Contributing Op-Ed Writer: What if Race No Longer Matters in City Politics?

The most significant development in the mayoral election in Boston earlier this month was hardly discussed: the absence of open racial animosity.

The new mayor, Martin Walsh, a white labor union leader, received crucial backing from three minority candidates — Felix Arroyo, John Barros and Charlotte Golar Richie — who had been defeated in Boston's version of a primary. Walsh has committed himself to filling at least half of his cabinet with African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans.

Walsh's Democratic opponent, John Connolly, who serves on the city council, was just as liberal on matters of race. Connolly's electoral problems lay in his more upscale background – he went to Roxbury Latin, a local private school, and then Harvard before going to law school at Boston College and joining Ropes & Gray, a white shoe firm. This fancy background hurt him in comparison to Walsh's leadership of Laborers Local 223 and of the Building and Construction Trades Council of the Metropolitan District.

For someone familiar with Boston's racial history, what stands out is how different the climate was on Nov. 5 from that of the 1960s and 1970s, when violence broke out in white neighborhoods as the city struggled with federal busing orders that sent African-American kids from Roxbury into lower-income Irish-American South Boston. Mobs of angry, rock-throwing whites lined the route to South Boston High.

In 1967, Louise Day Hicks, a member of the Boston School Committee and an inflammatory anti-busing activist, took first place in the city's open primary, forcing Kevin White, a more liberal Democrat, into a runoff. White won with 52 percent of the vote; Hicks won 47 percent.

In the 1976 Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary, George C. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, running on an explicitly segregationist platform, carried Boston's working class white wards by overwhelming margins.

Bill Russell, the Celtics center from 1956 to 1969, described Boston in his 1979 memoir "Second Wind" as "a flea market of racism.'' "The city," he wrote,

"had all varieties, old and new, and in their most virulent form. The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-'em-back-to-Africa racists, and in the university areas phony radical-chic racists."

The 2013 election stands in contrast to Boston's fraught racial past.

"If you were to go back 40 years, the notion that a white, blue-collar guy from Dorchester would be the candidate of black voters would not be believable," Charlie Baker, a Democratic consultant in Boston, told me. "That world has ended."

"Nobody would ever play a race card now, not a chance in a million," said Chuck Campion, a consultant with Boston's Dewey Square Group.

The multiracial character of Boston's 2013 primary electorate is reflected in Walsh's nearly identical margins in Roxbury and South Boston. Roxbury, the core of the city's black political power structure, went for Walsh 59-41; South Boston, once the center of virulent anti-black racism, this year went for Walsh 61-39.

Boston is not alone. The absence of race as a divisive issue was also striking in New York's recent mayoral election — and before that in the March 5 mayoral election in Los Angeles. All three cities experienced intense racial clashes in past elections, New York most famously in the two mayoral contests between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani, and Los Angeles repeatedly under Mayor Sam Yorty.

Boston exemplifies the demographic transition taking place in much of urban America. In 1970, whites made up 81.8 percent of Boston's population; today whites in Boston are reduced to a plurality, although one with dominant status. Forty-seven percent of its residents, according to the 2010 Census, are non-Hispanic whites, 24.4 percent are black, 17.5 percent Hispanic, and 8.9 percent Asian-American.

Over time, as Figure 1 shows, the black share of Boston's population has remained stable, while the percentage of whites has steadily declined and the percentage of Latinos and Asian Americans has rapidly grown.

Two decades ago, East Boston was 79 percent white. Now it is majority Hispanic, 54.4 percent, with a per capita income of $22,403, well below the city's $33,158.

Perhaps most important, South Boston, the core of white resistance to integration 40 years ago, is becoming gentrified, with one and two bedroom condos overlooking the harbor selling for $1 million and more. Per capita income in the South Boston waterfront, a subsection of South Boston as a whole, is now one of the highest in the city, $70,913.

This year's mayoral contests in Boston and New York were shaped by income and class rather than by race or ethnicity. Both Bill de Blasio in New York and Walsh in Boston won with coalitions dominated by downscale voters. Because the race in Boston was closer, the class and income divisions were more clearly delineated.

Walsh won decisively in such low-to-middle income neighborhoods as Dorchester, at 70 percent; South Boston — except for the upscale waterfront — at 61 percent; Hyde Park, also at 61 percent; and Mattapan at 62 percent. Connolly carried relatively affluent sections: Beacon Hill at 79 percent; Back Bay at 82 percent; the South End at 67 percent; and West Roxbury at 62 percent.

Figure 2, a map created by WBUR in Boston, demonstrates the pattern of voting in the city — blue areas for Connolly, red areas for Walsh.

Insofar as race continues to lose salience in big-city elections, the beneficiaries are Democratic candidates and the Democratic coalition.

Among the most striking recent developments is the increasingly strong linkage between Democratic voting and population density. Dave Troy, a blogger who writes about technology and politics from Baltimore, has analyzed the results of the 2012 presidential election and found that "98 percent of the 50 most dense counties voted for Obama. 98 percent of the 50 least dense counties voted for Romney." Troy charted the pattern in Figure 3.

Not only does the growth in the number of minority voters work to the disadvantage of the Republican Party, Troy argues, but Republicans also seem oblivious to the fact that "cities are the future."

The stakes are high:

"While the Republican Party is retooling in the desert, it should carefully consider whether its primary issue is identity politics or whether its platform is simply not compatible with the global urban future."

For Democrats celebrating the party's post-racial solidarity, however, the future offers the prospect of new and potentially more divisive conflicts in the struggle to hold together the fragile liberal coalition.

The Democratic Party has two tiers. At one level, there is an elite of well-educated, relatively affluent activists who dominate party proceedings, set the agenda, write much of the platform and decide the make-or-break issues governing the selection of presidential nominees. At another level, there is a much larger segment of the electorate that is poorer, dependent on government programs and ill-organized to force the powerful to pay attention to its priorities.

If, as now appears to be a possibility, the 2016 fight for the Democratic nomination pits Hillary Clinton against Elizabeth Warren, this largely submerged conflict will be forced onto center stage.

Clinton and Warren represent opposing wings of the party. The New Republic's Noam Scheiber recently described these competing forces in his cover story, "Hillary's Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren":

"On one side is a majority of Democratic voters, who are angrier, more disaffected, and altogether more populist than they've been in years. They are more attuned to income inequality than before the Obama presidency and more supportive of Social Security and Medicare. They've grown fonder of regulation and more skeptical of big business. A recent Pew poll showed that voters under 30—who skew overwhelmingly Democratic—view socialism more favorably than capitalism. Above all, Democrats are increasingly hostile to Wall Street and believe the government should rein it in."

On the other side

"is a group of Democratic elites associated with the Clinton era who, though they may have moved somewhat leftward in response to the recession — happily supporting economic stimulus and generous unemployment benefits — still fundamentally believe the economy functions best with a large, powerful, highly complex financial sector. Many members of this group have either made or raised enormous amounts of cash on Wall Street."

These two factions have in recent elections been united by their animosity toward George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Mitt Romney.

Looked at a different way, this means that the 2016 prospects for Democrats may be in the hands of their adversary, the Republican Party. Whether Republicans pick a Ted Cruz or a Chris Christie could be decisive. Few developments will forestall a Democratic schism as swiftly as the nomination of a Tea Party conservative – a self-defeating move which, recent history suggests, makes it all the more likely that Republicans will do just that.