial noting that “a man of mixed race has now reached the pinnacle of U.S. power only two generations since the end of Jim Crow.” To the Journal, this was “a tribute to American opportunity,” and proof that egalitarianism had triumphed in the United States. “One promise of his victory is that perhaps we can put to rest the myth of racism as a barrier to achievement in this splendid country,” the editors wrote. “Mr. Obama has a special obligation to help do so.”
Throughout the campaign in 2008, Obama alternately laughed off and rejected the idea that his campaign could or would allow the country to transcend its history of racism. In a speech on race, given in response to reports about the inflammatory sermons of his longtime pastor, Jeremiah Wright, he remarked that, “contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial division in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy—particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”
Yet the idea that Obama’s candidacy represented “racial reconciliation on the cheap,” as he put it in that speech, persisted into his Presidency. A version of the Journal’s argument appeared in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court decision that, in 2013, gutted the Voting Rights Act.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that the act’s “special provisions” for monitoring the electoral laws of states with histories of racial discrimination against black voters were a relic of the nineteen-sixties. During arguments, Justice Roberts asked Donald Verrilli, Jr., the Solicitor General, whether the Obama Administration believed that “the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North.”
What Justice Roberts’s question implied was that the election of a black President to a second term surely served as evidence that the Voting Rights Act, which was passed when there were no black elected officials in statewide or congressional office in the South, had served its purpose. Justice Antonin Scalia went further, referring to the act as “the perpetuation of a racial entitlement.” Another interpretation of Roberts’s question, however, is that it’s roughly akin to citing declining numbers of drunk drivers as evidence that laws criminalizing the behavior had served their purpose and could now be relaxed.
The most transparent evidence that relaxing the rules does not improve compliance is the fact that, in 2016, there are nearly nine hundred fewer polling places in states previously covered by the Voting Rights Act than there were for the 2012 election. Moreover, African-American advocacy groups have to keep fending off new efforts to suppress voting. On Friday, a federal judge in North Carolina threw out an attempt to have nearly four thousand individuals, many of them African-Americans, struck from the voting rolls in Beaufort, Moore, and Cumberland counties. The move came in response to a lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. In July, federal judges struck down a North Carolina voter-I.D. law that targeted black voters with “surgical precision.” On Sunday, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund tweeted a reminder that the Voting Rights Act “prohibits any attempt to ‘intimidate, threaten, or coerce’ ” prospective voters.
At the time of the Shelby decision, observers pointed out that the Supreme Court contention that the Voting Rights Act unfairly presumed racism among white Southerners was as much a justification for expanding the law as it was for dismantling it. In short, if access to the ballot is no longer a uniquely Southern concern, that might be because the problem has become more widespread. Consider the fact that the biggest proponent of voter intimidation is not a Mississippi sheriff trawling registration rolls for black people but a real-estate developer born and raised in Queens.
Trumpism has expanded the challenges to African-American voters. Late last month, the Pennsylvania G.O.P. filed a suit alleging that the state laws that restricted poll watchers to the county in which they were registered was unconstitutional. If it had been successful, the suit would have facilitated poll watchers from across the state converging upon areas where they suspect, with little evidence, that election fraud may take place. On Friday, a federal judge ruled against the Party, calling their suit an “extraordinary remedy” to the potential problem.
It nonetheless remains that the most fraught election in modern American history is also one in which access to the vote is most tenuous and imperilled. The irony of this state of affairs is that past progress may become an obstacle to moving forward—and, indeed, may become the basis for us heedlessly, recklessly moving backward.
