I used to somewhat shrug off this thinking, but I heard a part of her interview on CNN this morning and reading some of the comments from the article, I'm coming to realize that the narrative of the Democratic party taking the non-white vote "for granted" is more real than I first thought, and is more of a problem than I thought. I think they assume that minorities will by and large support them no matter what because their other option is Republicans who vocally work against their interests, which "frees the party up" to spend most of their focus on trying to court moderates to their side and the result of that would be a big election-sweeping coalition.
What I get now that I didn't before, is that this strategy doesn't lead to the POC vote going Dem instead of GOP...it just leads to them not turning out at all. Meanwhile, consider Republicans over the last decade; the Tea Party movement started as a small and more radical right-wing subset, but they started to hold the rest of the Republican party hostage, they started to drag the whole party further right and they were able to do so because their message resonated with the more extreme members of their constituency, which started to turn out in numbers and lent the movement credibility over time. Then along comes Trump to take advantage of the wave and now arguably what was once radically-right is the new center-point for the GOP. Strong messaging and strongarm tactics, even for policies that would ultimately hurt the people supporting them, works. The Pelosis of the world still haven't figured this out and continue taking steps to the right to reach out for those that Republicans are dragging further right.
