The Black Vote
Will Republicans defend the Bush record on black progress?
WSJ.com
Democrats left Boston last week all fired up about John Kerry, save for one surprising group: The black vote. That may explain why the Democratic nominee is dumping $2 million into outreach ads on Black Entertainment Television and urban contemporary radio.
The Kerry camp's concern is that black support is miles wide but only inches deep. A BET/CBS poll released on the eve of the Democratic Convention found that just 27% of black voters are "enthusiastic" about the nominee, and 45% say a Kerry presidency would make little difference in their lives. If you're a Democrat, this is worrisome because unenthused voters are more likely to stay home on Election Day. For Republicans, this is an opportunity to present the GOP as a viable alternative for the black electorate.
Six months before an election, the black vote typically lags 10 points or so behind the white vote in intensity. Democrats usually close the gap in the interim by way of black media outlets and other get-out-the-vote efforts. But when the Tarrance Group conducted its battleground survey in June, it found that black voter intensity was trailing by more than 20 points. It also found that union voters, a Democratic constituency that comprises a disproportionate number of blacks, were less motivated by Mr. Kerry than white conservative Christians were by Mr. Bush.
All of this helps explain not only the recent NAACP vitriol aimed at ginning up the protest vote but also the more general effort on the left to convince blacks that they've lost ground under President Bush, no matter the facts. Black homeownership is at an all-time high. The black middle class has never been larger. And black unemployment, while still double the white rate, is down 1.5 percentage points in the past year. The speeches in Boston last week focused on the "black middle-class squeeze," as if these African-Americans had been better off back in the underclass.
Conventional Republican wisdom is to stand by while Democratic operatives do their thing at the precinct level. The thinking is that countering the attacks will only drive up black turnout, most of which will go to Democrats.
A serious Republican outreach effort would respond to Democrats by running political ads in the same black media markets and with the same frequency. Millions of black voters might be interested in knowing that the Democratic politicians who represent them don't share their conservative views on issues like abortion, school choice, taxation and faith-based government programs.
In the run-up to the 2002 elections, Democrats found themselves with a similar lack of black voter intensity. They were unable to close it, with low black turnout playing an important role in the GOP's Congressional gains two years ago. The Democratic National Committee harped on Florida 2000 but the tactic backfired--particularly in places like Georgia, where white turnout was up 10% while black voter participation dropped by .3% from where it had been four years earlier.
We hope Mr. Kerry and the Democrats don't return to that type of demagoguery, or the type that produced political ads in 2000 suggesting then-Governor Bush was indifferent to punishing the thugs who dragged a black man to his death behind a pickup truck. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Kerry said that it's "time to reject the kind of politics calculated to divide race from race, group from group." In the coming months, we'll find out if he meant it.
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