Harold Washington, Barack Obama, and the Game Plan for Victory---Should We Have Seen This Coming??

A few months ago, in the midst of the primary season, I wrote a post wondering about how black turnout might affect the general election. Having done a lot of reading on Chicago politics over the past few years, I was becoming convinced that the Obama campaign was using a playbook that had proven successful in its own backyard, 25 years prior.

In 1983, Chicago elected its first African American mayor, Harold Washington. The election of Washington was an arduous two step process. First, the reformist Washington campaign had to win a bruising three way primary against incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne and Richard Daley, Jr., son of the deceased former mayor (and current mayor). With Byrne being the Democratic machine candidate and Daley the namesake of the city’s most dominant political family, Washington’s candidacy succeeded largely due to massive increases in black registration, mobilization, and turnout. For example, between the 1979 and 1983 mayoral races, registration in Chicago’s majority black wards increased 30% (as opposed to only a 4% increase in the rest of the city). The final tally gave Washington 37%, Byrne 33%, and Daley 30%. While the racial dimension of the campaign was evident in the primary, the general election brought a whole new level of rancor. Whereas the city was long dominated by the Democratic machine, giving Republicans few chances to win citywide office, Washington’s place at the top of the ticket led large swaths of Democratic voters to cross party lines and support Bernard Epton. Many of the city’s Democratic machine leaders agitated against Washington’s bid, using tactics and language that was anything but subtle in their racial overtones--Epton's campaign slogan was "Before It's Too Late." Again, Washington had to rely on black turnout and mobilization (coupled with support from high income, high education level whites). In the general, Washington narrowly won with 51.4% of the vote. Again, black turnout was huge—75%!!

Writing in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s victory, University of Maryland political scientist Ronald Walters wrote:

…the Washington campaign illustrated that a black candidacy could bring formerly politically inactive people into the electoral process and could make politics take on a relevance and urgency for those who had previously seen little connection between elections and their own lives. It also showed that participation by people who usually opt out of the system could change election outcomes (PS, Summer 1983; p. 492).

Thus, coming into this year’s election season, the Obama campaign surely realized that black turnout would be an important, although certainly not definitive, determinant of their success. While the Obama campaign’s financial juggernaut has been unprecedented and his appeal to young and upscale white voters has been crucial, one can’t ignore the degree to which the black vote has been the backbone of the campaign. Given the delegate allocation formula used by the Democrats, Obama was able to take advantage of his near universal support among black voters to ensure that Hillary Clinton was unable to gain ground quickly, despite her victories in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. With the early date of the South Carolina primary (with its large black electorate) Obama’s campaign was given a boost heading toward the Super Tuesday blockbuster of contests. These early victories also sent a signal to black voters, as described by Walters above, that their participation could indeed determine the outcome of the race.

One consequence of Obama’s success in the primaries, which I’ve also written about, is that it placed many established African American politicians in a difficult position. Long allies of the Clintons, these members of Congress, mayors, and Democratic insiders failed to see the oncoming Obama phenomenon. In fact, several faced (and may in the future face) primary challenges as a result of their initial snubbing of Obama. For many, Hillary Clinton was the safe, and rational, pick. Here again, some parallels to Harold Washington become apparent. In his campaign against the Chicago Democratic machine, Washington broke from a number of black Chicago leaders who, by providing the machine with scores of black votes, received patronage, neighborhood power, and electoral security over the years. Writing about this tension between insurgent and establishment politicians, the Brookings Institutions’ Paul Peterson wrote:

Black political leaders nationally have many of the same difficulties that the Washington candidacy posed for black aldermen and committeemen in Chicago. If they support the problematic candidacy of an insurgent, all the past ties and connections with leading white political figures, from which many identifiable benefits flowed, would be endangered. A black candidacy that achieved only modest success could leave them politically isolated. But if they decide not to support a black insurgent who succeeds at mobilizing the black community, the close connections with white leaders would only appear to black constituents to be still another example of having “sold out.” Even as many black aldermen lost their seats to Washington’s supporters, so black mayors and congressmen who fail to support one of their own brothers for president become vulnerable to local challengers. (PS, Fall 1983; p. 716).

Sound familiar???

To add another layer, I came across an

old article from Chicago Magazine, written in January 1993. The author discusses further increases in black mobilization in Chicago, this time focused on the election of the Clinton/Gore ticket and Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American woman ever elected to that position. The focus of the piece is Project Vote!, an organization formed to increase minority and low income voter registration. Whereas voter registration had normally been the purview of the Democratic Party machine in Chicago, Project Vote!’s efforts were conducted outside the party apparatus and were community based. For the 1992 campaign, the organization was successful in adding 150,000 black voters to the rolls. Bill Clinton’s win in Illinois and especially Moseley-Braun’s upset primary unseating of incumbent Senator Alan Dixon were aided by these new voters. Who was the Director of Project Vote!, you might wonder??? A 31 year old lawyer named Barack Obama. The article concludes with a young Obama being asked about his own political ambitions:

Obama shrugs off the possibility of running for office. “Who knows?” he says. “But probably not immediately.” He smiles. “Was that a sufficiently politic ‘maybe’? My sincere answer is, “I’ll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don’t know if that’s true right now. Let’s wait and see what happens in 1993. If politicians in place now and the city and state levels respond to African-American voters’ needs, we’ll gladly work with and support them. If they don’t, we’ll work to replace them. That’s the message I want Project Vote! to have sent.”

