From BET.com News Staff & Wire reports
Posted Nov. 3, 2006 – Republican efforts to reach Black voters just isn’t working. Blacks voters just aren’t buying the Republican charm offensive, says a new Associated Press poll.
Black voters are less likely to approve of how President Bush does his job than the average voter, and more likely to feel the country is headed in the wrong direction – news that Republican Party officials who have been trying to cuddle up to Black voters might find a little hard to swallow.
With so many tight races this political season, Republicans can’t seem to buy a break when it comes to wooing the Black vote, mainly because most Black voters are diametrically opposed to many of the platform issues Republican candidates are touting, according to the poll The Associated Press conducted with AOL between Oct. 23 and Oct. 30.
When it comes to the Iraq war, Black voters are more likely to say it was a mistake, the survey found. Recent disclosures of scandals and corruption in Congress will most likely cement Black voters’ firmly on the side of Democratic candidates, according to the study’s findings.
On the issues, Black voters were most likely to rate the economy and health care as extremely or very important to them.
While Black voters say Republicans have done a poor job of representing their interests, they also have misgivings about the Democratic Party.
Almost half of Black voters surveyed said the Democratic Party takes their vote for granted; about a third said the party has done a poor job of representing their interests.
Even so, about nine of 10 Black voters have gone for the Democrats in recent elections.
Among the other findings:
Curtis Gans, director of American University‘s Center for the Study of the American Electorate, told The Associated Press that while Black voter turnout is generally low, Black voter discontent could boost turnout much in the same way it did during the 2004 presidential election.
Last weekend, Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat who hopes to oust Senator George Allen, crammed in visits to 12 black churches, and for several weeks he has been pumping money into advertisements on black radio stations and in black newspapers.
In Missouri, Claire McCaskill, the Democrat trying to unseat Senator Jim Talent, has been running advertisements about sickle cell anemia, a genetic illness that mostly afflicts black people, and the importance of stem cell research in helping to find a cure.
For Democrats like these in tight races, black voter turnout will be crucial on Election Day. But despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally, there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans.
“This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we’re having to go out of our way to counter them this year,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist.
This will be the first midterm election in which the Democratic Party is mobilizing teams of lawyers and poll watchers, to check for irregularities including suppression of the black vote, in at least a dozen of the closest districts, Ms. Brazile said.
Democrats’ worries are backed up by a Pew Research Center report that found that blacks were twice as likely now than they were in 2004 to say they had little or no confidence in the voting system, rising to 29 percent from 15 percent.
And more than three times as many blacks as whites — 29 percent versus 8 percent — say they do not believe that their vote will be accurately tallied.
Voting experts say the disillusionment is the cumulative effect of election problems in 2000 and 2004, and a reaction to new identification and voter registration laws.
Long lines and shortages of poll workers in lower-income neighborhoods in the 2004 election and widespread reports of fliers with misinformation appearing in minority areas have also had a corrosive effect on confidence, experts say.
The harder question is whether this jaded outlook will diminish turnout.
Recent polls have found record levels of outrage from Democrats about the current political leadership, which may offset the effect of black disillusion.
But Saleemah Affoul of Milwaukee, for one, is not so sure. Like many other black people in her neighborhood, Ms. Affoul said she was convinced that no matter how she voted, it would not be counted fairly.
“I do think the system is rigged,” she said. “I vote anyway because my forefathers worked too hard to win me that right. But not everyone feels that responsibility around here.”
Walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in the gritty and mostly black section of Brewers Hill on the North Side of Milwaukee, Ms. Affoul said that cynicism in her neighborhood was on the rise.
She traced her own skepticism to one afternoon two months before the last presidential election when she overheard several young black men saying they were not going to vote because they feared being arrested at the polling station for their unpaid parking tickets. The neighborhood had been flooded with fliers from the Milwaukee Black Voters League, a fictitious group, saying that even minor infractions like parking tickets disqualified people from voting.
Ms. Affoul, 66, said she argued with the men but failed to convince them that they had been misinformed.
“I realized that maybe the poll tax isn’t gone after all, and that if people were willing to try that trick, they might be willing to do a lot more that I don’t even know about,” she said.
Black voters are expected to play crucial roles in races for governor and the Senate in Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia.
