Will Black Voters Save the Senate from the GOP?

With the Republican Party base growing increasingly racist and reactionary (the use of racist "dog whistle" sound bites isn't even disguised anymore), black voters in general and those in the South in particular have no reason to support the GOP.  Thus, a key for Democratic victories in contested Senate races will be turning out black voters in November.  Some believe this will be difficult in a non-presidential election  year.  Still others believe that the hold backward black pastors - who at least in Virginia in my view are often so easily duped by feigned religiosity that they are little more than water carriers for the descendants of segregationists - have over their congregations will push black voters to not support "liberal" Democrats.  Others are now thinking that the task might not be as difficult as some fear given changes that are taking place across the former Confederacy.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

If you  haven’t already read Nate Cohn’s excellent story in the New York Times on the potential power of the black vote in this November’s midterm elections, you should. He makes the same prediction I have been making for months now. “If Democrats hold the Senate,” he writes, “they will do so because of Southern black voters.” But my forecast is always tempered by the fact that African American voters, like most voters, stay home in non-presidential election years. Cohn gives me a little more hope that this time will be different.

“The trends increasing the clout of black voters reflect a complete cycle of generational replacement in the post-Jim Crow era,” Cohn notes. “White voters who came of age as loyal Democrats have largely died off, while the vast majority of black voters have been able to vote for their entire adult lives — and many have developed the habit of doing so.”

When it comes to the Senate map, the toughest and closest races Democrats face are in southern states. As The Post’s Aaron Blake reported in April, “Six of the 16 states with the highest black populations are holding key Senate contests in 2014.” Three of those states — Louisiana, North Carolina and Arkansas — “are widely considered to be the most pivotal when it comes to the GOP’s hopes of winning the majority.” Cohn adds Georgia to the list. “Black voters will most likely represent more than half of all Democratic voters in Louisiana and Georgia, and nearly half in North Carolina.”

[A] major factor in black voter power in the south is the re-migration of African Americans to the region. And Cohn writes that this could benefit Democrats in November, particularly in Georgia where Michelle Nunn is seeking election to the open Senate seat there. “Since 2000, as the black population has risen, the share of registered voters who are white has dropped to 59 percent, from 72 percent,” he reports. “The state’s growing black population will give [Nunn] a chance to win with less than one-third of the white vote, a tally that would have ensured defeat for Democrats just a few years ago.”

 The cited New York Times piece goes on to explain why turn out may not be so difficult to generate:

Democrats lamented low black turnout for decades, but Southern black turnout today rivals or occasionally exceeds that of white voters. That’s in part because black voters, for the first time, have largely been eligible to vote since they turned 18. They have therefore had as many opportunities as their white counterparts to be targeted by campaigns, mobilized by interest groups or motivated by political causes.

Mr. Obama is part of the reason for higher black turnout, which surpassed white turnout nationally in the 2012 presidential election, according to the census. But black turnout had been increasing steadily, even before Mr. Obama sought the presidency. In 1998, unexpectedly high black turnout allowed Democrats to win a handful of contests in the Deep South; in 2002, Ms. Landrieu won a Senate runoff with a surge in black turnout.

The Supreme Court’s decision last year to strike down a central provision of the Voting Rights Act unleashed a wave of new laws with a disparate impact on black voters, including cuts in early voting and photo-identification requirements.

These laws will disenfranchise an unknown number of eligible voters, but probably not so many as to have a big effect on election results. In Georgia, where a voter ID law has been in place since 2007, the black turnout rate has increased to nearly match that of whites.

The post-Jim Crow era also led to the end and eventual reversal of the Great Migration, the exodus of blacks from the South to escape racist laws and seek better economic opportunities. The South was home to about 90 percent of the nation’s African-Americans until the beginning of the 20th century. By 1970, 53 percent of blacks lived there.

This trend reversed in the decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, 57 percent of black Americans live in the South; more than one million black Southerners today were born in the Northeast.

 Anyone who does not want a return to the Jim Crow era and/or Gilded Age needs to turn out and vote in November.  Bad things happen when good people do nothing, and GOP control of Congress would be a bad thing.