From Professor Ismail White and Professor Chryl Laird comes a creative and incisive analysis of contemporary Black partisanship in the United States. Steadfast Democrats is one of the best books of the year, exemplifying the capacity of resolute social science to illuminate the contours of democratic politics by helping explain why and how African American voters are the stalwarts of the Democratic Party. Using experiments, White and Laird reveal what they describe as causal mechanisms underlying Black political unity. Surveying the history of the African American political experience forged from slavery, white supremacy, and racial apartheid, the authors contextualize the content of racialized social pressure that rewards compliance and enacts sanctions for defection. Analyzing descriptive demographic and survey data, they identify the social network and kinship ties populated by other Blacks that continually maintain and reinforce group unity behind Democrats. The result is an elegant and conceptually rich theory of racialized social constraint that goes beyond the individual level of psychological predispositions and identities, instead implicating the social context and historical contingencies of Black partisanship. Rounding out this already impressive empirical and analytical achievement, Laird and White take the further step of considering the normative implications of the reality of Black homophily for agency and choice among this group of US voters. Their observations are thoughtful and wise, and combined with the brief discussion at the end of the book about the portability of the concept of racialized social constraint to other groups in US politics such as Southern whites, Latinx, and Asian Americans, White and Laird make an important addition to the study of partisanship in the United States.

The contributions of Steadfast Democrats are manifold; the erudition and elegant writing style are among its most appealing features. Equally as important is the imperative to go beyond what has been seen in the literature on political behavior: a too-heavy reliance on individual dispositions—affective closeness, group consciousness, linked fate, and solidarity—as drivers of racial political behavior and partisanship. As White and Laird persuasively argue, simply identifying the presence of group consciousness among Blacks falls short of specifying why and how the degree of homogeneity in partisan identification is as robust as it has been. Instead, their conceptualization takes our understanding of these dynamics a step further: “Our racialized social constraint framework takes the specificity of the black American experience—with its history of slavery and racial segregation—and spells out its implications for the doing of group-based politics by individuals…. It makes the structure of the lived experience of blackness central to the politics of black Americans” (p. 17). This is a crucial intervention for research in political behavior and attitudes and one that no future publication on party affiliation can ignore.

Nevertheless, there remain limitations in the book that prompt questions from the ambitious reader. Among the most important is addressed in the final paragraphs of the concluding chapter: voting behavior. As compelling as White and Laird’s theory of racialized social constraint is for the expression of party affiliation with the Democratic Party, they acknowledge that vote choice under conditions of a secret ballot is unobservable by others in a person’s social network: “For example, if a black conservative with a largely black social network were to consider voting for Donald Trump or some other Republican candidate, he would be doing so knowing that his friends and family would not likely approve. While he may understand that they cannot possibly know how he voted, he may anticipate that they might ask” (p. 207). Noting that it is costly for a Black voter to support a Republican Party candidate, they end by observing that voting Democratic will bring greater social rewards from conforming to racialized social constraint. This may be true, but there is no empirical evidence brought to bear on these conjectures. Just as more highly educated voters are incentivized to report turning out to vote, even when they have not, because of the social pressure to conform to norms of democratic citizenship, Black voters feeling the constraint of racialized social pressure to cast their ballot for the Democratic Party candidate may simply say they did when they did not. Invoking the exceptionally strong support for Doug Jones among Black voters in Alabama during the 2017 special election for the US Senate is a persuasive frame, but a single example based on exit poll data is less compelling than a systematic examination of, for example, precinct-level data across districts within and beyond Alabama. Doing so would most likely support White and Laird’s position that Black voters support Democratic Party candidates with heavily lopsided margins across time and space. But there are always exceptions, and one wonders about the electoral and structural conditions under which Black voters could support Republicans when there is a Black candidate for statewide office who is either a moderate Republican or who is distancing him- or herself from the Republican Party (i.e., John James in the 2020 US Senate race in Michigan).

This quibble raises another question about which the book is silent, and that is the behavior of Black voters in primary elections. Although Steadfast Democrats provides a strong argument both conceptually and empirically about the strength and homogeneity of Democratic Party affiliation, the analysis is geared almost entirely to the implications for general election outcomes. What does the theory of racialized social constraint contribute to understanding the dynamics of partisanship and race within the context of primary elections with multiple Democratic Party candidates running for a nomination? White and Laird’s documentation of the growth of conservative ideology over time that is masked by the constraints of Black voters’ support for Democrats provides a window into the increasing heterogeneity of issue positions among Black voters. One wonders perhaps less about this subset of conservative Blacks and instead more about those voters who support primary candidates with ideologies further to the left of the eventual nominee in a general election. For instance, the strong base of support that 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders had from Black voters in the primaries and the enthusiasm among Black female voters for 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Sanders are indicative of potential new trends to the left on the political spectrum, particularly from young Black voters. Similarly, Laird and White’s theory of racialized constraint on partisan affiliation does not extend to questions of mobilization of the Black electorate to turn out to vote. Black voters may be heavily and disproportionately Democratic in affiliation, but the analysis in the book does not address when and how racialized social constraint affects the mobilization to turn out to vote. The extension is obvious, but the supporting data remain to be seen. Some enterprising political scientist might take this as an invitation to extend White and Laird’s theory of racialized social constraint to turnout behavior.

Finally, one wonders about extensions to other racialized groups in politics that the authors discuss in the concluding section of the book. They provide the most attention to white voters in the American South, describing the disproportionate support among this group for the Republican Party following the realignment in southern states in the wake of the legislative victories from the US civil rights movement. What is absent from this brief discussion is the recognition that white voters—unlike Black voters—actually have a choice between the two major US political parties. They can choose the relatively progressive politics, including a stronger if highly imperfect position supporting racial equality, represented by the Democratic Party, or they can choose what analysts once called the “racially conservative” politics of the Republican Party. In a post–George Floyd world and during the stewardship of Trump, it was clear that this descriptor was a euphemism for the ideology of white supremacy in the modern Republican Party. In this regard, racialized social constraint works not at all the same for whites as it does for Blacks in the United States, because the choices for whites are actual choices: pick the party of racial division or pick the party that is more supportive of racial equality. In contrast, Black voters have only one choice in national politics, the Democrats. White and Laird pay mind in two chapters of the book to the racial apartheid that has structured US politics, and this acknowledgment should indicate with clarity that constraint is not what drives white voters into the arms of the Republican Party. Constraint implies a lack of agency and choice; the decision of white voters to support Trump is instead the exacting of agency to support the continuation of the practice of anti-Black racial apartheid. Southern white voters who vote Republican may be motivated by race, but they are not constrained in the same way as Black voters by a party system that provides stark choices in racial egalitarianism versus anti-Black racial supremacy.

All said, the authors’ silence on these important questions is due to the limits of scope and space, rather than purposeful blindness. Steadfast Democrats is an essential read for political scientists and is a book that will stand the test of time in the study of Black politics.