First they didn’t want black people to vote, would do almost anything to stop them from voting, from gerrymandering to setting up literacy tests to dreaming up grandfather clauses.
Now, they’ll do anything for the black vote: make all types of promises, trot out your favorite celebrities — anything short of actually enacting any policies or legislation good for black people.
According to a new analysis by The Atlantic, however, black people aren’t particularly keen on voting.
At least, not as much as they were four years ago.
In the 2012 election, black citizens with college degrees voted in greater numbers than whites with college degrees. However, in 2016, that was no longer the case, with the number of black voters with college degrees dropping seven percentage points.
And just over half of eligible black voters without a college degree voted — 56 percent.
All told, out of the roughly 27.5 million black people eligible to vote, only 16.4 million actually cast ballots in 2016, 765,000 less than in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center.
That means 11.1 million black people who could have voted, didn’t. And need we remind you that a measly 2.9 million votes separated the two major candidates in the 2016 election?
For those that are saying, But the electoral college, and for those that feel their vote doesn’t matter, The Atlantic analysis has some bad news: black voter turnout in Wisconsin reportedly “plummeted” in 2016, and declined heavily in North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
What do all those states have in common?
They were all won by the GOP, and many were so-called “battleground” states — places where the race was very tight between the two major parties.
The takeaway: if you don’t like the current administration, and you live in one of those states, and you didn’t vote, you have no one to blame for the current state of affairs but yourself.
Experts, like Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress, point to a lack of Obama as being to blame for low black turnout.
“I viewed black turnout in a steady, upward trajectory,” before the 2016 election, Teixeira said. He expected that trend to continue. However, now he says, “It turns out that the Obama election increases were perhaps more attributable to Obama than we thought.”
Fancy that. Black people like to come out to vote for people who look like them, and who they think will help them.
What a revolutionary idea.
Maybe some major party will wise up and run someone black voters have a little more faith in next time around. There’s a freshman from California people seem to be excited about, just sayin'. (Editor’s Note: This is not a Blavity endorsement of Kamala Harris; we'll leave whether or not we're fans to your imagination.)
Finally, here’s a little help. Registering to vote is way easier for you than it was for your grandparents: no crazy tests, no racists blocking your path.
You can do it at vote.gov, from the comfort of your own home. Why don't you do it now, before you forget!
