There has been much talk this election about the fundamental transformation of voters in the Rust Belt and what that portends for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
But there is another belt also worth keeping an eye on for its remarkable electoral transformation: The Black Belt, a series of counties with large black populations, which stretches from the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic. (Florida is not a Black Belt state.)
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday found that a measly 1 percent of registered black voters overall support Trump.
That’s extremely problematic in states with high numbers of black voters. The more black voters Clinton gets, the fewer white ones she needs.
The northernmost of these states have voted Democratic in recent elections – Maryland since 1992; Virginia since 2008. North Carolina even flipped in 2008. But now, with Trump as the GOP standard-bearer, the Black Belt states in the Deep South also look shaky.
A Georgia poll conducted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and released Friday showed Clinton leading Trump by 4 percentage points in the resiliently red state in a head-to-head matchup and by 3 percentage points when Libertarian and Green Party candidates are included.
On Friday, a headline on AL.com in Alabama blared: “Poll shows Clinton leading in Georgia: Is Alabama next?” It’s a question worth pondering in a state where 27 percent of the registered voters are black, according to a January Pew Research Center report. But it should be noted that Alabama is doing its very best to disenfranchise as many of those voters as possible.
As John Archibald pointed out on AL.com in the fall: “Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of nonwhite registered voters.” He pointed out that the state “opted to close driver’s license bureaus in eight of them.” As he put it: “Closed. In a state in which driver’s licenses or special photo IDs are a requirement for voting.” Furthermore, “Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver’s license office closed. Every one.”
Welcome to the South, folks. And thank you very much, Chief Justice John Roberts, for your opinion in the disastrous Shelby County vs. Holder case. How did you put it: In the South, “Things have changed dramatically.” Yeah, right.
Then there is Alabama’s western neighbor, Mississippi, which had the highest percentage of black people of any state (37 percent) in the most recent census, but which has not voted for a Democratic president in 40 years. A Mason-Dixon poll in April gave Trump only a small margin over Clinton, although FiveThirtyEight.com still gives Trump a 76 percent chance of winning it.
Now, of course, winning in many, if not most, of these states is simply wishful thinking for Democrats, but the fact that some of these Deep South states have showed up in any poll with Clinton in the lead is noteworthy, if not earth-shattering.
The Republican Party’s 2012 autopsy report said: “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. We must recruit more candidates who come from minority communities. But it is not just tone that counts. Policy always matters.”
And then this year the party nominated Trump, a man who alienates all of these communities.
The black vote will be crucial this year, just as it was in the last election. As The Cook Report put it in July 2015:
“Deconstructing exit poll data from 2012, African-American voters accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Without these states’ 112 electoral votes, Obama would have lost decisively.”
If Trump loses in November and the black vote tips even one of the Deep South, Black Belt states blue, the Republicans won’t only need an autopsy, they’ll need a Ouija board – because they’ll be dead and buried.
The New York Times