The claim that Black voters are bolting to President Donald Trump’s Republican Party not only feels premature: It also fuels a troubling narrative that pins the blame for a possible second Trump term on Black voters.

This notion of realignment has gotten more attention in recent months, as political observers try to make sense of polls showing that some Black voters are souring on President Joe Biden and Democrats and becoming more Trump-curious.

The last realignment occurred around the middle of the 20th century. Over the course of several decades, Black voters left the Republican Party, which during Reconstruction had backed legislation that enshrined Black equality, to support an increasingly civil rights-oriented Democratic Party.

Some Southern white Democrats were so furious that their party was taking this new tack that they broke away; these segregationist defectors became known as “Dixiecrats.”

It was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, that guaranteed the right to vote free of racial discrimination, transformed the country into a multiracial democracy, and helped to cement his party as “the party for Black voters,” as one politics professor previously told Capital B.

Are we seeing a shift of that scale today?

Issac Bailey, a Davidson College communications studies professor, isn’t convinced — at least not yet. And he’s hardly alone.

He and others have pointed out that a lot of the analysis doesn’t hold up very well to scrutiny. Black voters’ overall support for the Democratic Party has remained remarkably steady in recent contests, and seems to be trending toward 2020 levels. Plus, it’s too early, in terms of available data from general elections, to determine whether we’re witnessing something as major as a realignment.

To further explore this issue and news narratives about Black voters, Capital B spoke with Bailey, who focuses on, among other things, race and media and is the author of the 2020 book Why Didn’t We Riot?: A Black Man in Trumpland. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Capital B: What are your reservations about recent reporting saying that we’re in the middle of a realignment?

Issac Bailey: For me, there’s no real solid evidence for these claims when it comes to general elections. If you look at Pew Research Center data, for instance, Hillary Clinton got something like 91% of the Black vote in 2016, and then we saw that President Joe Biden got something like 92% in 2020. Plus, since 2016, Democrats have been winning a lot of races, powered by Black voters.

So if this [realignment] is happening, at some point, it has to show up in the general election, but we haven’t seen that yet. Maybe things will change this time around, but I just haven’t seen any real sort of explanation for why we should think that this year will be different, because the Black vote has actually been very stable.

This touches on a related issue. Several sources have vented to me about legacy media’s fixation on whether a small portion of Black voters might back the GOP — and lead to a second Trump term — as if the weight of the country is on their shoulders.

What’s fascinating to me is that up and down the income scale, white voters choose Trump — but that isn’t the dynamic that’s usually talked about. What many mainstream media outlets do, instead, is scapegoat poor white voters and ignore the fact that lots of rich, upper-middle-class, and middle-class white voters also support Trump.

What this means is that, essentially, Trump’s only real chance of even coming close to winning the general election is through white voters. When you read mainstream media coverage, though, what you read is an extreme focus on whether the Black vote — and the fringes of the Black vote, at that — is realigning and will turn out for Trump.

Read More: The GOP’s Long-Shot Bid for Black Voters

What I’m curious about is why so many white voters can look at a candidate like Trump and still want him to lead the country. If you looked only at nonwhite voters, Trump would get blown out in every single state by wide margins. So what is it about Trump that’s kept the bulk of white voters in his column?

To me, this focus not only drains Black voters of sophistication, leaving little room to hear their frustrations with the Democratic Party. It also ignores how incredibly damaged the GOP’s image is in Black voters’ eyes. Thoughts?

I think that if we had a healthier political system or two healthier parties, I could absolutely see more Black voters splitting their votes between the two parties, because so many of us are more pragmatic and even conservative, and some Black voters have genuine grievances with Biden and the Democratic Party.

But because the Republican Party is just so unhealthy right now, it actually keeps many of us away.

A Black voter with my background is sort of a prime example of that, in some ways. I’m from South Carolina, which, politically, is very different from, say, California. My voting past was sort of mixed: the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, third-party candidates. Now, though, it would be difficult for a Black voter with that background to even think about supporting this version of the GOP. There’s simply no way.