So how might we gauge whether any of this emphasis on registration and mobilization, especially among African-Americans, is paying off??? Over the past few days we’ve started to receive some data on the early voting that is taking place across a number of states, including key battlegrounds like Florida and North Carolina (see this great site from GMU’s Michael McDonald). What seems to be taking place is tremendous, and unprecedented, black turnout. As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com has pointed out, the states with the biggest increases in early voting, compared to 2004, are those with large black populations. We’re also seeing early voting spikes in counties in Ohio with large numbers of African-American voters. Thus, while we’re expecting to see higher than normal turnout among all voters nationwide, the more interesting question is what gap will exist between white and black voters. In 2004 white turnout was roughly 65% while black turnout was about 60%. What happens if black turnout not only grows (perhaps to parity with white turnout) but maybe even surpasses that of whites in some places? Should that happen, then the math starts to get really interesting, electoral votes start going red to blue, and what might normally be a close election starts to move toward landslide territory.

Thus, as we approach election day it’s hard not to think that the groundwork for the Obama campaign was put in place well before he announced his candidacy in early 2007 and before his famous address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Rather, much of what we’re seeing materialize has its roots in longstanding efforts begun back in Chicago. Many commentators have looked to previous elections for parallels to what we’re seeing this year—Is 2008 like 1992? 1980? 1932?

Should Obama win next Tuesday, my vote goes not for a presidential race in our past, but rather a mayoral one--1983. The fact that some of this year’s participants were either involved in or influenced by that campaign should, perhaps, have gotten a lot more attention by a lot more people.

A Long Rumination on Turnout, the South, and Harold Washington

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about turnout. As several stories in the past few days have discussed, and as we know from the primaries to this point, turnout has been soaring on the Democratic side. Obviously this bodes well for them in the general election in November.

For Obama supporters, increased turnout among African Americans and younger voters has been responsible for the magnitude of many of their victories. As the campaign between Obama and Clinton has intensified and turned nasty, the question that has been asked is whether these voters will still show up in November should Obama be denied the nomination. Likewise, Clinton supporters have argued that her core constituency—i.e. older women, white working class voters—can’t be taken for granted either. Polling released in the past few days about the hesitancy of each side to vote for the other (polling that I would take with a large grain of salt, by the way, given how moods can change over seven months) has re-enforced these fears.

My thinking about turnout was also peaked by the running debate about how an Obama nomination could “change the electoral map” in November. With increased turnout, especially among African Americans, might states that have voted Republican in the past—but with large black populations—potentially vote Democratic in the fall? Here, many people have looked to the south, a region I’ve been writing a lot about recently. A Census Bureau report on the black population in America confirms what we’ve known for a while (see my earlier map from Kevin Phillips circa 1968). Namely, the black population continues to be concentrated in southern states.

For example, ten states—Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Louisiana, Virginia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi—account for just under half of the nation’s black population. In six of these states, blacks make up more than 25% of the total population (Mississippi—37%; Louisiana—33%; South Carolina—30%; Georgia—29%; Maryland—29%; Alabama—26%). These numbers make many Democratic operatives salivate, especially with an Obama candidacy driving up turnout and drawing virtually all black voters to his side.

So what’s the problem?? The problem, according to Thomas Schaller, is that black voting doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but tends to produce a reaction among white voters. We would note, for example, that of the states listed above only Maryland is reliably in the Democratic camp election after election. Others have gone Democratic sporadically—Georgia (’92), Louisiana (’92, ’96)—but on the whole these states have been among the reddest of the red over the last few decades. The reason, according to Schaller, is that race is so entwined in southern politics that whites have fled the Democratic party (a process begun by Goldwater and continued through Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan) over the past generation and have become the most solid part of the Republican coalition. While the size of the black population gives Democrats a head start toward carrying these states, the strong Republican tilt of the white vote is able to overwhelm Democratic candidates. Using Mississippi as a specific example, Schaller writes:

“If African-Americans, who are 37 percent of voters, cast 90 percent of their vote for the Democratic nominee, that means Mississippi Democrats begin any statewide campaign with about 33 percent of the vote—or two thirds of the way to a majority. Yet the Republicans control the state’s governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, and have carried Mississippi in the last seven presidential elections.”

We would also note that such a scenario has happened with white Democratic candidates on the ballot. White flight to the Republican camp might intensify with a Democrat like Obama at the top of the ticket.

Schaller’s analysis seems to dovetail nicely with the southern portraits that V.O. Key gave us over fifty years ago. As I’ve noted in several earlier posts, Key wrote that southern politics prior to the recent Republican realignment tended to produce pathologies heavily influenced by the race question. Without a viable opposition party to attract black votes (assuming they had access to the ballot) white politicians were able to demagogue the issue without fear of reprisals. In fact, it was usually electorally advantageous.

