A Bad Week For "The Black Party"

The Democrats As "The Black Party" 

Back in 2009, the journalist Steve Sailer suggested a Machiavellian strategy Republicans could use to drive wedges in the Democratic coalition and lower their election turnout: brand them as "The Black Party":

 Being, in essence, the white party makes the GOP uncool. And that's only going to get worse as the impact of decades of indoctrination in the uncoolness of white people by the school system and Main Stream Media continue to pile up [...]

My suggestion: the only long-term option for the Republicans, the de facto white party, is to rebrand the Democrats as the de facto black party.

Not the Minority Party or the Cool, Hip, Multicultural Party—but the Black Party. Go with the flow of the fundamental Manichaeism of American thought: Black versus White. [...]

Hispanics and Asians certainly will never be terribly happy with the idea of being junior partners in the white party. (Indeed, lots of white people have an allergy to belonging to the white party.) Hence, the alternative must be framed that if Hispanics and Asians don't want to be junior partners in the white party, they get be junior partners in the black party.

As Sailer noted several years later, while the Republicans didn't take him up on is suggestion, the Democrats basically did it for them: 

Of course, practically no Republican tried to implement this strategy, but it is clearly happening anyway among Democrats: black megalomania and white Democrats’ myth-making combine to privilege blacks as the moral core of the Democratic Party. Which would be fine for the Democrats, except that blacks tend to behave badly far more often than any other group.

So, Democrats have self-inflicted this Sailer Strategy Supplement on themselves.

Indeed. Being The Black Party is why Biden was compelled to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate, despite her performing so poorly in the 2020 primary that she was forced to drop out before Iowa. 

The Downsides Of Being The Black Party 

We saw a couple of examples of the downsides of being The Black Party this week, first at Kamala Harris's rally in Atlanta, and later at Donald Trump's appearance at the black journalists event in Chicago.

In order to boost attendance at Kamala's Atlanta rally, the campaign had the rapper Megan Thee Stallion perform. Her act looked ridiculous in front of a mixed crowd, including bewildered-looking, elderly white ladies in Kamala campaign shirts, and it came across as cringeworthy on social media as well. 

In part, this was due to a tactical error by the event organizers. Years ago, one of the big trance DJs played a one-off event in the Hamptons. The organizer of that event was savvy enough to pack the front rows with the DJ's fans. 

People are social creatures, and if they saw some Megan Thee Stallion fans reacting enthusiastically to...whatever it was she was doing on stage, the rest of the crowd might have seemed less bewildered. Of course, the megalomania Sailer mentioned above, might have prevented anyone on Team Kamala or Team Thee Stallion from considering that she wasn't everyone's cup of tea. As William Wheelwright put it on X: 

Amusing to think how they smuggled this sort of thing into mainstream culture via the decoy of hip-hop, which admittedly did sometimes employ some thought provoking wordplay and described an unfamiliar aspect of American life. But it only took a few decades to get the music back to feeling like it’s 1900 and we are deep in the bush of Zaire and there’s an enemy tribe doing its human sacrifice preparation ritual just around the next bend in the river

Trump Versus Black Lady Journalists In Chicago 

The second stumble for the Black Party this week was in Chicago, where Trump was immediately ambushed by a hostile black woman journalist, and--rather than defer to her apologetically, as most politicians would--he pushed back. 

Probably the biggest headline to come out of the event, was President Trump questioning Kamala Harris's black identity: 

Some argued Trump was being racist or unnecessarily provocative here, but as Steve Sailer suggested, Trump's confusion may have been genuine: 

As it happened some prominent black men weren't buying it either. 

Former NFL star Antonio Brown shared a video of Kamala Harris calling herself Indian in a segment with an Indian actress. 

Why Kamala's Flexible Identity Matters

As Douglass Mackey summed it up, the point is that Kamala is of mixed ancestry but that she's a phony, with no fixed values. 

Zaid Jilani underlined this point, noting that Harris doesn't appear to believe in any of the policies she ran on in 2020. 

And rather than try to pin her down on this, the media is acting as her Super PAC instead. 

Maybe we'll get some clarity in the one debate with Trump that Kamala has agreed to. 

In Case You Missed It 

In our trade alert yesterday (Being Greedy When Others Are Fearful), we wrote about taking advantage of the recent pullback to place bets on a few oversold, undervalued stocks. 

We got a fill on one of those trades yesterday, and the other two are still open, if you want to tail. 

Also, barring an extraordinary reversal, our Carvana trade from June is headed for a >200% gain today. 

If you want a heads up when we place our next trade, feel free to subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below. 

You can also download our iPhone hedging app by tapping here on your phone, or aiming our iPhone camera at the QR code below. 

If you'd like to stay in touch

You can scan for optimal hedges for individual securities, find our current top ten names, and create hedged portfolios on our website. You can also follow Portfolio Armor on X here, or become a free subscriber to our trading Substack using the link below (we're using that for our occasional emails now).