The New York Times‘ original headline was “These Are the Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails.” The revised headline (6/16/26)—evoking a 1970s-era British domestic drama—casts  Black voters in the role of servants.

Ten years ago, New York Times political thinker Thomas Edsall (6/1/16; FAIR.org, 6/5/16) was blaming Trumpism on

the refusal of Democrats and the American left to hear—or to grant some legitimacy to—the grievances of white America as it loses power and stature to ascendant minorities and to waves of immigrants from across the globe.

Now, though, Edsall (New York Times, 6/16/26) says that “the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.” Now the voters he wants Democrats to listen to are no longer white:

White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.

These are the voters, as the piece’s original headline put it, who “can keep Democrats from going off the rails.”

As evidence for this, Edsall cites polling suggesting that Black (and “other minority”) voters are more concerned about “the situation at the border,” more likely to believe that gender “is determined by sex assigned at birth,” and less likely to support “cutting some funding from police departments in your community and shifting it to social services.”

As it happens, these issues—immigration, gender identity, policing—are the same issues the New York Times has long pushed to warn readers away from the left (FAIR.org, 5/24/21, 5/6/21, 4/24/23). But do such issues have an impact on real-world elections?

Edsall offers Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a “centrist Democratic think tank,” to assure us that they do:

In the 2020 Democratic primary in South Carolina, Black Americans famously supported Joe Biden over socialist Bernie Sanders. In 2025, New York City’s Black voters supported Andrew Cuomo over socialist Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary. And in the 2026 Democratic primary for mayor in DC, socialist candidate Janeese Lewis George leads among white voters by 25 points, while the mainstream Democrat Kenyan R. McDuffie leads among Black voters by five points.

So Black voters lean to the right, and therefore can be counted on as a bulwark against socialist politicians? That’s good news for the Progressive Policy Institute—a deceptively named ideology mill bankrolled by ExxonMobil, PhRMA, AT&T and the like—as well as for Edsall, a staunch opponent of appealing to working-class voters’ economic interests (FAIR.org, 6/23/17, 3/30/18).

The Cato Institute (9/26/19) found that African Americans had the most positive views of socialism and most negative views of capitalism out of four demographic groups.

But wait—if we want to know what Black voters think about socialism, why don’t we ask them? That’s what the Cato Institute (9/26/19), the libertarian think tank, did; it found that 62% of Black respondents viewed socialism favorably, as opposed to 36% of white respondents.

The same survey found that 64% of Democrats as a whole had a positive view of socialism–making it unlikely that white Democrats have a substantially more favorable take on socialism than their Black counterparts.

Yet Edsall quotes another representative from the Progressive Policy Institute, founder Will Marshall, declaring:

The nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in US politics…. They aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.

But, laments Edsall:

The problem for Marshall and others who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.

It’s a nice trick: portraying proponents of policies that benefit the working class as “white elites.” Meanwhile, actual white elites are paying the Progressive Policy Institute to dress up the defense of their wealth in blackface.

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