Democrats and the black voter: Project Vote
Democrats need black voter participation to have any chance of holding the line in the 2014 elections.
It’s no secret that black people vote heavily Democratic. And it’s no secret that they were extremely helpful in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, voting overwhelmingly for him and his fellow Democrats.
I’ve written before about the fact that this was not only true of the vote for Obama, but for all recent Democratic nominees for president ever since 1964, when the Democratic Party became strongly identified with civil rights. For example, whiter-than-white Al Gore and John Kerry received almost as large a percentage of black votes as Barack Obama did:
It occurs to me, however, on reading the Times article about black voters in 2014 and the need to ramp up turnout, that the main difference between Obama and those previous Democratic nominees was not so much the percentage of the black vote they received as Obama’s ability to get black voters into the voting booths in the first place [emphasis mine]:
The Associated Press is out with a study of the 2012 election concluding that the black voter turnout rate exceeded the white turnout rate for the first time. It’s almost certainly true that black turnout was higher than white turnout last fall — but that also was true in 2008.
Using census data and exit polling, the AP found that black voters were 13 percent of the electorate even though they make up only 12 percent of the population. White voters represented 72 percent of the electorate, outperforming their 71.1 percent share of the population, but not to the same degree they have in past elections…
The AP does give exact numbers for 2008 turnout — 66.1 percent for whites and 65.2 percent for blacks. But Michael McDonald, a professor at George Mason University who specializes in analyzing voter turnout, has crunched the numbers differently. If you exclude people who did not respond to the census, the black turnout rate also surpassed white turnout four years ago, 76.6 percent to 73.6 percent…
The AP also runs the 2012 election using the 2004 electorate and finds that with those turnout patterns, Mitt Romney would have narrowly beaten Obama.
That’s how important turnout is. And make no mistake about it, Obama knows this.
Actually, he has known it, and worked hard to enhance it, even before he became a politician himself. One of his very first positions in Chicago after graduating from law school was director of Project Vote:
From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois’s Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain’s Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of “40 under Forty” powers to be
That short quote doesn’t even begin to explain how important, and how formative, Obama’s Project Vote experience was. For those who say he never directed or managed anything (not successfully, anyway), it constitutes very much of an exception. It is no coincidence that this undertaking had to do with two causes close to his heart: the politics of voting, and race.
This article, which appeared in Chicago Magazine in 1993, is truly fascinating. It depicts an Obama who is in his element, a young man glowing from the success of the endeavor, highly ambitious and much-praised. I suggest reading the whole thing. But here are some excerpts:
For the first time in ten years, more than half a million blacks went to the polls in Chicago. And with gubernatorial and mayoral elections coming up in the next two years, it served notice to everyone from Jim Edgar to Richard M. Daley that an African-American voting bloc would be a force to be reckoned with in those races.
None of this, of course, was accidental. The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. “It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics,” says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side’s 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.
At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old African-American lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama…
Within a few months, Obama, a tall, affable workaholic, had recruited staff and volunteers from black churches, community groups, and politicians. He helped train 700 deputy registrars, out of a total of 11,000 citywide. And he began a saturation media campaign with the help of black-owned Brainstorm Communications…
“It was overwhelming,” says Joseph Gardner, a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the director of the steering committee for Project Vote! “The black community in this city had not been so energized and so single-minded since Harold [Washington] died.”…
“I think it’s fair to say we reinvigorated a slumbering constituency,” says Obama. “We got people to take notice.”…
“We won’t let the momentum die,” he says. “I’ll take personal responsibility for that. We plan to hold politicians’ feet to the flames in 1993, to remind them that we can produce a bloc of voters large enough that it cannot be ignored.”
Nor can Obama himself be ignored. The success of the voter-registration drive has marked him as the political star the Mayor should perhaps be watching for. “The sky’s the limit for Barack,” says Burrell.
Some of Daley’s closest advisers are similarly impressed. “In its technical demands, a voter-registration drive is not unlike a mini-political campaign,” says John Schmidt, chairman of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority and a fundraiser for Project Vote! “Barack ran this superbly. I have no doubt he could run an equally good political campaign if that’s what he decided to do next.”
