By James Strong
When miles in the far distant, you see clouds dark and wide dumping trainloads of rain over the open seas, and fast and furious winds blowing the waves as high as skyscrapers, the skipper of a sailboat flees as quickly as possible to port or speeds toward the nearest island to hide the vessel behind impenetrable rocks and weather the approaching storm.
When you don’t hear loggers laughing and joking in the forest or the sound of axes and electric saws chopping down trees or the crackle of huge, ancient oak trees falling against one another and loud thuds as they hit the ground, you know it’s okay to walk through that part of the forest.
Signs such as these also exist in politics. For instance, in a close election, a large voter turnout for a particular candidate oftentimes precedes victory for that candidate.
Terry McAuliffe is the latest example of this principle, because a large Black voter turnout helped the Democrat win the closely-contested race for governor of Virginia in the November elections. McAuliffe only won over Republican Ken Cuccinelli by three points, but exit polls seem to show that his margin of victory resulted from the enormous number of Blacks who cast their ballots for him.
“Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost white voters to Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli by 20 points in the Virginia governor’s race, 56-36 percent. But McAuliffe still won the election by three points, 48-45 percent. How is that possible when more than seven-in-10 (72 percent) of Virginia voters Tuesday were white? Simple: Black voters,” comments NBC’s Domenico Montanaro.
Montanaro goes on to explain that “McAuliffe won Black voters by a 90-8 percent margin, a similar spread to the 93-6 percent President Barack Obama ran up in the 2012 presidential election in the Old Dominion. Black voters also voted at a similar clip to the 2012 election. They made up 20 percent of voters, or one of every five people who went to the polls. That’s exactly the percentage of the electorate Black voters made up for Obama in 2012 in Virginia.”
Stu Rothenberg, who claims to be a non-partisan political analyst, disputes the notion that African-American voters were responsible for McAuliffe’s victory. “He [McAuliffe] won because Republican Ken Cuccinelli failed to get the same level of support from the normally Republican voting groups that Mitt Romney had a year earlier,” says Rothenberg.
Yet, despite providing information to substantiate low independent and non-tea-party Republican support for Cuccinelli, Rothenberg provides no evidence and little logic to show that Cuccinelli’s lack of Republican support means that the large Black voter turnout did not help McAuliffe win the governor’s race.
That’s because the margins of traditionally Republican votes Cuccinelli received compared to margins Mitt Romney received in the 2012 presidential race from Virginians was too small and uneven to be statistically significant. For example, Cuccinelli received a lower margin of votes among the married over his Democratic opponent, 50 to 43 percent, than did Romney, 55 to 44 percent. But Cuccinelli received a higher vote margin among men, 51 to 47 percent, than Romney, 48 to 45 percent.
Moreover, as Montanaro notes, “Other key minority groups underperformed. Even though Latinos . . . make up 8 percent of the population, they were just 4 percent of the electorate Tuesday, down from 5 percent in 2012. Asians make up 6 percent of the population, but were just 1 percent of Tuesday’s voters, down from 3 percent in 2012.”
So, while Rothenberg claims that McAuliffe won because Cuccinelli had low Republican support, Cuccinelli would still have lost, it seems, even if he had high Republican support.
He was too weak to be a winner and too tiny to triumph among giants. He alienated the group that held his chances of winning by carrying it on a sea voyage of anti-Black innuendos and tossed it overboard to sink or swim, survive or perish. It did not sink, it did not perish, because McAuliffe and the Democratic Party threw it a life jacket.
What is that life jacket and how vital is it? Well, if you support Black causes, you will win Black votes. If you oppose Black causes, you will lose Black votes.
Consequently, just as we learned not to trust Romney’s smiles, we learned not to trust Cuccinelli’s eyes. They are strange, harsh eyes without a tear for humankind. Truly, his lack of warmth, his decision to ally with the racist Tea Party movement and his unwillingness to even open a delicate conversation with the Black electorate doomed his candidacy to defeat.
Cuccinelli espoused views that had little Black support and, therefore, did not gain Black votes. McAuliffe took positions favored by most Blacks and, as a result, won the Black vote.
Hence, as with endless droughts, the Republican Party still experiences a famine of thoughts on how to win Black and minority voters. Famished by their barren and vain toil, their candidates flounder among the drowsy and can only watch with weary eyes as Democrats and others feast off their incompetence. The Black vote, with the same sweat and excitement it showed in Virginia, helped Democrat Bill de Blasio become mayor of New York City, Democrat Martin Walsh become mayor of Boston and Democrat Michael Duggan become the first white mayor of Detroit since 1974.
Thus, if you continuously support policies that are anti-Black and anti-minority, you shouldn’t expect to receive votes from Blacks and minorities. That fact is simple enough, as tasty and healthful as Black beans and rice.
But in the pharmacy of politics, it’s difficult to find a drug that cures stupidity. Throughout the history of American politics, both the Democratic and Republican Parties have spread, without much concern or care, the disease of discrimination. But whereas the Democrats have managed to cure theirs, the sores of bigotry and intolerance still remain open and full of puss in Republican Party politics.
For some reason, they have seen but not probed, observed but not explored a clear and undeniable landmark on the map of American political understanding: If a large Black voter turnout occurs during an election, you can assume that Blacks will vote for a Democrat. As a result, Republican stupidity on this matter serves as delicious debates at dinner time in the kitchens and living rooms of the Democratic Party faithful.
How sweet is the knowledge that you have power to decide the outcome of elections! Much like honey added to tea, that knowledge adds flavor to get-out-the-vote campaigns. Such campaigns, when successful, can make a strong candidate weak and a weak candidate strong.
The essential message for Blacks constructs an oasis of influence. It uses, in the realm of politics, analogous timber from which mansions and palaces are built: If a small voter turnout can help candidates lose, a large voter turnout can help them win.
Copyright © 2013 by James Strong. All rights reserved. Reproduction or translation of this
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