How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote

Her failure to challenge Barack Obama's huge momentum among African-Americans -- not a given at the start -- may have doomed her campaign.

By Thomas F. Schaller

Read more: Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Jesse Jackson, African-Americans, South Carolina, Opinion, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Reuters / Jonathan Ernst

Sen. Hillary Clinton campaigns in Columbia, S.C., in January.

May 5, 2008 | If Hillary Clinton fails to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Barack Obama, there will be plenty of second-guessing about how she ran her campaign. What if her loyalty to campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle and chief strategist Mark Penn had not prevented her from demoting them sooner? What if her electoral strategists had better understood the power of caucus states and the way in which votes cast there translated into delegates? What if she had actually planned for the month following Super Tuesday, thereby preventing Obama from posting the 11 straight wins after Feb. 5 that provided him the pledged delegate lead he enjoys today? But beyond these questions, one little-discussed factor (with direct or indirect relation to all of the above) appears to have had fatal consequences for Clinton's campaign: She failed to mount a strong enough challenge to Obama's claim on the African-American vote.

Though a majority of black voters may inevitably have gone for Obama, nothing precluded the wife of the so-called first black president from keeping Obama's margins among blacks significantly narrower -- say, losing to him by 4-to-1 or even 3-to-1, rather than the devastating 9-to-1 margins by which Obama has often won African-American Democrats. "The Clinton campaign has been focused on Barack Obama's performance with white working-class voters in a few states, but they fail to mention Senator Clinton's abysmal performance with black voters all over the country," says political consultant and Obama supporter Jamal Simmons. "She has gone from leading among black voters to losing them 90 percent to 10 percent in Pennsylvania. One would expect Obama to win these voters, but 90-10 is a total collapse that Obama is not experiencing among any constituency. Simply put, Hillary Clinton has a black problem."

Outside of Missouri and maybe Delaware, staying competitive among black voters wouldn't have tipped any states for Clinton from the losing to winning column. But had she improved her performance to just 20 percent, she would have significantly reduced, if not eliminated entirely, her national popular-vote deficit (even without the disputed Florida and Michigan returns). And because the formula for assigning delegates favors the candidate who wins delegate-rich urban areas, Clinton could have limited the lopsided delegate-per-vote ratio Obama enjoyed in states ranging from Alabama to Maryland to Wisconsin.

Since the days of Adlai Stevenson -- which is to say, since the civil rights movement finally guaranteed the franchise for black voters -- the fate of candidates favored by so-called wine-track Democrats usually ends the same way. From Eugene McCarthy to Ted Kennedy, from Jerry Brown to Howard Dean, they make a big initial splash with the white liberal base, only to end up high and dry when working-class whites and blacks together align behind somebody else. What makes Obama different is that he has unified white liberals and African-Americans -- a powerful coalition Clinton needed to prevent. Given that roughly three in five black Democratic voters are women, Clinton's blunder here was preventable, and it may well have doomed her 2008 bid for the White House.

With Indiana and North Carolina voting tomorrow, the consequences of Hillary Clinton's low standing among black voters will once again be on display. She may win Indiana (polls show a tight race) and keep her expected loss in North Carolina to single digits. But with a better showing among black voters, these two outcomes might be a solid win and a narrow victory, respectively, and a net gain rather than a loss of delegates in the two states combined.

For all the talk now in the post-Rev. Jeremiah Wright phase of the campaign about the reasons for doubting Obama's electability, it is worth noting that black Democrats were initially among those most skeptical -- maybe "cynical" is the better word -- about the prospects of Illinois' junior senator. The widespread apprehension among African-Americans was not personal to Obama so much as it was historical, rooted in the deeply held suspicion that neither America nor even the multicultural Democratic Party was ready to nominate, let alone elect, a black man for the presidency.

This reality was made plain to me last December at an Obama rally headlined by Oprah Winfrey at the football stadium on the campus of the University of South Carolina. Tens of thousands of African-Americans came to Columbia that Sunday morning, many driving hundreds of miles from points elsewhere in the state or region, to see Obama and Winfrey appear side by side. I expected these black attendees to be already in lockstep behind Obama, and some were. But many people I interviewed said they were not convinced he would be the nominee or president; some said they came out that day to pay witness to the historical fact of his candidacy, not his inevitable presidency.

In fact, poll results as late as October 2007 showed a solid majority of African-Americans expressing their support for Hillary Clinton's candidacy. This was a natural reflex, of course. The former first lady, after all, is the wife of a president once almost universally beloved of African-Americans. So what went wrong?

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