African Americans Based Votes on Performance

Since Nov. 7, there has been a great deal of discussion about the size and the impact of the African American vote in the 2000 presidential elections. Most of the commentary has been positive, but not all.

There are voices, mostly on the right, that persist in characterizing African American voters as blindly loyal to the Democrats, following them like lemmings to the sea. This portrayal could not be more untrue. This year, African American voters cast their ballots in an entirely rational fashion.

First, the African American vote in 2000 was a performance vote on the Clinton and Gore record, and African American voters thoroughly approved of that record. In 1998, in a study that I regularly conduct for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, for the first time a much higher percentage of blacks than whites said their finances had improved from a year earlier. The study consisted of a national survey of 850 African Americans and a parallel survey (of equal size) of the mostly white general population. Those findings from 1998 (i.e., African Americans doing better financially) were repeated in similar surveys in 1999 and 2000. Further, hard numbers from the federal government corroborated those survey results, with record-low African American unemployment, large income gains and increasing home ownership and college attendance.

Prior to the 2000 election, there was widespread discussion that African Americans did not like Al Gore as much as Bill Clinton. However, Gore received 90% of the African American vote, while Clinton received only 84% in 1996. This was not surprising because most of the employment and income gains that African Americans have made occurred during the second Clinton term. Because of the improved performance in the previous four years, African American voters gave the Democratic nominee an even larger share of their vote.

To African American voters who based their choices on performance, the above reasons would be enough to want “four more years.” However, President Clinton (and by extension Vice President Gore) defended affirmative action, made many and ground-breaking appointments of African Americans, made Africa (and AIDS) a foreign policy interest of the U.S. and, finally, reduced crime, a significant concern to many African American families.

What was the alternative for African American voters? While there are Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest who receive African American support, nationally, Republicans are not trusted by African Americans. The GOP leadership in Washington is dominated by white Southerners; in particular, by Republicans who were sent to office by white Southern voters who left the Democratic Party because of its embrace of civil rights. This was the basis of Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” with the GOP making negative racial appeals to attract white Southern voters.

There are, of course, other things that further alienate African Americans from the Republican Party. The impeachment of Clinton by House Republicans was taken personally by many African Americans because of their broad support for him. During the Republican primaries, Gov. George W. Bush’s visit to Bob Jones University and his defense of South Carolina flying the Confederate flag reduced Bush’s credibility among African Americans--and as a Southern Republican, that credibility was already quite low.

Finally, on U.S. Supreme Court appointments, Bush identified his favorites on the bench as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Affirmative action and Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act are hanging by a slender thread in the court; Scalia and Thomas oppose both. If a President Bush were to add another Scalia and a Thomas to the court, both laws probably would be ruled unconstitutional.

There were many news stories during the campaign discussing Bush’s outreach to minority voters, including appearances at African American schools and before the NAACP. The “diversity” of the 2000 Republican National Convention was also much commented on. Anyone even remotely schooled in politics would know that such “efforts” would be ineffectual compared with the fundamental and substantial matters noted here.

African American voters clearly behaved in a rational manner in the 2000 election. Their support for Gore and the Democrats was as intelligent, far-sighted and principled as that of white Bush supporters who based their votes on gun rights, abortion or tax cuts.

I am not a person who is predisposed to characterize individuals or the things they say or write as racist. That being said, I can only interpret statements to the effect that “black voters are like sheep” for what they are: racist.