Prometheus 6

Sometimes I get lucky
One of the members here is Darryl Cox, a former political consultant, campaign manager and community organizer. Being a serious sort of brother, every so often he feels compelled to speak on a topic. The last beneficiary of that impulse was BlackElectorate.com. The latest is you.

The Never Ending Confusion Over Black Voters, by Darryl Cox

Black people have played a decisive role in
American electoral affairs since the founding days of the
Republic despite the fact that law and custom barred the majority
of them from voting for nearly two centuries. Thomas
Jefferson’s political opponents, for example, attributed
his victory in 1800 over the incumbent president John Adams to
“Negro electors, Negro vote, and Negro congressmen.”
What had raised their ire was the infamous provision enshrined in
the Constitution decreeing that each slave would be counted as
three fifths of a person in determining the members of the
Electoral College from each state.

This formula virtually ensured that slave owners
and slave states held the political whip hand over non-slave
holders and non-slave states. “Negro Electors exceed those
of four states, & their representatives are equal to those of
six states, ” argued Senator William Plumer of New
Hampshire. “Those slaves,” he continued, “have
no voice in the elections; they are mere property; yet a planter
possessing a hundred of them may be considered as having sixty
votes, while one of you who has equal or greater property is
confined to a single vote.” Jefferson was called the
“Negro President”, according to the writer Garry
Wills, not because of any alleged sympathies Jefferson held for
blacks or rumors of a sexual liaison with his slave, Sally
Hemings, but because if the “real votes alone had been
counted, Adams would have been returned to office.”

In this so-called post Civil Rights era it is difficult for
many Americans to believe that prior to the passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 blacks in the South, which is where a majority
of black Americans still live, were effectively denied the right
to vote despite the passage of the 15^th Amendment
nearly a century earlier. In the summer of 1964, the Republican
presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater publicly opposed the
passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and thus hastened the
second great migration of American blacks: from the party of
Lincoln to the party of Roosevelt. No Republican presidential
incumbent or candidate to date has received more than 15 percent
of the national black vote since Richard Nixon’s 39 percent
share in 1960. Even President Bush’s clear victory over
John Kerry was accomplished with only 11 percent of the black
vote.

The seeming allegiance that black voters have demonstrated
toward Democratic Party candidates for the past 40 years has
caused no small degree of hand wringing and concern among
Republican political operatives and black intellectuals and
political activists who tend to identify themselves as
neo-conservatives or post-Civil Rights analysts and thinkers.
Their pronouncements about the alleged dangers or pitfalls of
black voters being in the pocket of the Democrats are generally
well received, particularly during this period of electoral
post-mortem, by various print and electronic media outlets,
although, to date, none of them have provided any factual
evidence that black voters are harming themselves by expressing a
nine to one preference for Democrats over Republicans.

To the extent that you can’t cash losers’ tickets
at the winner’s window this concern for the behavior of
black voters might be well placed. In politics you reward your
friends and punish your enemies, or those who don’t support
your campaign, by ignoring their issues and concerns. The
reality, however, is that although Republicans have controlled
the White House for 24 of the 36 years since 1968, black voters
are still inclined to hitch their wagon to the Democratic donkey
despite any gains George Bush made among their ranks in Ohio.

This behavior of black voters may be shortsighted and it may
even be foolish but it is, at bottom, in the very best traditions
of American electoral politics. Black voters, like any other
group of American voters, tend to support political parties and
candidates who share their values and concerns. Irish, Italian,
Polish and Jewish Americans, for example, beginning in the late
19^th Century and well into the 20^th
Century, repeatedly demonstrated their understanding of this
basic political principle in election after election. And they
did so for decades without anyone questioning their political
judgment, collective wisdom or, worse, accusing them of
“voting as victims rather than as individuals” as one
black political pundit so recently declared.

There is little reason to suppose that President Bush is
opposed in principle to the concerns and issues of black
Americans. It is a fact, though, that he and his party are
greatly at odds with the black electorate and their leaders in
fashioning effective solutions to these problems. In a market
system any trader who continually blames the customer for failing
to purchase the seller’s products would be considered a
less than deft business owner. The Republicans’ electoral
success at the presidential level tends to make too many people
ignore this reality when it comes to black voters’ values
and market preferences.