DNC Coverage: Racial Equality
Over the last eight months, we’ve explored the issue landscape of the Democratic nomination. We began with our issue tracker, which followed the ebbs and flows of the issues that drew the most attention during the primary season, and then compared how these issues lined up with how the candidates pitched themselves to the electorate. Then, when Biden became the presumptive nominee, we took a look back at the agenda-setting dynamics of the primaries, assessing who led whom in issue attention among Twitter, the candidates, and the news media as the battle for the nomination unfolded.
This week, Joe Biden accepts his party’s nomination (albeit not in our hometown). Although the DNC has scaled down its presence in Milwaukee, the Elecurator project is just ramping up. Our team will be presenting real-time, in-depth insights into the centerpiece issues of Biden’s pledge to “Build Back Better” and the online conversations sparked by each night of the convention.
Here, we kick off our DNC coverage with one of the issues (among the 25 we’ve tracked) that has garnered the most sustained attention on social media: racial equality.
Throughout the year, calls to address racism and racial disparities in policing, education and healthcare have been frequently referenced in tweets about Biden, the Democratic Party and/or the 2020 presidential election. George Floyd’s death on May 25th and the viral video that began circulating the next day, capturing a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly 8 minutes before he died, reignited national outrage about the deaths of Black people at the hands of white police officers. Millions of Americans have taken to the streets in protest this summer – in big cities and small towns alike. Citing scholars and crowd-counting experts, the New York Times reports that the protests – in which an estimated one in five Americans have participated – may be the largest movement in U.S. history.
Our issue tracker also picked up a renewed focus on racial justice this summer. In the figure below, we report the weekly distribution of the top issues mentioned in tweets about Biden’s candidacy after he became the presumptive nominee. Throughout the month of June, tweets about racial justice vastly outnumbered those about other top issues, including healthcare and the economy. And though the volume has decreased somewhat in recent weeks, it remains one of the most frequently referenced issues on Twitter as we head into the DNC convention.
DNC Issue Tracker
Weekly distribution of issues referenced in tweets about Biden’s candidacy.
But as we’ve mentioned before, Twitter users tend to be younger and more liberal than the average American. It’s possible that this focus on racial justice is limited to the subset of young Democrats on the left who tweet frequently about politics.
Earlier this month, we fielded our first Elecurator survey through NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel, asking a nationally representative sample of Americans about their social media use and the issues that they care most about heading into the presidential election. Twitter users in our sample were younger, more highly educated, and more likely to identify as Democrats. But despite these differences, the vast majority of Democrats surveyed were in agreement that racial equality is a “very important” issue in the 2020 presidential election, and we found no difference in agreement between Twitter users (79% agreement) and non-users (78% agreement).
We also asked respondents to describe, in their own words, their top issue in the 2020 presidential election. We then coded these responses by issue. Roughly 6 percent of self-identified Democrats did name racism/racial equality as a top electoral issue, unprompted. That said, more Democrats identified healthcare, the economy, COVID-19, and Trump as important issues, and Black Democrats were more likely to say that racism/racial equality was the most important issue than white Democrats. Indeed, as political scientist, Candis Watts Smith notes: there is often a wide gap between what white Americans “say they value and what they are willing to do to live up to their ideals.” Other recent polling shows persistent racial gaps in opinion about public policies aimed at addressing racial inequality.
Open-ended responses to most important issue in 2020 presidential election
Biden has made racial equity one of the four pillars of his “Build Back Better” agenda for economic recovery, outlining the policy steps he would take to reduce the racial wealth and opportunity gaps. His proposed plans include investing in affordable housing, homeownership and small businesses in Black, Latino, and Native American communities and resurrecting the Obama Administration’s Fair Housing Rule, which the Trump Administration suspended in 2018. At the same time, Biden has said he does not support defunding the police, disappointing activists and movement leaders who have called for abolition, not reform.
In future analyses, we will look at how people are engaging Biden’s proposals to promote racial equality, exploring the reactions expressed online during the DNC and then during the presidential debates later this fall. Is our issue tracker just picking up sentiment, or are more Americans also debating concrete government action?
Student team members who contributed to this report include Savannah Charles, Kaley Gilbert, and Emma Hazeltine.