One of the more irritating conservative talking points during the 2008 election and beyond was the Republican complaint that black voters were only voting for Obama because he was black. In fact black voters were voting for Obama because he was a Democrat (Al Gore and John Kerry both got 90 percent of the black vote), but they were particularly excited about voting for him because he was black. Given this country's history, that's completely understandable and unobjectionable.
Republicans, though, insisted that black voters were racists who only vote for black candidates. We've seen this myth debunked time and time again, most notably with Nikki Tinker's anti-Semitic campaign against Steve Cohen in Tennessee's Ninth District. Last night, Rep. Artur Davis got trounced by Ron Sparks among Alabama's mostly black Democratic primary voters. Davis had made a big show out of tacking to the right in an effort to make himself appealing to white voters in the primary election, most notably by voting against the Affordable Care Act. He also refused to start his campaign by ingratiating himself to Alabama's civil-rights establishment, much of which ended up backing the more progressive Sparks.
So there are a number of factors that lead to Davis' defeat -- his tacking right, thumbing his nose at the traditional black power brokers in the state -- but fundamentally the issue is that a significant number of black voters chose to back a more progressive white candidate who supported policies that appeal to black voters, rather than a more conservative black candidate simply because he was black.
That doesn't mean race played no role in yesterday's primary, though. Davis was beaten 62 percent to 38 percent, despite leading by about 10 points in the polls. We'll have to wait for the demographic breakdown of the results, but that sounds like a pretty significant Bradley Effect of some kind. Not exactly the era of post-racial possibility Davis imagined when he first announced his candidacy.
Last night was a pretty bad night for black primary candidates as a whole, as two Republican candidates, Fox News personality Angela McGlowan and Les "vote for me, I'm a black dude who isn't Obama" Phillip both took last place in their respective primaries. Last night Dana Houle quipped, "Black repubs losing tonight in both repub and dem primaries."
-- A. Serwer
