What’s the best reaction when you fail to achieve your goals? If you ask former St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones, you lash out with accusations of racism.
St. Louis Public Radio published its interview with Jones Thursday, quoting the single-term mayor about her time in office. Last month Jones, a black woman, failed in her re-election bid to Cara Spencer, a former member of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, a white woman.
During that interview, SLPR’s Jason Rosenbaum asked Jones about white voters, wanting her to compare her victory in 2021 to her loss this year.
“Why don’t you think you did as well in 2025 in majority-white progressive wards in the city as you did in 2021?” he asked.
Jones’ response was that it all comes down to race, since she could not think of any other reason why people did not vote for her.
“You know, even when my team had conversations with white voters in south St. Louis, they could not give us a reason why they didn’t like me or why they were voting for Mayor Spencer,” she told him.
“And if you can’t give me a reason, or something that I have particularly done, then the only default is race.” Jones concluded.
There it is.
Jones decided that if no explanation can be found, the answer is most certainly racism.
Do you vote in local elections?
Never mind that if her team did approach voters, they might not feel comfortable blasting the incumbent to her team’s faces.
Jones is a black woman. Her opponent Spencer is a white woman. That must mean the voters are racist, right?
Or maybe there were other factors.
One glaring factor that the St. Louis Public Radio interview failed to mention is that the local Democratic Party took the highly unusual step of NOT endorsing Jones, who was the Democratic incumbent in a deep-blue city. Instead, they voted to throw their support behind Spencer, another Democrat.
“In an ‘unprecedented’ move, the City of St. Louis Democratic Central Committee officially endorsed the challenger running against an incumbent mayor,” KSDK-TV reported March 8, just one month before the election.
Out of 26 committee members in 14 wards, “Spencer won 15 votes, seven of them from Black committee members,” the TV news outlet reported, adding that two members abstained, two were absent, and nine voted for Jones.
The officials quoted in the story were politely vague about the highly unusual step of not supporting an incumbent from their own party. Even Spencer was circumspect in her reaction to winning the Democratic Party endorsement, making references to “issues in the past with a lot of folks, divide and conquer and that sort of thing.”
“This, to me, really speaks to a unifying component of our city,” Spencer told KSDK. “Committee members elected by the constituencies of wards all over the city of St. Louis coming together to be supportive of a change and a path working together.”
Obviously, if Jones lost support from even some of the predominantly black wards in her city, there must have been broad dissatisfaction with the way she was doing her job.
That plot twist puts Jones’ cries of racism in a very different light.
Comments made Thursday by former president Joe Biden Thursday deserve to be met with similar skepticism.
During his appearance on an episode of “The View,” Biden looked back at former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss in November to President Donald Trump.
Similar to Jones, Biden said he thought Harris’ loss came down to her being a mixed-race woman running against a white man.
Whether it’s at the local or national level, this is a losing mentality.
Whenever you’re faced with shortcomings, the most productive next step is to look inward. Where is there room for improvement? That’s the right question to ask.
Blaming external factors goes nowhere.
Imagine a professional sports team losing a championship, then — instead of promising to work harder next season — blaming the referees, the opposing team’s fans, and the weather on the field that day.
Biden and Jones are committing the political equivalent of that. There’s no room for improvement on their side. It has to be somebody else’s fault.
See how far that gets you.
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