MICHAEL BARONE: Democrats are taking minorities for granted.

According to the 2016 exit poll , Hillary Clinton received the votes of 88 percent of black Americans and 65 percent of Hispanic and Asians. Barack Obama’s 2012 percentages among these groups were marginally higher—93 percent of blacks, 71 percent of Hispanics and 73 percent of Asians. That was a downtick from the 95 percent he won among blacks, but that and his 2012 percentages among Hispanics and Asians were the highest Democratic percentages among the three nonwhite groups measured in exit polls starting in 1972.

Naturally, Democrats want to retain these high levels of support. Hillary Clinton’s 37 percent among white voters was the lowest Democratic percentage among that bloc since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot, and her fall to 28 percent among white non-college graduates may be the worst Democratic showing in that group in the party’s history. It’s easy to imagine — it can be extrapolated from current polling — that other Democrats will run stronger among white groups than Clinton did. It’s harder to imagine that they can win without something like the very high percentages they have been getting among nonwhites.

One way to do that is to hark back to the issues that seem to have worked in the past. In August 2012, campaigning before a biracial audience in South Side Virginia, Vice President Joe Biden said that Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s financial policies would “put y’all back in chains.” Obama-Biden campaign spokesman said this was a metaphor for “unshackling” the middle class, but Republicans — and probably many voters — heard it as an insinuation that their side wanted to return to slavery. Similarly, Democrats attacked the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision overturning section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, but leaving in place the rest of the law, as a return to exclusion of blacks from the polls. But that section only singled out for special administrative scrutiny changes in voting laws in states defined by low voter participation levels in the 1964, 1968 and 1972 elections. That provision made sense when discrimination barred blacks from voting in several Southern states, but as the Court pointed out, there has been no such mass suppression in recent decades; a Census survey showed higher turnout rates among blacks than whites in 2012. It’s hard to see the Democrats’ attacks here as anything but attempts to tar their opponent as racists determined to restore slavery or segregation, even while knowing that such characterizations are false.

Hard indeed.

Plus: “Scarcely mentioned in the immigration debate are Asians, who in recent years have made up an increasing share of immigrants. They constitute, however, only 13 percent of the illegal immigrant population, and the income levels of Asian households are more than 30 percent higher than those of all U.S. households. Historically, there was much prejudice among Asians, peaking perhaps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Today there is little evidence of invidious discrimination or of the underrepresentation in desirable categories that is considered the justification for racial quotas and preferences. To the contrary, there is stark evidence that racial quotas work against Asian applicants to colleges and universities, who need much higher test scores and academic records than whites, much less Hispanics and blacks, to be admitted to selective schools. Harvard University has been sued for discriminating against Asian applicants and, when Democratic legislators in California sought to seek a ballot proposition to repeal an earlier measure barring racial discrimination in state higher education, they were met by a torrent of protest from Asian parents and dropped the issue.”