Color bias in College admissions has long been unpopular, and three years ago, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, in a sweeping ruling that spelled out penalties for other race-based policies that promote diversity or correct past discrimination. Some research shows that, after the civil rights era, the achievement gap between rich and poor students is now narrowing the gap between white and black students. However, well-intentioned blue-state Democrats continue to push for racially-based affirmative action, to their political detriment, instead of supporting a fairer policy of giving opportunities to economically disadvantaged people of all races.
In February, the California State Legislature passed, by a vote of 54-14, a measure seeking to place on the November ballot changes to the state constitution. allow for color preference in K–12 education and higher education scholarships. (The state Senate has yet to act on the measure.) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued The 375-page Racial Equity Initiative last month which said, “New York’s history has been one of colonialism, exploitation and racial oppression”; along with other measures, plan confirms the city’s intentions directing contracts to minority-owned businesses. Late last year, the Democratic leaders in the Maryland House and Senate excessive Gov. Wes Moore vetoed legislation seeking reparations for descendants of enslaved people.
In large parts of the country, the Democratic brand has become anathema. The party will struggle to retake the White House and reclaim the Senate unless it can convince some red-state voters to reconsider. One obvious point would be for Democrats, who have done it hemorrhaging working-class votersabandon their stubborn support for radioactive political favoritism. For more meaning Americans believe that economically disadvantaged people of any race deserve special consideration in hiring and employment decisions, and such efforts do not violate anti-racism laws. However, many Democrats cannot accept the Supreme Court’s decision — or public perception — even when doing so would help their prospects significantly.
In a recent researchpolitical scientists David Broockman of UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy changes in 29 different areas—including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza—in an attempt to determine what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates. They found that moving to the center of racial bias in college admissions was the most fruitful electoral move that Democrats could make and that doing so on racial bias in government contracts was the second most important.
The results are surprising. Affirmative action appeared the least number of times in the top 10 issues most relevant to voters. Inflation, the economy, employment, and health care are almost always higher.
Perhaps affirmative action has more symbolic value for some voters. For advocates, it signifies a commitment to the advancement of underrepresented groups, especially Black Americans. To some voters, Democrats’ support of racial bias suggests that the party favors some groups over others rather than seeking equal treatment for all Americans.
Like center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has made an argumentSwing-district Democrats rarely play the party’s most unpopular positions; Most candidates simply try to avoid mentioning them at all. But Republicans are only too happy to bring up these issues. This is why President Trump reiterates his opposition to “discriminatory DEI” programs every time. Republicans may not agree on the Iran war and the curtailment of their rights, but they are united in their opposition to DEI programs. And they know that many Democrats also oppose counting races in determining who will run first. In 2020, for example, California voters supported Joe Biden against Trump for 29 points and at the same time rejected efforts to restore racial privilege by 14 points.
Even among the intended targets of racial bias in college admissions, ambivalence has grown. A Gallup opinion poll several months after the Supreme Court’s decision Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard found that 52 percent of Blacks polled, and 62 percent of Blacks under the age of 40, said that rejecting racial bias was “the best thing.” (I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in that case and in a similar case against the University of North Carolina.)
The most successful Democrats have long understood that supporting racial bias is a political albatross. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the only Democratic presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection, both publicly questioned racial bias. In 1995, Clinton said that she wanted to change the base of certification programs for economic needs, “because they work well and have a great impact and provide broad support.” More than a decade later, then-presidential candidate Obama said he thought of his own daughters He didn’t deserve racial preference in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did.
No president, however, has fully followed his instincts. An Obama staffer once told me that the only way the president could change policy toward class-based affirmative action would be if the courts forced him to do so. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing racial profiling was a failure of Democratic priorities but also a political gift.
New evidence suggests that, after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision, universities began a transition from apartheid to economic affirmative action. In a a recent study by the Development Policy InstituteMy colleague Aidan Shannon and I found that since the Supreme Court’s decision, the share of students eligible for state Pell Grants (which go to low-income and working-class students) had increased to 83 percent at the universities for which data was available. Our results are according to 2025 Associated Press analysis of 17 highly selective colleges, which found that “almost all saw an increase in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year.” In most cases, the increase is significant. At 10 of the top 18 colleges we studied, the share of Pell Grants rose by more than 20 percent, and at six of those, the share increased by more than 30 percent. In an Associated Press analysis, MIT expanded its Pell grant by 35 percent, Duke by 29 percent, and Smith College by 25 percent.
The Trump administration has proposed that can attack These new economic programs as agency discrimination. Democrats should advocate for these new initiatives instead of clinging to racial partisanship.
Parties can move. Just ask the Republican Party, which in 2016 saw a renegade presidential candidate switch parties on trade, justice reform and the Iraq War. Democrats need to understand that the most successful reforms—like Social Security, Medicare, and Obama’s crowning achievement, the Affordable Care Act—distributed benefits based on economic need, not race.
Any Democratic presidential candidate who wants to reject racial preferences in favor of economic affirmative action has a political opportunity. Among the party’s leading candidates in 2028 is Moore, the governor who won most of the Democratic seats in the Maryland legislature. His position has a symbolic power. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. he argued that there is a the best way to compensate: Bill of Rights for disadvantaged people of all races.
Evidence suggests that a shift away from overt racial bias, more than any change in position, will make skeptical voters pay attention.
