During a December 8 call with civil rights leaders, President-elect Joe Biden issued a simple edict: Stop talking about policing until after Georgia’s Senate runoffs.
“I also don’t think we should get too far ahead of ourselves on dealing with police reform in that, because they’ve already labeled us as being ‘defund the police’ anything we put forward in terms of the organizational structure to change policing—which I promise you, will occur. Promise you,” Biden said in a recording of the call leaked to The Intercept. “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police.”
As the animating idea behind many of the summer’s massive racial justice protests, the call to “defund the police” was impossible for Democratic politicians to ignore in the 2020 elections, whether it meant marching in a rally or responding to attacks from their Republican opponents. Even as the interminable process of electing a president finally concluded, the divisions surrounding “defund the police” only deepened, with some Democrats—including Biden—blaming the slogan for the party’s down-ballot losses.
Progressives like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pushed back on these claims, citing a lack of statistical evidence and the positive influence of the summer’s racial justice protests in turning out Democratic voters.
To get a better handle on the debate surrounding the slogan, Blue Tent analyzed dozens of news stories and opinion pieces, reviewed available polling data, and spoke with a number of experts across the ideological spectrum. This reporting did not find strong, conclusive answers about the electoral impact of the slogan or this summer’s protests, but led to many more difficult questions with which politicians and progressive activists will have to grapple, now and in the future.
What We Know
Defunding or abolishing the police is mostly unpopular
Even when broken into a less divisive policy explanation rather than the slogan itself, polling from Gallup shows that defunding or abolishing the police is a mostly unpopular idea. Police abolition has just 15% support, with 22% support among Black Americans and only 12% support among whites. When framed as reducing police budgets and using the money for social services, support increases to around 70% for Black Americans and 41% for whites, with support at 47% overall.
This is also true on a partisan level, where 1% of Republicans support abolishing police, and only 27% of Democrats support it. Defunding police and redistributing the money polls at 78% for Democrats and only 5% for Republicans. The idea is also unpopular compared to other hot-button policies on the left, such as Medicare for All, which registers upward of 53% support, or the Green New Deal, at upward of 59% support.
Biden won with strong support among young and nonwhite voters, made gains with older white voters
While young people turned out at higher levels in 2020, older voters saw an even larger increase in turnout, which resulted in young voters comprising a smaller share of the electorate than in 2016. Black voters likewise saw a bigger turnout in 2020, but only made up a slightly higher share of the electorate as compared to 2016. Thus, Biden won in large part thanks to his ability to make gains among older, white voters (the most likely group to oppose defunding police) while simultaneously turning out young, nonwhite voters in high numbers (the groups most like to support defunding police).
“It’s a false dichotomy to suggest that we can (or should) win by targeting only one group of voters,” said Benjy Messner, a data and analytics-focused political consultant and founder of New River Strategies. “Instead of using data to shrink audiences, we should use it to expand them and deliver a broadly popular message to them, customized to each subgroup.”
“We need to win the 24-year-old Black woman in Detroit just as much as we do the 55-year-old white guy in the Philly suburbs, and don’t need to talk out of both sides of our mouth to do so,” Messner said.
Moderates controlled Democratic campaigns from top to bottom
Despite a tough presidential primary, the Democratic Party strongly united behind Biden in the general election. Even in the primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign didn’t hammer Biden to the extent that some of his advisors wanted, and the former vice president’s campaign was able to proceed without much meaningful acrimony from the party’s left-wing voices.
Moderate Democrats exercised the same level of control down-ballot. Only one Democratic candidate in 27 toss-up House races in 2020 was endorsed by the progressive group Justice Democrats. Not a single Democrat who flipped a House seat in 2018 was endorsed by the group, and many members of the 2018 class, especially those from swing districts, joined the centrist New Democrat Coalition upon taking office. In the Senate, not a single Democrat in a competitive race was endorsed by Justice Democrats.
