Young Wooing White Voters in Governor Race

History is an uninvited guest in Andrew Young’s campaign for the Georgia governorship.

It was not many years ago that Young, as a lieutenant to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., came to rural towns like this one as inconspicuously as possible. Last week, he roared into Eastman in a huge van emblazoned with his campaign posters and bumper stickers.

That was exactly the transformation of Southern life that Young and other civil rights leaders envisioned as they fought the system, throughout the 1960s, to dismantle the barriers that kept blacks from voting. His current campaign represents a major step toward validating that faith that all doors eventually would open once the polls did.

Today, Young leaves others to draw such historic conclusions from his candidacy. In speeches to both an integrated audience in nearby Ft. Valley and an all-white Lions and Rotary luncheon here, he mentioned only fleetingly and obliquely his years with King. He emphasized his two terms as mayor of Atlanta and promised to seed the rest of the state with office towers like those that now crowd the city’s skyline.

“I’m not denying any of my heritage . . . but the jury is still out on civil rights for a lot of people,” Young said in an interview during a break from a long day of campaigning. “That’s not the issue on which I’m running for election.”

Yet however Young may try to focus his audiences’ attention on his vision of international companies relocating in the Georgia countryside, he cannot escape what has become, in virtually everyone’s mind here, the central question of his campaign: Will Georgians accept a black man as governor?

That dominant issue frames only one dimension of the political evolution taking place here. Many politicians also are asking if Georgia could elect a Republican governor, a prospect that once would have been considered not much more likely than electing a black.

These cross pressures could make this a pivotal election for the biracial Democratic coalition that has controlled state-level politics here, as in most of the Deep South, since the fall of segregation.

From one side, the dominant Democratic alliance is being squeezed by a Republican Party blossoming in the rapidly growing suburbs of Atlanta and the state’s other major cities.

Democrats consider state House Minority Leader Johnny Isakson, the front-runner for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, the most serious GOP contender in more than two decades. Though Republicans have not elected a governor here since Reconstruction, the moderate (he supports a woman’s right to abortion) Isakson exudes confidence. “The forces at work in Georgia are such that it is not a matter of if , it is a matter of when you elect a Republican (governor),” he said.

From the other side, Young’s candidacy challenges one of the Democratic coalition’s unspoken tenets. Though blacks have made enormous gains in lower-ballot offices in Southern states since passage of the Voting Rights Act 25 years ago, the white majority has maintained a stranglehold on the powerful positions. No black has been nominated--much less elected--to one of the statewide constitutional offices in Georgia.

As more and more whites shift their loyalty to the GOP and black votes become that much more essential to Democratic success, that pattern is coming under pressure--not only here but all across the South. Last year, L. Douglas Wilder was elected the first black governor in Virginia, and became only the second Southern black to hold statewide office.

In North Carolina last Tuesday, a black Democrat, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt, won his party’s U.S. Senate nomination. State Sen. Theo W. Mitchell, a black, is seeking the South Carolina Democratic gubernatorial nomination.

Nor is Young the only black Democrat to run for statewide office in Georgia. State Sen. Al Scott is one of three serious candidates for a spot on the Public Service Commission.

“The underlying push driving all this right now is that the Democrats are a biracial party, in which black influence is on the rise,” said Merle Black, a professor of politics at Emory University here.

The potential for conflict created by that shifting balance was underscored last month, when 24 black politicians and civil rights leaders filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s runoff primary. Georgia and eight other Southern states require that the top two finishers in a primary compete in a runoff if no candidate wins a majority.

Democrats contend the rule ensures that the strongest nominee wins, but some blacks say it unfairly denies nominations to minority candidates who can win a plurality in the first round of an interracial primary but fail when white voters unite behind the remaining white candidate.

Many here believe that Young could face just such a scenario. He is ahead in polls for the July 17 gubernatorial primary, but is extremely unlikely to win enough votes to avoid a runoff with one of his four white opponents.

Assuming that black voters cast between one-fourth and one-third of the votes, and that Young holds nearly all of them, strategists in the race say he would still need 30% or more of the white vote to win a runoff--a tall order even with the gains he appears to be making in such appearances as those in Eastman. Without the runoff requirement, he would be more likely to win the nomination.