Obama shrugs off the possibility of running for office. “Who knows?” he says. “But probably not immediately.” He smiles. “Was that a sufficiently politic ”˜maybe’? My sincere answer is, I’ll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don’t know if that’s true right now. Let’s wait and see what happens in 1993. If the politicians in place now at city and state levels respond to African-American voters’ needs, we’ll gladly work with and support them. If they don’t, we’ll work to replace them. That’s the message I want Project Vote! to have sent.”
Note, by the way, the term “agitating from the outside” vs. working from the inside as a politician. Obviously, he ended up deciding on the latter approach. And note also how frank and open he was at that time about his dedication to the needs of African-American voters rather than to all the people of Chicago. No “There’s not a black America and white America…there’s the United States of America” back then for Obama.
Directing Project Vote, Obama was in his element, in his wheelhouse: tending to the nuts and bolts of politics, turning out the voters he knew would be reliably and loyally Democratic, and basking in the praise of others who considered him a shoe-in for higher office.
And so it all came to pass.
[NOTE: By the way, there’s nothing illegal about registering more bona fide black voters, and it makes perfect sense for Democrats to do it (I’m not talking about illegal aliens or felons or voting more than once; just registration of of-age citizens). The Republican Party has lagged behind greatly on this sort of thing. In recent years its turn-out-the-vote efforts haven’t been what the Democrats’ have been, even though turnout is every bit as important for Republicans. Republicans, however, have traditionally had better turnout in non-presidential election years, such as this one.
Republicans need more ads such as this, too.]
Once you vote black you cant go back..
cause its racist to vote otherwise…
Tribal loyalties allow for no dissent.
Obama the “affable workaholic”!?!?
roc scssrs:
Yes, I though that was pretty funny, too.
But I actually think that when he was working on Project Vote he was an affable workaholic—at least, for that project. I think he was happy—highly motivated in a project that was an excellent fit for his interests and his skills, and was going very well, and he was receiving enormous kudos for it. It must have been a very heady experience for such a young man, a great boost to the ego, and highly satisfying in its results.
I hope your readers take a minute to watch the Elbert Guillory anti-Mary Landrieu ad that you linked to in your last sentence, Neo. Yes, Republicans need more hard-hitting, powerful ads like that one.
Talked to a guy involved in getting out the vote in black neighborhoods. I referred to a couple of precincts in Philly which had 110% turnout. His comment was that he had no idea who was voting, since it was hell getting the folks to…you know…actually vote.
Our politics now are all based on tribes and race.
“…..agitating……”
The Republicans dropped the ball in 2008 when they allowed O to use the term “community organizer” instead of the more accurate description “community agitator”. Organizer sounds so much more wholesome and moderate than the more accurate divisive agitator.
WASP : Good Bye America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXWuOxFcdIk
[eh]
Out today and, as well, on Drudge, is the story about how many in the audience–overwhelmingly black in Maryland’s Prince Georges county, and one would think practically every one of them an Obama supporter–started leaving as soon as Obama started to speak at reportedly the first campaign rally he has made an appearance at in 2014.
There is even a picture in the article, reported by the UK’s Daily Mail (I’m pretty sure you ain’t gonna see any MSM reportage), which, according to its caption, shows a white campaign worker attempting to persuade those leaving to stay (see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2799603/crowds-walk-obama-speech-rare-campaign-trail-appearance.html#ixzz3Ghx6l1a6) .
So, are even some black supporters just finally turned off?
Wolla Dalbo:
It would have been interesting to try to interview the leavers and see why they left. Were they bored? Angry? It certainly doesn’t seem they are about to vote Republican, though, since they were at a rally for a Democrat.
Guillory is priceless. The gop has done next to nothing to speak to the inherent conservatism of many within the black religious communities across the nation. If Walker wins reelection in Wisconsin I would welcome a Walker-Carson ticket in 2016, as the more I learn about Carson, the more I admire him. Carson’s greatest attributes are his obvious intelligence, his sincerity, and his appeal as an outsider to politics as usual. And I doubt the attacks against Herman Cain would work on Carson
Jefferson Davis was a democrat and the democrats were pro slavery. They were the party of the KKK and Jim Crow laws. Seeing how the blacks vote for democrats almost makes me believe in Karl Marx’s theory of false consciousness.
