Racial preferences in college admissions have long been deeply unpopular, and three years ago, the Supreme Court declared them unlawful, in a sweeping ruling that portended doom for other race-conscious policies to promote diversity or remedy past discrimination. Some research indicates that, in the aftermath of the civil-rights era, the achievement gap between rich and poor students now dwarfs the gap between white and Black students. Even so, well-intentioned blue-state Democrats keep pushing for race-based affirmative action, to their own political detriment, rather than supporting a much fairer policy of providing a leg up to economically disadvantaged people of all races.
In February, the California State Assembly passed, by a 54–14 vote, a measure seeking to place on the November ballot a change in the state constitution to allow racial preferences in K–12 education and in higher-education scholarships. (The state Senate has not yet acted on the measure.) In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a 375-page Racial Equity Plan last month that said, “New York’s history has been one of colonization, exploitation and racial oppression”; among other measures, the plan reaffirms the city’s intent to steer contracts to minority-owned businesses. Late last year, Democratic supermajorities in the Maryland House and Senate overrode Governor Wes Moore’s veto of legislation to study reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.
In huge swaths of the country, the Democratic brand has become anathema. The party will struggle to recapture the White House and reclaim the Senate unless it can persuade some red-state voters to take a fresh look at it. One obvious move would be for the Democrats, who have hemorrhaged working-class voters, to abandon their stubborn support for politically radioactive racial preferences. Significantly more Americans believe that economically disadvantaged people of any race deserve special consideration in admissions and employment decisions, and such efforts do not run afoul of laws against racial discrimination. Nevertheless, many Democrats cannot bring themselves to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling—or the public’s attitude—even when doing so would help their prospects immensely.
In a recent study, the political scientists David Broockman of UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale tested potential policy shifts in 29 different issue areas—including immigration, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and Israel and Gaza—in an attempt to discern what might make skeptical voters consider choosing Democratic candidates. They found that moving to the center on racial preferences in college admissions was the most electorally fruitful move Democrats could make and that doing so on racial preferences in government contracting was the second most important.
The findings are surprising. Affirmative action has rarely turned up in the top-10 issues most relevant to voters. Inflation, the economy, jobs, and health care almost always rank higher.
Perhaps affirmative action has a powerful symbolic value to some voters. To proponents, it signals a commitment to the advancement of underrepresented groups, particularly Black Americans. To other voters, Democrats’ support of racial preferences suggests that the party favors some groups over others rather than seeking equal treatment for all Americans.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Trump is right about affirmative action]
As the center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias has argued, swing-district Democrats rarely play up the party’s most unpopular positions; many candidates merely try to avoid mentioning them at all. But Republicans are only too happy to bring up these issues. This is why President Trump emphasizes his opposition to “discriminatory DEI” programs at every turn. Republicans may disagree about the Iran war and entitlement cuts, but they are united in opposition to DEI programs. And they know that many Democrats are also opposed to counting race in deciding who gets ahead. In 2020, for example, California voters supported Joe Biden over Trump by a whopping 29 points and simultaneously rejected an effort to reinstate racial preferences by 14 points.
Even among the intended beneficiaries of racial preferences in college admissions, ambivalence has grown. A Galluppoll taken months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard found that 52 percent of Black respondents, and 62 percent of Black respondents under 40, said that striking down racial preferences was “mostly a good thing.” (I was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in that case and in a similar lawsuit against the University of North Carolina.)
The most successful Democrats have long understood that support for racial preferences is a political albatross. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the only Democratic presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected, both publicly questioned racial preferences. In 1995, Clinton said that he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative-action programs to economic need, “because they work better and have a bigger impact and generate broader support.” More than a decade later, then–presidential candidate Obama said that he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did.
Neither president, however, fully followed through on his instincts. An Obama staffer once told me that the only way the president could shift policies toward class-based affirmative action would be if the courts forced him to. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down racial preferences was a defeat for Democratic priorities but also a political gift.
New evidence suggests that, after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, universities began the transition from racial to economic affirmative action. In a recent Progressive Policy Institute study, my colleague Aidan Shannon and I found that since the Supreme Court’s decision, the share of students eligible for federal Pell Grants (which go to low-income and working-class students) increased at 83 percent of top colleges for which data were available. Our findings are in accord with a 2025 Associated Press analysis of 17 highly selective colleges, which found that “almost all saw increases in Pell-eligible students between 2023 and this year.” In many cases, the increases are huge. In 10 of the 18 top 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 the Associated Press analysis, MIT expanded its Pell representation by 35 percent, Duke by 29 percent, and Smith College by 25 percent.
The Trump administration has suggested that it may attack these new economic programs as proxy discrimination. Democrats ought to be defending these new initiatives instead of clinging to racial preferences.
[Rose Horowitch: So much for class-based affirmative action]
Parties can shift. Ask the Republican establishment, which watched in 2016 as a renegade presidential candidate remade the party on issues including trade, entitlement reform, and the Iraq War. Democrats should understand that the most successful reforms—such as 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 jettison racial preferences in favor of economic affirmative action has a political opportunity. Among the party’s potential candidates in 2028 is Moore, the governor who bucked overwhelming Democratic majorities in the Maryland legislature. His position has a powerful precedent. In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. argued that there exists a better path forward on reparations: a Bill of Rights for the disadvantaged of all races.
The evidence suggests that a shift away from overt racial preferences, more than any other position change, will prompt skeptical swing voters to take note.
The post The Democrats Can’t Let Go of Racial Preferences appeared first on The Atlantic.