Young joined in similar litigation 19 years ago, but denounces the current lawsuit. A runoff against a single white candidate might disadvantage him, he said, but it would be even more dangerous to his candidacy “to have Democrats bolt and go Republican (in the general election) because they don’t feel comfortable with me. Sooner or later, you’ve got to face the white majority, and for me, the sooner the better.”

In fact, Gantt’s contest last week proved that a runoff is not an insurmountable obstacle to a black candidate in the South. He had narrowly missed garnering the 40% of the vote required to win the initial primary, then won Tuesday’s runoff with a comfortable margin of votes in a low turnout.

Young’s chilly attitude toward the litigation is typical of his campaign style. He says nothing that could unsettle a white audience. Although Lt. Gov. Zell Miller and other Democratic contenders have warned that race relations in the state are deteriorating, Young said in Ft. Valley: “Georgia is the place where people get along better with more differences than any other place on the planet.”

If such remarks reflect Young’s own larger perspective on the passage from Jim Crow to racial coexistence, most observers here believe they also suggest the lengths to which he will go to ameliorate the deep fear among many whites that his winning the nomination would shift the balance of power to blacks.

“You got a lot of traditions you’re going against in Georgia,” said Walter L. Daniel, the smooth young executive director of the Eastman/Dodge County Chamber of Commerce, as Young mingled in an integrated group of businessmen. “The (black and white) communities get along well, but everybody kind of knows where the lines are drawn. You would have to break traditions that go back generations” for Young to win.

Although some black leaders accuse Young of neglecting his base, he is virtually guaranteed enough black votes to put him in a runoff. If the election were held now, he would most likely face Lt. Gov. Miller, the best-financed and most liberal white contender.

Miller has offered the most aggressive and specific proposals of the Democrats: a state lottery to pay for increased spending on schools, “boot camps” for young drug offenders, a rollback of auto insurance rates, enhanced sex education intended to reduce the pregnancy rate among teen-agers. He has also criticized Young’s record on controlling crime in Atlanta. He says it is “misleading” for the former mayor to promise that he can substantially redirect development into economically stagnant rural areas.

After 16 years as lieutenant governor and 30 years in state government, the silver-haired Miller may have trouble convincing the voters he is the man to execute change. “That is difficult, with some of the ones who don’t keep up with politics and government regularly,” he acknowledged as he shook hands outside a coffee shop in Augusta. “They see me as part of the same old crowd.”

The strongest challenger among the other Democratic candidates appears to be Roy Barnes, a moderately conservative state senator who supports tightening restrictions on abortion. Barnes has pointedly jabbed at the lieutenant governor over his support for the lottery, and at Young for his environmental record as mayor.

Barnes’ problem is that state Rep. Lauren (Bubba) McDonald and former Gov. Lester Maddox (who promises voters fed up with the capital crowd that he will be “your Ex-Lax in state government”), although lagging in the polls, will also siphon off conservative votes.

Even that analysis implies more cohesion than the race has yet acquired. At a candidate forum in Macon last week, the overwhelming impression was one of candidates struggling to find divergence and mostly failing. To most voters, “it’s still kind of fuzzy,” Miller acknowledged.

In any of these candidate gatherings, Young stands out--and not only because of his color.

The former U.S. representative and ambassador to the United Nations is simply an unusual politician. He is often vague, sometimes distant and distracted, at other times homey, and disarmingly quirky.

His plans for education include pressuring the news media to write about “one good thing a week in our schools.” In explaining to the Ft. Valley Chamber of Commerce how he would get businesses to move there, he stressed not education and infrastructure, the usual litany of New South governors, but how much less it costs to play golf and tennis in Georgia than it does in Japan.

And he is defiantly unafraid of telling people he doesn’t have answers to their questions. Not the least of those is whether he can raise enough money and attract enough white votes to become the Deep South’s first black governor. Young faces a steep climb, but despite his reluctance to be seen as a symbol, few observers here doubt that Young is pointing the way to a new era in Georgia politics.

If he falls short, Young said softly between stops in Eastman, it doesn’t mean that blacks cannot win the highest offices here.

“It just means I didn’t run a good enough campaign.”