Don’t Write Off State’s Black Voters

To a remarkable extent, the Democrat’s extraordinary success in California’s elections hinged on the overwhelming support of slow-growing urban areas. Despite the state’s dramatically changing demographics, when absentee ballots are tallied next month, the election results will have been significantly shaped by a constituency that is often overlooked and marginalized: African American voters.

It’s still too early to declare California decisively Democratic. According to exit polls, Anglo and Asian voters comprised about 80% of the voters on Nov. 7. Those living in urbanized coastal communities favored Democrats, while residents in eastern counties strongly preferred Republicans. Much like Oregon and Washington, where razor-thin margins determined the presidential and many key congressional races, the two groups split almost perfectly between the major parties.

At the same time, the state’s burgeoning Latino population, which cast about 14% of the state’s votes, went 2 to 1 for Vice President Al Gore. Even so, Republicans received more than twice the Latino vote they achieved in the 1996 presidential contest. This striking improvement lends support to the widely held expectation that as Latino immigrants become more established in the United States, more and more of them will vote for Republican candidates. For example, the Latino community in Texas, George W. Bush’s home state, is generally older than its California counterpart, and it only narrowly went for Gore.

With the state’s Anglo and Asian voters divided among Democrats and Republicans, and the Latino vote subject to considerable volatility, African American voters emerged as the state’s most crucial swing constituency. They accounted for just 7% of the total votes cast, but supported Democrats by a 9-1 margin. Even before the absentee-ballot count, which may increase Republican totals, the black vote accounted for as much as half the Democrats’ statewide margin of victory.

More significant, maintaining this historical voting pattern may prove key to the Democratic fortunes in the future. In particular, a monolithic black vote provides Democrats with nearly unbeatable insurance against the possibility that more Latinos might gravitate toward the GOP.

Assuming that California Latinos voted in ways roughly comparable with Texas (an unlikely scenario at this time), more than 90% of the state’s voters would still be evenly split between the two major political parties. The black vote would then control the result. If African Americans continue to strongly favor Democrats, as they have historically, statewide Democratic and urban candidates would almost certainly win most elections, and by a comfortable margin, even if Latinos should turn markedly Republican.

The electoral power of bloc voting is critical to Democrats because long-term growth trends in California and the rest of the nation seem to be skewed toward GOP-leaning regions. Los Angeles and four Bay Area counties accounted for almost all of Gore’s lead over Bush in California. Virtually the entire eastern two-thirds of the state, and every major southern county, including Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange and San Diego, went for Bush.

California’s Republican-leaning eastern and southern counties are growing much faster than the state’s urban areas, in part because they are gaining population from Democratic strongholds. In recent years, regulatory constraints and high costs limited urban-employment options to comparatively narrow, service-oriented sectors. Throughout the last decade, the state’s middle- and working-class families responded by streaming into California’s more affordable, pro-growth regions.

This trend cuts across ethnic lines. In the election, counties that exhibited expanding white, Latino or black populations all tended to vote for Bush. Those losing residents voted for Gore. A county’s relative attractiveness to new, generally younger and aspiring residents correlates closely with political preference.

The same geographic fragmentation is occurring nationwide. Post-election statistics show that the 2,424 counties voting for Bush were overwhelmingly suburban and rural. The population in these counties grew by an average of 14% over the last decade. In contrast, the 677 counties Gore carried were heavily urbanized and expanded just 30% as fast.

As in California, the country’s politically conservative regions are growing much faster than its more liberal counties. If national politics are as evenly divided as the Nov. 7 elections suggest, this trend may force Democrats to consider several difficult options to assure their political survival.

One is to try and limit the growth of Republican-leaning territories by using the federal bureaucracy to extend urban slow-growth constraints to suburban and rural communities. Efforts to expand environmental regulatory regimes in peripheral areas and the rise of “anti-sprawl” sentiments are in part motivated by this goal.

But such efforts risk igniting passions in fast-growing communities and provoking an even more damaging political backlash. Inflamed by what it saw as federal overreach, for example, the Intermountain West’s “sagebrush rebellion” contributed mightily to the Democrats’ congressional setbacks in the 1994 election.

Another gambit is to hope that today’s fast-growth regions will evolve into pro-Democratic communities. Los Angeles’ coastal region, for example, was once as famous for its aggressive business-development policies as its Republican politics. By the late 1990s, however, an anti-industrial, Manhattanesque politics had completely taken hold among the region’s professional elite and key interest groups. Perhaps Las Vegas, Phoenix and Salt Lake City will tread a similar path, eventually shedding their pro-growth conservatism to become new liberal bastions.

Unless the United States transforms itself from a diverse, multiclass society into a homogeneous, steady-state nation like Sweden, it will have to accommodate millions of people seeking advancement and economic opportunity. Immigrants, aspiring lower- and middle-class families, and young people generally don’t share the desire for a less turbulent, static society animating the urban elite. Even if now-thriving regions adopt slow-growth politics, new fast-growth areas will be created elsewhere.

Given such realities, Democrats may have little choice but to depend on their most polarized, monolithic constituencies, using urban super-majority votes to offset fast-growing Republican regions. That’s what seems to explain the stridently aggressive tone Democrats adopted this November to mobilize African American voters, in particular.

Fashioning a political base from ideologically uncompromising voters is, however, not without risk. Eventually, Democrats in California, New York and other core-support centers will be forced to appease such constituents or risk losses at the polls.

After years of actively fostering environmental activists, for example, Democrats learned to their dismay Nov. 7 that many would rather abandon Gore, and lose control of the White House, than compromise over matters of doctrinal purity. The party could attempt to cut such defections by adopting what its more extreme supporters advocate. Yet, like the Democrats’ health-care debacle in 1993, this strategy could just as easily motivate conservative voters.

It’s difficult to simultaneously restrain the most partisan interest groups, avoid an opposition backlash and yet assure that indispensable bloc voters still flock to the polls on election day. President Bill Clinton proved especially adept at striking this balance. Gov. Gray Davis has also skillfully melded his party’s conflicting impulses into an effective governing majority in the state. But when power ultimately depends on support from the most extreme voters, it’s all but inevitable that political polarization will result.

If intractable voting blocs increasingly determine electoral success, political radicalization seems the only possible outcome. Slow- and fast-growth regions will be forced to compete by creating and pitting monolithic constituencies against each other, rather than building consensus from the center. California’s core urban areas, which have never been more liberal and are growing increasingly more so, clearly reflect this trend.

In the bitter aftermath of the Nov. 7 election, few may want to contemplate a politics even more partisan than what has come before. The economic and social forces reshaping California and the country, however, may unavoidably generate a period of inflexible conflict. However we may wish otherwise, the result may herald a period in which conciliation, can-do practicality and common sense are rare virtues. *