“At the end of the day, moderates got everything they wanted,” said Data for Progress President Sean McElwee. “They got their Senate candidates in every election, they got their House candidates in nearly every election, and they got their choice of the presidential candidate. They were able to define the national brand, and to say that that is a failure on progressives, I think it shows the extent to which all of us in the party should be thinking of ways to build ourselves back up.”
Protests were able to capture a lot of attention, for good or bad
Support for defunding the police became an issue that every candidate was expected to answer, despite few Democratic candidates signaling their support for such measures. The summer’s racial justice protests, where calls for defunding or abolishing police were on prominent display, were covered widely, leading to high engagement from voters. Ninety-one percent of all voters considered the protests over police misconduct a factor in their decision to vote, with nearly one in five voters ranking the protests as the single most important factor in their voting, according to a survey by AP VoteCast. Of those who cited the protests as a factor, 53% voted for Joe Biden; of those who cited the protests as the single most important factor for their vote, 50% voted for Biden, with 49% voting for Donald Trump.
“Protests are themselves polarizing,” said Princeton Professor Omar Wasow, whose recent research focuses on race, politics and protests. “So what we see is that people who are aligned with a cause, it kind of amplifies their allegiance to that movement. But for people who are more weakly attached to that cause, the contentious politics can sometimes push them away.”
Like other big ideas from the far left, defunding police was also fodder for pundits, including legacy columnists, left-leaning digital publications like Vox and Slate, cable news, right-wing content mills and, of course, Twitter. Despite little appetite for police abolition or other left-wing policies among most Democratic candidates, these ideas traveled extensively. According to Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist think tank Third Way, this wide proliferation of controversial ideas is what sank many Democrats.
“You can have a Democratic nominee like Joe Biden who’s a moderate, but when you have a far left whose ideas are so politically toxic, and are proclaimed so loudly for two years in a presidential primary by Bernie Sanders, it’s no surprise that individual congressional candidates in very red swing districts have a really hard time fending that off,” said Cowan.
What we (still) don’t know, and why
What the data says about protests, the defund slogan and the 2020 elections
Much of the necessary data needed to figure out the impact of this summer’s protests on the 2020 elections is not yet available. Full 2020 voter files—which are the lifeblood of good campaign data operations—may not be accessible for months. The lack of data could mean that many of these debates are moot for the time being. That being said, with the data and results that are available, many experts are still fielding theories.
“What I see is turnout going up everywhere in an election where the contrast between candidates is stark, where the issues were clear and, given that’s everything going on, existential,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor and director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. “The idea of life and death with the pandemic, and the issues implicated in life and death with our racial justice and policing protests this year, certainly gives people really strong incentives.”
Ian Haney López, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively on the use of racism in politics, told Blue Tent that the specific calls for defunding or abolishing police from the left were not the most effective messages for Democrats.
“Defund the police, abolish ICE, part of the problem they suffer as messages is that they’re negative—here are things we want to destroy without articulating a positive message,” said Haney López. “But I think the more fundamental problem with them is that they are very often expressed in a context that suggests that the main problem we face is white society’s racism. That’s a losing message, and in fact, that’s a message that helps the right.”
Citing his own research testing responses to racist messaging from the right, Haney López argued that centering denunciations of racism doesn’t just lose white voters.
“What is clear from 2020 and what is clear from the research I’ve been doing is that you lose some significant number of people of color too, who feel overwhelmed by a message that they, as people of color, are demeaned by majority society, and that they are locked into conflict with majority society,” said Haney López.
What messaging worked, and what messaging could have worked
Again, the data simply isn’t yet available for an adequate analysis of which Democratic messages worked, which didn’t, and which messages Democrats should focus on in the future. Still, many experts and activists have drawn a few limited conclusions based on what they’ve seen thus far.
“The messaging that was most effective this year showed voters exactly what they would get by voting for Democrats,” said Messner. “A competent, well-run, no-drama government that actually addresses issues like the pandemic—and effectively contrasted that option against Republicans’ near-total abdication of the responsibility of governing.”