That Elbert Guillory video that neo linked to, “Mary Landrieu is not Helping Blacks “… WOW!
Maybe Louisiana State Senator Guillory should run for Congress.
Unfortunately, though, being a congressman is a very heady thing, and it’s easy to get corrupted, until as Guillory, quoting Thomas Sowell, points out in his very powerful anti-Landreiu commercial, you are just one of the “politicians”–“politicians (who) are not trying to solve your problems, they’re trying to solve their problems, of which getting elected and then reelected are number one and number two.”
The pay, the perks, the two thousand dollar suits and expensive jewelry, the glittering parties, the power and adulation, all of the people trying to butter you up and giving you things to get your influence on their side, the bowing and scraping just overwhelm people. People who may have come to Washington with good intentions and a reformist agenda but, in many cases, all that just gets overwhelmed and corrupted, as the outer shell remains but what was inside just withers away.
As I think I have written here before, in the first few congresses members were indeed “citizen legislators,” making the often long, arduous, uncomfortable, and sometimes dangerous trip from where they worked as farmers, lawyers, and businessmen to take up residence in crowded, hot, and uncomfortable boardinghouses in a Washington built on a just drained swamp where yellow fever was endemic (its no accident that the Congress was the first major instituiton in the U.S. to get air conditioning); they just wanted to get the minimum necessary work done, and then head back to their families and their real jobs, their work as legislators paid for at the glorious rate of $1.50 per day.
But, several congresses later, as congressmen started to set up homes so that they could stay in Washington much longer, that was the beginning of the end, as “professional politicians”–able to politic and meddle all year long–started to emerge.
The Republicans have probably maxed out on their ability to register “conservative” voters and get them to the polls, unless they start picking them up at their houses and busing them there.
Even then they are unlikely to gain much.
What is called the evangelical vote, is, it seems to me, divided between conservative Christians who understand politics and the principle of self-government, and members of sects who, rather like Libertarians, take a perverse pleasure in making futile and ultimately self-destructive gestures for the sake of the emotional fulfillment they derive from it.
Obama and Dems have been pursuing a strategy of turning out the partisan, even rabidly-partisan voters instead of “going for the middle.”
They have determined, correctly, that it is easier to motivate the fringes to turn our than the wishy-washy middle.
Republicans won’t pursue this strategy, because their base is more conservative than they are, and would upset the corrupt apple cart.
As things stand, I expect Republicans to retake the Senate, then largely sit on their hands for two years. They are worthless, most of them, but the base either doesn’t realize it or are too risk-averse.
I stated some time ago that Romney or other election problems weren’t due to Republicans refusing to vote. It was due to all the dead Democrats in cities coming out.
Ymarsakar:
I stated some time ago that Romney or other election problems weren’t due to Republicans refusing to vote. It was due to all the dead Democrats in cities coming out.
Is it coincidence, do you suppose, that fiction about the “zombie apocalypse” is all the rage these days?
Hmm. Come to think of it, this might be a nice counterpoint to the idiotic “Republicans for Voldemort” bumper stickers a while back. How about a bumper sticker reading “Zombies vote Democrat”?
(For those with especially long memories, a photo of Bob Hope might be appropriate…)
Daniel, that’s certainly one feasible interpretation of the Z Apoc. Although there are plenty of others.
For some reason, people started going partial or full “survivalist” around 2008. Maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was the Fort Hood shootings, maybe it was everything combined under Hussein O’s Dark Sun.
The Hunger Games heroine shooting a bow, probably incited popular views. There were already zombie katana slayers on the net, as hobbyists. It’s pretty easy to combine these disparate groups if the threat is real or feasible.
The evangelicas, or rather the missionaries in the US that are true believers like 7th Day Adventists or Jehovah’s Witnesses or perhaps the Mormon Missionaries, actually don’t believe government can solve corruption. Only God’s Kingdom can.
To the Leftist alliance and their death cult priests, their Government Power is equal to God’s Kingdom.
While true believers of certain Christian religions disagree, it doesn’t mean they will vote Republican to “fix” problems…
Re the black walkout at the rally. FWIW Monday’s WaPo article on the event never mentioned the walkout. Instead focused on the crowd’s enthusiasm. Brown is in a tight race and the Dems are clearly worried.