In Maryland, where blacks make up about 30 percent of the electorate, the Democratic candidate for governor, Martin O’Malley, who is white, is leading the Republican incumbent, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., in polls. Mr. O’Malley needs a large turnout among blacks in Baltimore to win, and he has mobilized more than 2,000 get-out-the-vote workers in black neighborhoods. He also helped his chances of attracting the black vote by selecting Anthony G. Brown, a black lawyer, as his running mate.
In Tennessee, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. is depending on a strong showing from blacks in Memphis, which he represents, to edge past Bob Corker and become the first black senator from a Southern state since Reconstruction.
In Virginia, Democrats hope that recent accusations of racism against Senator Allen will motivate blacks to vote for his Democratic opponent, Mr. Webb.
Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, said the reason for the rise in black voters’ cynicism could be summed up in a single word: confirmation.
Mr. Walters said that episodes of voter suppression that were dismissed in 2000 as unfounded recurred in 2004 and were better documented because rights groups dispatched thousands of lawyers and poll watchers. In addition, the first national data-tracking tool, the Election Incident Reporting System, offered a national hot line that fed a database of what ended up to be 40,000 problems.
“All of a sudden after 2004, these weren’t just baseless or isolated incidents,” Mr. Walters said.
The type of misleading letter sent this month to 14,000 Hispanic immigrants in Orange County, Calif., threatening them with arrest if they tried to vote, was hardly a first. In 2004, similar fliers appeared in predominantly black neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh area, on official-looking letterheads. The fliers said that because of unusually high voter registration, Republicans were to vote on Election Day, and Democrats were to vote the next day.
Fliers sent in Lake County, Ohio, told people that if they had registered through the N.A.A.C.P., they could not vote.
Asked whether such tactics from 2004 could influence black turnout next month, the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, whose National Action Network is also mobilizing voter protection teams, said that despite insufficient action from Democrats in responding to the problems, he believed that black turnout would be high.
“Just because more of us believe that folks are trying to rob us of certain rights doesn’t mean we are more likely to give up and leave the front door unlocked,” Mr. Sharpton said.
The rollout of new voting machines may also be contributing to black voters’ fears.
“African-Americans are more susceptible to conspiracy theories about the new technology because they have been subject to actual conspiracies more often than the rest of the population,” said David A. Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, a research organization dedicated to African-American issues.
Marsha Lindsey, a black paramedic and former poll worker in Dayton, Ohio, said that after 2004 she stopped arguing with her black friends when they said there was no point in voting.
Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Stealing Democracy: the New Politics of Voter Suppression,” said the threat of voter suppression presented difficult strategic decisions.
“Voter suppression is a real threat,” Mr. Overton said, “but Democrats can’t invest so much into voter protection that they don’t have adequate resources to turn out their voters to the polls in the first place.”
The Rev. DeForest B. Soaries, who is black and was appointed by President George W. Bush as the first chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission, an agency meant to help carry out the Help America Vote Act, said Democrats overestimated the problem of voter suppression in much the same way Republicans overestimated the problem of voter fraud.
Skepticism is especially pronounced in poor black neighborhoods, Mr. Soaries said, because these communities are often disproportionately affected by problems with machines and the number and training of poll workers. When problems do occur in these areas, he added, they occur against a historical backdrop of voter suppression.
Whatever its consequence, the topic is very much on Democrats’ minds. At a recent Democratic fund-raiser in Atlanta, at the home of Representative John Lewis, who is black, conversation centered on perceptions that widespread voter disenfranchisement would haunt the 2006 elections.
Former President Bill Clinton addressed the issue there, criticizing some Republican campaign tactics. After mentioning rough-edged political ads and other strategies, he said, “And when that doesn’t work, they try to keep you from voting.”
Headed into a statewide candidates’ forum on prison overhaul, for pastors from Baltimore, the Rev. Heber Brown III, who is black, said that the success of black voter mobilization efforts in 2004 set the stage for some disillusion.
“Last time, you had hip-hop leaders like Russell Simmons, Eminem and Sean Combs with the Vote or Die campaign and lots of young blacks voted but what did they get?” said Mr. Brown, 26, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore County. “Now when you talk to young black voters you can’t just say, ‘Get out the vote,’ you have to first do a lot of explaining, cut through a lot of confusion about the 2004 vote and first talk about how change takes time.”
Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.
Correction: Oct. 28, 2006
An article yesterday about close races in which black voter turnout is expected to be crucial misstated the findings of polls in the race for governor in Maryland. Polls show that the Democrat, Martin O’Malley, is either leading Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican, or is ahead of him within the poll’s margin of sampling error. Mr. O’Malley is not “trailing by several points.”
By Brian Williams
Anchor & “Nightly News” managing editor
NBC News
Updated: 4:49 p.m. PT March 1, 2004
PHILADELPHIA – Melinda Emerson said, “I think that African Americans very largely have been taken for granted.”
Michael Pearson said, “We’re not in the equation!”
It was only 40 years ago, but memories of what was known as “The Struggle” have become as grainy as the old black and white film – unless you were there.
“We intend to march to Montgomery!” That young civil rights activist receiving a near-fatal blow to the head in Selma, Ala., grew up to be U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who is today very worried that young black voters have forgotten what Democrats have done for them.
“More and more of these young people are saying, ‘That was then — what about now? What about the future? Show me something,’” Lewis said.
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The Penrose Diner in Philadelphia is a long way from Selma. And NBC’s four lunch guests know they owe a lot to those who fought and died back then, but that’s where the conversation gets interesting.
Pearson was an officer in the first Gulf War and an Ivy League business school graduate who owns his own local business and goes his own way politically. “We should really not give our vote to the Democratic Party,” Pearson said. “… We should sit down and truly look at choices.”
Two graduate students, two business owners, one of them a third-generation college graduate. All four are thankful for “The Struggle” of 40 years ago, but they are also struggling with today’s political reality.
“I don’t think it matters who I vote for,” said Dana Crawford. “I feel totally betrayed by voting in America at this time. Disconnected. And just really disheartened.”
That’s an opinion heard more and more these days and it’s a troubling one for Democratic Party strategists who for a generation have grown to rely on African Americans as their most loyal voting bloc.
Crawford commented, “I was raised under the assumption that you voted Democratic — if you’re black, that’s how you vote.” Emerson added, “I don’t think my mom ever said, ‘Vote Democrat,’ but I think it was implied more than anything else.”
The ’60s
Those were the days of Kennedy — “The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened” — Johnson — “Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society?” — King — “We not only have a right to be free, we have a duty to be free” — and then another Kennedy — “I think people can get along and live together.” But now, nothing is taken for granted.
“Can you say the Democratic Party is more apt to be sympathetic and activist in issues that involve the African-American community?” I asked. Pearson replied: “I think that could be a fair statement, but you have to prove it. It simply can’t be lip service.”
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These are the latest numbers: A full third of young African-American voters now say they’re independents. And you can easily hear why.
“I think that neither party has really been held accountable by African-American voters,” said Emerson. “And I think that nowadays people are really looking at every candidate individually and not just blanketly supporting one party or another. We need candidates who talk about issues that are important to African-American people. Things like unemployment. Things like diversity. Things like opportunities for small, disadvantaged businesses,” she added.
“I don’t feel like the candidates really care about my vote too much, either. They’re not talking about things that are important to me,” said Crawford. “I was one of those college students that was all about voting. I wore the stickers. I was driving the vans, honking the horns: “Come out! Vote! Yes!” I was all about voting,” she added.
Michael Coppage said, “You see it in the kids. They’re not thinking about Democratic or Republican, they’re thinking about life or death.”
Not one of the four has a favorite candidate in this year’s crowded race for the White House. Coppage, a teacher, has yet to vote in any election and won’t this year, “It’s just completely alien, and I feel so disconnected from them.”
Lewis says that is the danger. He says Democrats are much more likely to deliver for African Americans, but it’s the Republicans who have been making inroads: “I’m deeply concerned that my party, the Democratic Party, may be … just may be being left out and left behind when it comes to young professional African Americans.”
Michael Pearson added, “I have 74 employees. I go into any election thinking, ‘How am I going to provide for my other family?’”
They are the children of the struggle for freedom — now they’re using it to choose what’s best for them.
© 2006 MSNBC Interactive
