Impact of race on voting hard to measure

If the United States were genuinely post-racial — if whites were as likely to elect a person of color as a white candidate, and vice versa — there would be no need for the Voting Rights Act.

But that is not the case in Georgia, according to an analysis of the state’s 159 county governments by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And it is not the case at the national level, according to a host of studies that have dissected voting trends.

Across Georgia, in county commission elections where one race has a solid majority (at least 55 percent of active registered voters), white candidates hold 98 percent of seats in white-majority areas; blacks hold 84 percent of seats in black-majority areas.

More than half of majority-black counties have majority-white commissions. But no majority-white county has a majority-black commission.

“Race really still matters,” said Bernard Grofman, a scholar who studies mathematical models in politics and is author of “Quiet Revolution in the South.” “It may not matter as much as in the Bull Connor era, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not important.”

To challenge a voting system under the Voting Rights Act, voters who feel disenfranchised must first demonstrate that elections in their state, county or city show evidence of “racially polarized voting.” Then the argument turns to whether the electoral system itself skews the results and should be changed.

But determining whether voting in a given place is racially polarized can be harder than it looks. Many factors influence voting; often, it’s hard to separate them out.

Party affiliation plays a major role, but party has become deeply intertwined with race, especially in the South. Personal familiarity — which candidates a voter knows and which he doesn’t — can be a factor, especially in smaller, rural areas. The perception, perhaps influenced by a candidate’s color, that he or she is likely to share the voter’s concerns certainly makes a difference. And finally, old fashioned racial prejudice may re-emerge in the privacy of the voting booth.

Interviewing national experts, as well as elected officials and voters across Georgia, the AJC traced the tangled threads of all those forces and more.

Party time

The political landscape of the South has changed radically since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Some things have disappeared: poll taxes and literacy tests. And some things have appeared: a genuine two-party system, in which Republicans are not only active but often dominant.

Some argue that party, not race, is the stark dividing line. Indeed, it’s not easy to separate the two.

“Now we have party identification running — not exactly identical to race, but similar to it,” said Charles Bullock, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia.

In the civil rights era, the national Democratic Party became identified with civil rights legislation, and black voters have overwhelmingly aligned with Democrats ever since.

Not long after, the Republican Party made a play for whites, often by speaking to their resentment of federal intervention on behalf of blacks. Decades later, the reverberations linger.

“You cannot in the South — because of the way the Republican party developed — separate partisanship and race,” said Vernon Burton, director of the Clemson CyberInstitute and professor of history and computer science.

Getting to why

But sometimes, party is absent from the equation.

Radar Fair, an African American and a Democrat, was a commissioner in Clay County when he saw his district redrawn from majority-black to majority-white after the 2010 census. Fair, a retired career employee of the Georgia Department of Transportation, filed to seek re-election anyway. But the minute he learned that a white Democrat was running against him, he decided to give up and did not campaign.

His reasons were twofold: He felt called to the ministry, and even though he had some white supporters, he believed he would have a hard time getting elected in a district that was majority white.

Fair, a lifelong resident of the county, is happy with the performance of the white commissioner who unseated him. But he believes his own time on the commission, working with another black commissioner, was important, because they understood the issues of black constituents.

“I think we got some stuff passed that wouldn’t have been passed if I hadn’t have been there,” he said. That included amending ordinances that were “oppressing some of the less fortunate people of the county,” Fair said, including a measure to limit the right to have a trailer on a small piece of land. “We didn’t try to change things, we tried to correct things,” he said.

Fair’s story illustrates how hard it can be for political scientists to pinpoint the degree to which racial feelings shape the outcome of a given race or election cycle.

If someone ran unopposed, is it because they’re popular and smart? Or well funded and connected? Or because other candidates shied away, believing that race gave them an inherent advantage?

If a contest draws two candidates of different races, and the winner is of the same race as most voters, does that prove racial voting? Perhaps the winner was better qualified or a better campaigner. And even if race was a factor, did that mean voters of the same race simply knew that candidate better? Or were they were hostile to the other candidate because of race?

Who you know

Fair thinks people vote for candidates they know and understand, and they know people of their own race better than people other races. “I think that’s the key right there,” he said. “People don’t understand one another. We work together, we be together, and when it’s time to go home we go our own way, but we don’t get to know one another.”