Rather than getting distracted by every Trump outrage, Messner argued, the Biden campaign in particular succeeded at painting a clear picture of a more competent candidate. By the same token, McElwee advocated an approach more focused on helping voters than pushing ideological buttons.
“I think too often, we’re focused on changing minds as the Democratic Party, when we should be focused on changing lives with the minds that we have,” said McElwee.
Intercept reporter Ryan Grim, in his post-election analysis, argued that Democratic campaign ads in swing districts lacked consistency and emotional appeal compared to Republicans. Bolstering the case that Democratic ads failed to move voters was a recent study undertaken by Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC. The group tested a number of ads by the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, finding that they mostly failed at persuading voters.
Cowan, the Third Way president, instead credits the Biden campaign for building a moderate Democratic majority.
“Joe Biden won the general election because he was a moderate,” said Cowan. “The data shows that he was seen as more moderate than Trump, but Trump was viewed as more moderate than Hillary Clinton. He overwhelmingly won moderate voters, and he outperformed far-left candidates.”
What Democrats actually believe when it comes to police reform
Only a handful of Democrats have outlined clear policy positions on how they would like to see policing changed, and these are mostly members of the party’s left flank. Democrats in the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act with support from moderates and the left, but signing onto legislation that is dead on arrival in the Senate does little to indicate a member’s vision for police reform. Conversely, several Democrats are now backing away from police reform legislation for fear of being tied to the defund movement, according to reporting by The Intercept.
“As the Republican coalition shrinks, that means you’re trying to hold together an even more heterogeneous coalition among the Democrats,” said Wasow. “Now you’ve got to go from people who are Republicans who voted for Biden to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and spanning that is really hard.”
What defunding the police would look like
Visions of a country with defunded or abolished police range from the idealistic to the dystopian. Examples of such policies in practice are hard to pin down or extrapolate.
For advocates of expanded policing, the example was set in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s, when police were funded at much lower levels and crime in urban areas was rampant. Municipalities should be investing more, not less, in policing, argued blogger Matt Yglesias.
“Beat cops are effective at reducing crime, and investing money in hiring them is worthwhile,” Yglesias wrote on his Substack blog, Slow Boring. “Investigative cops also appear to be at least somewhat effective at solving violent crimes, and investing money in hiring more of them would lead to higher clearance rates.”
The city of Camden, New Jersey, is commonly cited by police reform advocates as a successful example of a municipality abolishing its police force, but detractors point out that Camden pursued more of an overhaul and culture change than the models activists are advocating.
“The [defund the police] slogan makes clear that there is a broad rejection of ‘police reform’ as outlined by the Obama administration and professional police reformers,” said Alex Vitale, a professor at Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing.”
“As such, it has opened up space at the local level for discussions about shifting resources from criminalization to community well-being. The result has been a huge number of victories in which local governments have begun to invest in non-police public safety initiatives like non-police crisis response teams, replacing school police with counselors and funding community-based anti-violence initiatives,” said Vitale.
The road not traveled
One question that will go permanently unanswered is what the American criminal justice system would look like had cities, states and the federal government chosen a different path on police, prisons and prosecution during the 1980s and 1990s. To Vitale, the choice to pursue tough-on-crime policies has locked otherwise progressive politicians, like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, into an ideological prison.
“He’s accepted this idea that the only way to control disorder and crime is to turn this problem over to the police, and once he made that decision, all is lost,” Vitale told Jacobin in June. “Because then, he’s enabling not just a loss of funds to the police department and the creation of a repressive apparatus — he’s investing in an ideology, this ‘thin blue line’ ideology that says that the only thing holding society together is the punitive and coercive interventions of policing.”
Writing in The Nation in 2016, Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow,” argued that Black politicians and activists in the 1990s were not just asking for tough-on-crime policies. Like many Black Lives Matter activists today, those activists were begging for an economic intervention in their ailing communities.
“They were also demanding investment in their schools, better housing, jobs programs for young people, economic-stimulus packages, drug treatment on demand, and better access to healthcare,” Alexander wrote. “In the end, they wound up with police and prisons.”
