How many times have we heard this? “If Sanders isn’t the nominee, we’ll lose the most enthusiastic voters, and it takes enthusiasm to win,” is the cry we read, day in and day out. But is it true?
How do you define “the most enthusiastic voters”? Is it the people who show up for rallies, often on their own college campus, with somebody offering them free tuition?
Or do you gauge “the most enthusiastic voters” by looking at how enthusiastically people vote?
If it’s the former, great, you win. A whole bunch of excited college students, who, like the youth of every generation in history vote at a lower rate than anybody else, look great at rallies.
But if you gauge enthusiasm for voting by, well, voting, you’re not only wrong, you’re insulting the people who have truly earned that honor.
Who am I talking about?
African American women.
(Huge hat tip to Denise Oliver Velez for the links, and for a parallel comment responding to this claim.)
How do you measure enthusiasm to vote? I’d suggest you gauge it by looking at 3 and 4 hour long lines on a burned vacation day to vote on one of two working voting machines, while your white suburban neighbors zip in and zip out before work using six or eight machines. I’d gauge it by busloads of people spending their Sunday afternoons in souls-to-the-polls events. And, thanks to Denise, I’d gauge it by actual numbers.
From The Center for American Women and Politics for Higher Heights Leadership Fund, with Rutgers University, The Status of Black Women in American Politics:
On at least one measure of formal – or traditional – political participation, Black women have surpassed their Black male peers and men and women of all other races. Black women have registered and voted at higher rates than their male counterparts in every election since 1998 (see Table 10 and Figure 15). 26 Since then, the highest percentage of eligible Black women voters registered for any one election was in 2012, when 76.2% of Black women were registered.
And it’s not just measured against black men. In the last two presidential elections, black women voted at a higher rate than ANYBODY:
They didn’t just vote. They voted for the Democrat, and did so at a higher rate than any other group, and by a lot:
Okay, you say, but Obama was running. What about down-ticket, you intone? Without The Bern down-ticket, all the “enthusiasm” will be lost and we can’t possibly win any Congressional seats. Again, not if you measure “enthusiasm to vote” by, well, enthusiasm to vote:
Beyond their influence at the presidential level, Black women have also been the most reliable voters for Democratic members of Congress. In a 2012 national exit poll, 94% of Black women and 86% of Black men reported voting for a Democrat for the U.S. House. In key 2012 U.S. Senate races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia – all presidential battleground states where exit polls were taken – 94% of Black women voted for Democratic winners, while majorities of non-Hispanic White women in those states voted for the Republican nominees.
Okay, you might say with a sigh. But we’re building The Future, and The Future starts with The Bern. THERE, at least, all the enthusiasm to vote is with the people showing up a Bernie’s rallies. Right? Perhaps not.
Finally, Black women represent a significant portion of the Rising American Electorate (RAE), an estimated 115 million eligible voters – and nearly half of the electorate – composed of unmarried women, people of color, and people under 30 years old. Black women sit at the intersection of these groups, representing just over half of the 26.9 million eligible Black voters and 19% of all eligible unmarried women voters (Lake, Ulibarri, and Treptow 2013). 28 They also represent the most active and dependable contingent of the RAE, contributing to its growing influence and playing an essential role in building coalitions across RAE groups to influence electoral outcomes in future races.
How big a deal is the black vote?
In 2012, 66% of black voters turned out, and as you can see above, a much higher percentage of women than men were in that group (we’ll save for another time how incarceration and the war on drugs affects that). If that dropped to 55%, we’d lose Florida. Drop it to 50%, and Ohio is gone, too. 45%? Say goodbye to Virginia.
Not just that, but given the racist campaign being run out loud by Trump, and by dog whistles for the rest of them, what if white non-college educated voters increase their vote for Republicans by just a few percent? Trump wins. And what is the bulwark against that? Black women. Not youth, who may be enthusiastic rally attendees, but are rank amateurs compared to black women when it comes to actually voting. No, if you want to find the most enthusiastic VOTERS, the people who fight their way through hell and high way to exercise their franchise, you need to look to the women in our African American communities.
And you know who they support, don’t you? Yeah, you do.
