Time for Democrats to chart a new path to the White House

We’re only a few days away from the South Carolina Democratic presidential primary, that once-every-four-years moment where the national media decides that black voters have a role in selecting the next president.

But don’t worry, America, it won’t last long. The battle for white votes – the one we spent the last year watching in Iowa and New Hampshire, two of the least diverse states in the country – will resume shortly.

Before you know it, our country’s pundits will be single-mindedly focused on how the seemingly preordained Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is performing among working-class white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, maybe even North Carolina and Indiana if whichever Republican extremist nominee collapses.

If you listen closely, particularly during the less desirable cable news timeslots, you might hear a few bread crumbs thrown to the black community in the form of “changing demographics,” always in the vaguely defined “future.”

But according to one veteran civil rights lawyer, those candidates should be using the present tense when talking about voters of color.

In his new book, “Brown Is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority,” Center for American Progress senior fellow Steve Phillips shatters the fiction that the Democratic Party’s path to the White House comes from squandering millions on the white “swing” voters we’re accustomed to hearing about.

Instead, Phillips charts a new path, with detail and precision – one that might terrify our country’s ruling class, but certainly can’t be dismissed as pie in the sky. It’s a road map based on harnessing the full strength of the “explosive population growth of people of color in America over the past fifty years” that has resulted in progressive voters of color making up 23 percent of the electorate, and securing a permanent majority through white progressive voters’ 28 percent share.

Through engagement – not just a robocall and a knock on the door, but a real, sustained focus with new policy solutions – Philips explains how this largely ignored 51 percent coalition can win and govern. And better than any other writer to date, he breaks down the demographic math on how to do it.

Philips explains that if we ignore the demographic shifts – which arguably should have transformed our politics over a decade ago – any longer, the disconnect between our leaders and the people they allegedly serve is going to more closely resemble South African apartheid than the future our constitution envisions.

The Black Institute is hosting a discussion with Steve Phillips at 6 p.m. this Thursday, Feb. 18. Drop by if you want to know what America’s future looks like.