What do the D.C. results mean?
The results are in from the D.C. non-binding primary. The Washington Post's headline, Dean defeats Sharpton seems to reflect the conventional wisdom among the media about the contest.
Dean won with 43% and Sharpton had 35%. Moseley Braun came in third with 12% of the vote and Kucinich fourth with 8%. Turnout was about 10-12% of registered voters.
Overall, it was a strong showing for Sharpton; if he picked up the Moseley Braun vote, he would beat Dean. Look for him to do well in South Carolina and other Southern states where the majority of Democrats are African-American, as well as in predominantly African-American districts around the country.
Many black activists believe that bloc voting for Sharpton is the best way for African-Americans to make their voice heard. With the black bloc vote behind him, Sharpton will enter the convention with a nice set of delegates, which other candidates will have to seek out and woo to put themselves over the top. Hopefully, this will force them to address African-American issues in their platforms (I have made a similar argument in favor of Muslims bloc voting for Kucinich; see also here).
Sharpton has made a good start on that today. It seems likely that nearly all the white vote (40% of D.C.'s electorate) went to anybody but Sharpton, and was probably split between Dean and Kucinich (i.e., most of Moseley Braun's votes were from blacks as well). If all those who voted for Kucinich (8%) and the minor candidates (2%) were white, then Dean got 30% from white voters (40%-10%=30%) and the other 13% from black voters. At the other extreme, if all those who voted for Kucinich were black (unlikely, but not impossible), then nearly all of Dean's vote (38% out of the 43%) was from whites. It has to fall between these two figures.
No matter how you slice it, Sharpton got well over half the black vote (about 60% of it; or 35/60) and he and Moseley Braun together pulled down 78% of the black vote (47/60). At most, Dean got 22% (13/60) of the black vote - hardly the strong showing that he is going to be claiming. And the stronger Kucinich's showing among blacks, the worse Dean did. In the unlikely event that Kucinich got all his votes from blacks, Dean may have gotten as little as 8% (5/60) of the black vote.
This is all pure speculation and arithmetic, but it seems pretty clear that if D.C.'s vote is representative, there will be an African-American bloc vote this year and at 78% it is strong. Dean's showing among blacks ranges from poor (22%) to dismal (8%).
Now, looking at the other part of the story, if all of Kucinich's votes were from whites, he got about 20% of the white vote (8/40) with the minor candidates at 5% (2/40) and Dean at 75% (30/40). No poll shows Kucinich at 20%! Where did he get all those votes from? Shouldn't all the people who couldn't vote for Clark, Kerry, Edwards, Gephardt, and Lieberman have voted for Dean instead? Dean should have obliterated Kucinich among whites. There are only two options here. Either Kucinich has a much stronger base of support among whites than is believed, or if he did as poorly among whites as the polls would indicate, he must be getting his votes from blacks instead. They had to come from somewhere!
Conclusions: D.C. was primarily about the black vote and it looks like the black vote is going to the black candidates, overwhelmingly. Dean has not shown any great ability to win the black vote. Kucinich is either doing better among whites than expected, or if he is doing as poorly among whites as expected, he is doing surprisingly well among blacks especially as compared to front-runner Dean. The Kucinich campaign should try to get a racial breakdown of the votes to find out where Kucinich's support is coming from. This will indicate whether Kucinich is polling well enough among whites to compete or whether he is polling well enough among blacks to make an alliance with the black candidates a good strategy. This will indicate the way forward for the campaign.
Update 1/15/04: Moseley Braun is dropping out. It'll be interesting to see how many of her voters Sharpton picks up.
Update 1/16/04: The Washington Post now reports D.C.'s white voters, not black, made the difference for Dean. You heard it here first ;-)
Update 2/3/04: Looks like Sharpton's support among African Americans in South Carolina was much less than the D.C. results might indicate and D.C. was not representative after all. Oh, well. On the other hand, results from Michigan suggest that Sharpton does well among urban black but not in the rural south. This could still be interesting!
Update 2/6/04: Robert Alcock has posted ward by ward results from the D.C. primary. Correlating this with the Washington Post article about white and black voters, we can see that Kucinich did above average in the predominately white wards and below average in the predominately black wards, similar to Dean. Kucinich got around 13% of the white vote and 4% of the black vote. This is about what I expected.
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Comments
This is the most incisive analysis of the DC primary I've seen, a lot better than the Washington Post
Posted by: bill | January 14, 2004 08:15 AM
On further reflection, I think the African-American vote for Kucinich was on the high side of your range. DC is a Pacifica town, and there is a lot more support for progressive, especially anti-war positions than you might expect. That would tie in with the idea that the white vote would go overwhelmingly to Dean, in large measure because Dean has such an inside-the-beltway aura right now.
Anyway, here is a great article on Kucinich from the Village Voice by novelist Steven Elliott:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0402/essay.php
Posted by: bill | January 14, 2004 09:41 AM