Why Are African-Americans Such Loyal Democrats When They Are so Ideologically Diverse?

Theodore Johnson wrote for the Washington Post about African-Americans and the Democratic party: 

The safest bet in presidential politics this year is that Hillary Clinton is going to win the black vote by a yuge margin. But should Donald Trump win the election, it’s even safer to bet against his claim that he’ll win 95 percent of the black vote in 2020.

Such supposition is not an attempt to turn political punditry into easy money, but rather a sober assessment of five decades of data on black voting behavior. No Democratic presidential nominee has received less than 82 percent of the black vote since Kennedy’s 68 percent in 1960. And in the past 80 years, no Republican presidential nominee has done better than Eisenhower’s 39 percent in his 1956 reelection bid.

The enormous attention paid to this quadrennial political phenomenon, however, often overshadows the black electorate’s diversity. As a black American, I know firsthand that our heterogeneous politics exist alongside our homogeneous voting. So I set out to explore the interaction of these two characteristics of the African American electorate.