It took a long time for the political machine to realize the power of the black vote. Now it does.
Va. governor’s decision to restore voting rights to ex-cons could give the battleground state to Dems
By Tim Townsend
The term “swing state” gets a lot of use when the United States is as politically divided as it’s been in the 21st century. And even though it may resonate as a modern phrase, states have always swung, and often the energy behind that motion has been a minority community, ignored by political heavyweights until their votes were desperately needed.
“This year the Negroes may represent a balance of power in the key states” of New York, Pennsylvania, New York and Missouri, the editors of Life magazine wrote, three weeks before Election Day in 1944. “In a close election their votes may be the deciding factor.”
The old political game hasn’t changed much. On Friday, Virginia Republicans accused their Democratic governor of increasing the likelihood that black Virginians could help put the Democratic presidential nominee over the top in a swing state.
Governor Terry McAuliffe said Friday that he would use his executive powers to restore voting rights to the state’s ex-convicts, including in this year’s presidential election. Virginia House Speaker William J. Howell, a Republican, said he was “stunned” at McAuliffe’s move, but “not surprised by the lengths to which he is willing to go to deliver Virginia to Hillary Clinton in November.”
The New York Times reported that the action, which overturns a 19th century provision in Virginia’s constitution, would affect more than 200,000 ex-felons, “most” of whom are black. McAuliffe told reporters Friday that it’s estimated one in five African American Virginians of voting age can’t vote because of a past felony conviction. The move could expands the state’s total voter rolls by nearly 4%.
The African American vote has proved crucial for Democrats in the last two elections, and Virginia has been a close call in general. In 2008, Virginia went blue for President Barack Obama, who won 53% of vote. Four years later, Obama’s margin narrowed — 51% to Mitt Romney’s 48%. African Americans voted for Obama in both cycles at between 93% and 95%.
Just after the 2012 election, Nate Cohn wrote that “African American turnout could be more important to the outcome of the 2016 election than the ability of Republicans to rekindle their support among Latino voters.”
Here’s Cohn’s math:
There were somewhere between 3 and 4 million new black voters, voting overwhelmingly blue, in 2008 and 2012, and at a turnout of 13% of the electorate. If the absence of an African American presidential candidate in 2016 drops the turnout of black voters to 11% of the electorate, a decline of just 2%, and the Democratic nominee gets only 90% of the black vote, that leaves 4 million African American voters who could vote Republican or stay home.
That “could easily decide a close presidential election, especially in states like Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida,” according to Cohn.
In 1944, some of the swing states were different, and certainly the attitude towards black voters was different. In their October 16 issue (with an about-to-be famous Lauren Bacall on the cover above the cutline, “New Movie Find”), Life’s editors grappled with an angle that sounded as if it might have even been an afterthought of the magazine’s political coverage:
“For 65 years after the Civil War there was no question about which way the negroes would vote,” Life reported. “They always went Republican (when they were allowed to vote) out of gratitude to the party of Abraham Lincoln.”
But the northern migration and the Depression changed things, the editors said, and “gradually they began to think politically, not in terms of race, but in terms of economics.” That led to a shift toward the Democrats in the 1930s.
But since 1940, “increased prosperity and a growing resentment toward the Democratic Party have been swinging the Negroes back to Republicanism,” the editors wrote. “They object to racial discrimination in the armed forces and in war jobs and to anti-Negro tactics of Southern Democrats.”
Seven decades ago, black Americans were fighting voter discrimination in the south, the remnants of which are still being resolved in southern state legislatures, like Virginia’s. As Life went to press with its “How will negroes vote?” story, it reported that in the south African Americans were more concerned with straightening out the voting rights mess than the election itself.
“They had good reason for optimism,” about increased voting rights. Life reported. “There were no more outbreaks of the Ku Klux Klan. The Supreme Court had declared it unconstitutional for a political party in Texas to prevent Negroes from voting in primaries. In some southern states, where most Negroes vote Democratic, they were to be allowed to vote freely and easily in November.”
