Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics

Abstract

In Dangerously Divided, Zoltan Hajnal shows that Black people (and, to a lesser extent, other people of color) disproportionately lose out in American elections and policy. With smart analyses and compelling figures, he describes the scale of this representation gap between white Americans and everybody else. The book convincingly demonstrates that race, far more than class, is key to predicting who wins and loses in American politics. And yet, in framing these features of American politics as surprising and in describing their causes with almost no reference to racism or white supremacy—I counted only eleven total uses of either of these terms in the body of the text—the book may contribute to the very problems it seeks to address. The best parts of Hajnal’s book are his analyses showing that white people win the most in almost every arena of American politics. Hajnal compiled data going back as far...