Where does that leave us? Is someone like Obama unable to “change the electoral map” in the south? Schaller is highly skeptical of any Democratic future in the south in the short term (even with white candidates). He counsels Democrats to look westward for greener (bluer?) pastures. This is no doubt a wise strategy given what we're seeing in places like Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. While Schaller’s evidence is quite convincing, I’d like to throw out for consideration three southern states that could potentially go Democratic with Obama as the nominee (and perhaps with Clinton too should black voters turn out for her). These states are southern, but not of the deep south, and have four things going for them that might help put them in the Democratic camp. First, they have a sizable black population. Second, while race has been a prevalent issue in their politics, it hasn’t been as crippling and venomous as in some other southern states. Third, they have a large number of highly educated white voters, many born outside of the south. These voters tend to live in what Judis and Texeira call “ideopolises.” These areas tend to have voters who have high education, high income, and socially liberal positions on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, prayer in school, etc. As we know from the exit polling so far this year, Obama has done extremely well in these areas. Finally, these states have elected Democrats statewide recently and, in fact, all have Democratic governors now. I’ll list these states in order of what I would predict to be their likelihood of going Democratic.

First is Virginia. The black population of Virginia, as of 2000, is 20.4% compared to 12.9% nationwide. The black population of the state is largely concentrated in the city of Richmond in the center of the state and in the Hampton Roads/Newport News/Portsmouth/Norfolk area in the southeast corner. Virginia has elected an African American governor—Douglas Wilder in 1989 and has elected two consecutive Democratic governors—Mark Warner (2001) and Tim Kaine (2005) in addition to Democrat Jim Webb to the Senate in 2006. This “purpling” of the state, which hasn’t voted for a Democrat for President since LBJ in 1964, has been fueled by the growth of northern Virginia. The corridor of suburbs stretching westward from Washington, DC from Arlington through Fairfax, Falls Church, and out into Loudon County is a classic example of an ideopolis. The tech boom of the 90’s had its counterpart to Silicon Valley in this area and has been trending more and more Democratic, witnessed most recently by last year’s contest for the state legislature that saw a number of seats go Democratic.

Second is North Carolina. Here, the black population is 22.1% and is much more geographically dispersed than in Virginia. Concentrations of black voters can be found in and around Charlotte as well as the Raleigh/Durham area and in the more rural northeastern part of the state. The state’s governor since 2000 is Democrat Michael Easley and the state’s House delegation in Congress is now majority Democrat. North Carolina last voted Democratic in the presidential race, however, in 1976. As for the “ideopolis” variable, we have the research triangle area of Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham with three world class universities and a large tech sector. Orange and Durham counties went overwhelmingly for Kerry in 2004 and Wake county gave Bush only a slight win.

Finally, and least likely to go Democratic, is Tennessee. African Americans make up 16.8% of the state population. It is often argued that Tennessee is in fact three distinct regions (with three distinct brands of politics) and we see a similar pattern in terms of the black population. The largest concentration of black voters is in the south west part of the state, mainly in and around Memphis. Central Tennessee, centered around Nashville, sees a somewhat smaller, but nonetheless significant population of black voters (around 23%). Finally, heavily Republican eastern Tennessee is the whitest part of the state. The state currently has a Democratic governor in Phil Bredesen and voted Democratic in the ’92 and ’96 presidential races (Al Gore). In 2006, African American congressman Harold Ford, Jr. narrowly lost the race for the open Senate seat vacated by Bill Frist. The Nashville area has developed into a region to be known for more than the Grand Ole Opry. Like the Research Triangle and Northern Virginia, it has a thriving tech sector. Davidson county gave Kerry 55% in 2004.

Having said all of this, I don’t want to predict definitively how these states might go this fall. I simply raise them as possibilities which, I believe, are well rooted in the demography, history, and voting trends of each state.

What might tip these states in Obama’s favor? I return to the issue of turnout. According to Schaller, black turnout in the south is in fact higher than in other parts of the country. Thus, he is skeptical of efforts to turn these states blue through greater mobilization. In thinking about this, however, I was reminded of a book I read a year or so ago about another black candidate from Chicago—Harold Washington. When Washington became the first black mayor of Chicago in 1983, he was successful because of an amazing mobilization of the city’s black electorate. On the tail end of the first Daley era, Washington’s campaign was a classic insurgency style effort. Running in a heavily contested Democratic primary, Washington was able to benefit from a 25% increase in black turnout to garner a narrow victory. In the general election, black turnout in Chicago was a staggering 85%, with 99% of the black vote going to Washington. In a campaign, both primary and general, that saw some of the worst race baiting possible, Harold Washington was able to rely on turnout to win. If Obama could produce registration and turnout that mirrors what Washington did, but on a much larger scale, might we see some previously red states go blue?

When Washington ran for and won re-election in 1987, who was one of his main consultants???? David Axelrod, now chief strategist for Obama. Who had just moved to Chicago at the time of Washington's campaign and was working in the community being mobilized??? That's right. See any parallels between these two campaigns???