Hmm.
[NAACP President Ben] Jealous says the 2014 midterm election will be the real bellwether for black turnout. “Black turnout set records this year despite record attempts to suppress the black vote,” he said.
I think he meant last year. And I think we had record black turnout because of voter suppression efforts, not despite them. Trying to take away black voting rights had a galvanizing effect and really helped organizers in the field who had no difficulty making the election personal. In addition, I think that blacks were extremely attuned to the many ways in which the first black president wasn’t afforded the same respect given to all prior presidents. From the Strategy of No that Mitch McConnell devised even before inauguration day, to the constant conversation about birth certificates and ACORN and the New Black Panthers and socialism and Kenya and Islam, blacks felt that the president was being unfairly maligned and opposed in a totally unprecedented way.
This was a deliberate effort on the Republicans’ part to polarize the electorate along racial lines so that they could win a greater share of the white vote, and they succeeded in their effort. The problem was that millions of white voters who voted in 2008 simply stayed home in 2012, while blacks turned out in droves to defend the president. Perhaps the strategy would have worked if one judge after another hadn’t ruled against their voter suppression efforts.
So, now we have to wonder what happens when the Republicans turn the racial polarization off? Does turnout return to the mean?
The fact that the next Democratic nominee is unlikely to be black will change the dynamic by itself, probably costing the Republicans an unnaturally high percentage of the white vote. If they aren’t actively pursuing voter suppression efforts, and the Democrats aren’t running a black candidate, that could eliminate the Democrats’ advantage of unnaturally high black turnout.
I suspect that the deliberate antagonization of blacks will have a longer-lasting impact on the electorate than the Kenyan-Mooslim stuff because the latter works on a more subliminal level and needs to be stoked constantly to be effective.
