Democrats lock up black vote
A new election-year poll of black American voters intrigues. Only one in four says he or she is “enthusiastic” about John Kerry’s candidacy, according to the survey, conducted by Black Entertainment Television and CBS News, and roughly half say that, if the Democratic presidential nominee supplants the Republican now in the White House, opportunities for blacks will stay the same (if not get worse).
Yet, no matter the tepid black support for Kerry, the Massachusetts senator will garner nine of every 10 black votes come November. That’s because blacks slavishly vote Democratic every presidential election.
And it has been that way since 1964, when blacks cast nearly all of their ballots for Lyndon Johnson, signaling black estrangement from the Republican Party. Just one election earlier, Republican Richard Nixon managed to capture a third of the black vote in his race for the White House against John F. Kennedy.
And in 1944, nearly half of blacks considered themselves Republicans, a legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation of their ancestors. It is easy enough to understand black de-alignment from the party of Lincoln following the 1944 presidential election. The black population benefited from programs created by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
It is also easy to understand black realignment with the party of Johnson in the 1964 election. Blacks viewed Democrats as being more supportive of the civil rights movement.
But it is hard to fathom in 2004 why so many blacks remain so blindly allegiant to the Democratic Party, why they continue to give such a disproportionate share of their votes to Democratic candidates.
Maybe blacks judge Kerry’s record on issues of highest concern to their population — jobs and the economy, followed by education, according to the BET/CBS News survey – to be better than that of George W. Bush. But surely not 80 percent better – the gap between the Democrats’ black support and the Republicans’.
On the education front, Bush has increased K-12 funding by a whopping 49 percent since he took office. And on his watch, funding for historically black colleges is at an all-time high.
The Republican also signed into law legislation creating a taxpayer-funded voucher program for disadvantaged students in predominantly black Washington, D.C., who are mired in the city’s underperforming public schools.
During his appearance last week at the National Urban League’s annual conference, President Bush posed several questions to black voters that bear consideration.
“Does the Democrat Party take African-American voters for granted?” he asked. “Is it a good thing for the African-American community to be represented mainly by one political party? How is it possible to gain political leverage if the party is never forced to compete?”
Those are questions black voters really ought to ask themselves as they look forward to November’s presidential election. And if they answer honestly, they will not automatically give John Kerry nine out of 10 of their votes.
Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].