Blacks and whites leading separate lives is “common in this area of the country,” agreed Karin Tabb, elections director for nearby Baker County. Tabb, who is white, has reached out through black churches to increase voter registration. She says a person of good values would work for all citizens regardless of race.

Nearly half of Baker’s voters are black, but all five commissioners, who are elected countywide, are white.

On a sunny fall day at McConnell’s gas station on Route 91, a couple of white old-timers sat on motley old office chairs surrounded by stacked car batteries and shelves of garage goods.

Robert Hall, 75, said he voted for for the white candidate over the black candidate in one recent commission race. It wasn’t about party; both candidates (like all the current commissioners) are Democrats.

But it wasn’t about race, either, Hall said. The white candidate’s family ran a local hardware store, he said, and he knows them well. He barely knew the opponent.

The white candidate who won, Kevin Coker, believes he would have lost if the commissioners were elected from individual districts rather than at large. Coker considers districts a fairer system.

Hall said he’d be fine with election by districts, but after a few minutes’ thought, he amended that statement.

“It’d just be a mess,” said Hall, who served on the county commission until 2000, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. “We don’t have many blacks in Baker County that are landowners and taxpayers and responsible,” he said.

“We’ve got some good blacks in Baker County,” he hastened to add.

Teasing out race

Candace Wright lives in Midtown Atlanta and works in insurance. An African-American, she lives in Fulton County, one of the few places where African-Americans are strongly overrepresented on the county commission.

Wright said race shouldn’t matter, but for many black voters it does. “I noticed some blacks would vote for a person not knowing them because of their skin complexion,” she said. “I said, ‘You can’t vote for a person just because they’re black.’”

She voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, then supported Obama after he won the nomination. While she generally does not vote based on race, she said, she thinks politicians may be less effective in representing voters of other races because “they don’t understand where you came from.”

One study, published in the Harvard Law Review, aimed to separate out race and party.    It compared voting patterns in two parts of the country: the areas, largely in the South, that were singled out for special scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, and the areas that weren’t.

Looking at the 2008 and 2004 presidential races, the authors found that blacks came out in greater numbers for Obama than John Kerry. So did whites — except in the South. In Georgia, the white vote was flat; in several other southern states, Obama got fewer votes than Kerry had.

Digging deeper, the researchers found that some of of the behavior by whites, including southern, Democratic voters, was due to factors other than race: religious feelings, ideology and other variables. After factoring out party, ideology and those other variables, a 7 percentage point difference remained between southern whites and white voters in the rest of the country.

Race is the likeliest explanation for that remaining gap, said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stewart, who was born in Winder, Ga., was one of the study’s three authors.

Matt Barreto, another political scientist, has done his own research.

“What that tells me is there’s nothing post-racial about these southern states,” Barreto said. “When Obama became the candidate, a lot of these white voters dug their heels in and voted against the party they’d been voting for.”

Alive and well

Not everyone agrees that the Harvard study and similar ones measure the impact of race.

Abigail Thernstrom, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and her husband, Stephan Thernstrom, a retired history professor at Harvard, say the authors of such studies overlook variables other than race that could influence white southern voters.

“Look, there is a small percentage, you find them more in the South than in the North, that of course have old-fashioned racist feelings,” Abigail Thernstrom said. “But the point is, the percentage, from all the data we have looked at, is small.”

At the gas station in Baker County, the clerk, 19-year-old Bryant Jenson, pondered the interplay of race and politics as he tended to customers, black and white. He voted against Obama, he said, for “personal reasons.”

He voted for Baker’s current county commissioners. “Kevin Coker’s white, and I know Kevin Coker, and he used to do business here. Still does,” Jenson said, explaining his vote for Coker over a black opponent from another precinct.

Jenson could vote for the right black man if he knew him, he said, pointing, by way of example, to an acquaintance passing by outside.

But he said the tendency to vote only for someone of one’s own race — white or black — continues in his generation. In his eyes, a black person is a black person, he said — using a word that is a powerful racial slur. The older men chuckled softly.

Told of that incident, Coker said he wasn’t surprised. “It’s alive and well,” he said. “Racism is doing fine.”

You may contact the writers at the following links: Ariel Hart, Jeff Ernsthausen, and David Wickert