‘Other’ voters emerge in Atlanta races

By Steve Suitts

Since August, when a memo about electing a black mayor with a black agenda in Atlanta became front page news, race has been the background for a campaign in which two black candidates and one white candidate are now the leading competitors for a place in a runoff.

Guided by several issues like crime and city finances, this election may actually turn on race in a surprisingly complex way that both echoes the past and foreshadows emerging new possibilities.

So far, it appears that the mayor’s election will include racial voting patterns that have been evident in the South for most of the last 40 years.

Namely, when given a choice, most whites will vote for a white candidate over a black candidate. The latest polls suggest that at least half the city’s white voters support the only white candidate, Mary Norwood, while 30 percent are splitting their votes among two or three black candidates. The remaining one-fifth of whites is still undecided.

On the other hand, black voters are dividing their support fairly evenly primarily among Norwood (23 percent) and the two leading black candidates, Lisa Borders (30 percent) and Kasim Reed (20 percent). According to Insider/Advantage polling, about 25 percent of the black voters remain undecided.

The earlier memo about electing a black mayor was widely condemned as a call for African Americans to vote on the basis of skin color, but it obscured the simple fact that, regardless of their expressed reasons, white voters, not black voters, end up voting most often for a candidate of their own race in the South.

In effect, the memo suggested that blacks need to vote like whites in order to preserve the black community’s self-interest. On these terms, Atlanta may be headed toward the past again.

At the same time, these old voting patterns may be adjusted by a new development seemingly emerging in Atlanta and some other urban areas — the rise of the “other” registered voters. These adults choose not to self-identify as black, white, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. They prefer none of the above and usually check “other” or leave blank the ID box on the Georgia voter registration form.

Some of these “other” voters may have black and white parents or grandparents. Like most of us in the South, their heritage probably includes family members in the past from both sides of the old color line.

Whatever their true ancestry, most choose not to declare any traditional racial or ethnic identity. Today these “other” adults represent 12 percent of Atlanta’s registered voters, while self-identified blacks are 50 percent, whites are 37 percent, and Hispanics and Asians are only one percent.

In Atlanta today “other” voters are found throughout the city in both predominantly black and white precincts, ranging from Adamsville, Adairsville, and Mechanicsville all the way up to north Buckhead.

But the precincts with the largest concentrations of “other” voters are in more racially diverse neighborhoods of younger adults in and near the heart of the city — downtown, the Marietta Street Artery, Midtown, Cabbagetown and Reynoldstown as well as new housing developments in locations like Pine Hills off I-85 North.

Right now there is very little information about the political behavior of the “other” voters in Atlanta or elsewhere. Political scientists usually treat them as “unknowns” and exclude “other” voters from election analysis.

In the last presidential election, however, a few political observers did note a late surge of younger adults registering as “other” in states like Florida where most voted for Obama. In Georgia, almost twice as many “other” voters registered in 2008 than in 2004. They represented the largest gain in the percentage of newly added voters last year in Georgia.

These “other” voters also have not been included fully in political polling, although they now constitute almost one out of every eight registered voters in the city. For example, the latest polling for the mayor’s race included only six self-identified “other” adults out of a total sample of 664 telephone respondents — slightly less than one percent of the total.

In all fairness to pollsters, these voters are often younger, more mobile and increasingly may be accessible only though cellphones, which frequently are undersurveyed or left out of polling.

My best guess is that most (but certainly not all) of these “other” voters were recently inspired by the man “whose mother came from Kansas and whose father came from Kenya” and whose campaign promised them “change you can believe in.”

Their votes in the mayoral election are likely to reflect their own self-identity in politics. Most will probably support the candidate who understands both the strengths and the shortcomings of racial identity and whose own individual identity demonstrates an innovative approach to real issues and strong personal ethics.

These “other” voters do not have yet the numbers to carry any election on their own in Atlanta, and at this juncture we only have informed speculation as to how they might vote.

But, given the city’s lingering old patterns and styles of politics, this emerging, multiracial group of younger voters may constitute a significant tipping factor for the two candidates who compete in a runoff.

No less, in the years ahead, these “other” voters in Atlanta could represent the best hope for moving our city and its politics decisively toward new, rewarding possibilities since they seemingly are not defined in their political perspectives or choices by the deep, historical boundaries that have mapped our racially divided past. Apparently, they can see others in themselves.

Steve Suitts is an adjunct lecturer at the Graduate Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University and author of the biography, “Hugo Black of Alabama.”