How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote

In quick succession, three things happened in the month and a half between Thanksgiving and the New Hampshire primary. First, Oprah's unprecedented mid-December endorsement of Obama sent a clear signal to her mixed-race female-dominated audience that they should feel as comfortable having Obama on their living room television screens for the nightly newscast as they do having her there during late-afternoon coffee talk. Next, in January, white Iowans sent a safe-harbor signal to black Americans wary about the Democratic Party nominating a black candidate that it was OK to get behind Obama. Hillary Clinton had no control over either of those developments, of course. And a top Obama advisor confirmed to me that the campaign was already tracking movement by black voters toward Obama by Thanksgiving.

But Clinton did have (or should have had) control over the third factor: the behavior of her campaign and of Bill Clinton from that point forward. Yet, through a series of intended or unintended developments -- from Bill's "fairy tale" and "false premise" comments concerning Obama's stance on the Iraq war, to hints of black-brown animosities between African-American and Hispanic Democrats, to Hillary's incessant "not qualified to lead" insinuations about Obama -- the Clinton campaign signaled that if they were going to lose the black vote, they might as well turn it into an advantage with other elements in the Democratic coalition, notably white working-class voters.

Consequently, in a short span Hillary transformed from a celebrity into an object of scorn among numerous black Democrats. Was it inevitable? "I think once Obama became perceived as a viable candidate by the African-American community -- that is, after Iowa -- Clinton never had a chance to get any significant black vote," electoral analyst Charlie Cook, of the "Cook Political Report," told me. "I think President Clinton's statements, and the interpretation of his statements, hurt with white liberals. But she was already hemorrhaging her black support and ultimately was destined to get very little." Cook's "perceived as viable" qualifier here is crucial. Obama was never guaranteed to be perceived as viable, even by African-Americans, as those October 2007 polls amply demonstrate.

That may help explain why South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, went from cautioning Bill Clinton to "chill out" in January to lambasting him by late April. "I think a lot of Clinton surrogates have been marginalizing, demonizing and trivializing Obama," Clyburn bristled recently. When the former president complained that the Obama camp was playing the race card, Clyburn responded by dismissing the assertion as "bizarre" and reminding the public in a New York Times report that "it was the black community that bellied up to the bar" when Clinton faced impeachment. "I think black folks feel strongly that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation," Clyburn scoffed.

To understand the power of the black vote thus far in the 2008 Democratic primary, consider the fate of the two candidates in their own home states, both of which voted on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5.

Unsurprisingly, a whopping 93 percent of African-Americans in Illinois supported Obama. And even though New York was and surely will remain his low-water mark for black support, 61 percent of black New Yorkers still voted for him. Maintaining that level of support buffered Obama against the disparity in his performance among white voters in the two states, which were mirror opposites: 57 percent of whites backed him in Illinois, but in New York 59 percent of whites voted for Clinton. Consequently, despite their nearly identical home-state levels of white support, Obama netted more pledged delegates from Illinois (55) than Clinton did from New York (46), even though New York had far more delegates at stake.

In fact, by combining the delegate-earning power of Obama's black support in the metropolitan New York area -- along with the African-American pockets along the I-90 corridor from Buffalo to Syracuse to Albany -- with his black support in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh two weeks ago, Obama's Illinois victory effectively neutralized his net delegate loss in New York and Pennsylvania. That's right: Clinton squeezed out the same number of net delegates from her 17-point win in New York and 9-point win in Pennsylvania as Obama did in his 31-point win in Illinois -- even though New York and Pennsylvania combined (232 and 141 pledged delegates, respectively, for a total of 373) awarded nearly two and half times the delegates that Illinois did (153).

Nor can the results in those three states be dismissed as a case of Obama's manipulating the caucus system to squeeze out delegates from low-turnout contests, because Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania were all primary states -- and closed, registered-Democrats-only primary states at that. The combined returns from the three states, in fact, produced 118,603 more popular votes for Obama than for Clinton.

What might the situation look like now if Clinton had managed to keep Obama's 90 percent black support just to 80 percent? It's impossible to know for certain, because it depends on where specifically -- in which states and districts -- she garnered those extra black votes. But NBC News political director and delegate math expert Chuck Todd ventured a conservative, back-of-the-napkin estimate. "I'm not sure how many more delegates she would have gotten at 20 percent performance, but I'd guess roughly 25 to 30," Todd told me. "That may not seem like a lot, but it would have swung the net delegate margin by 50 to 60, or about a third of his current pledged delegate lead."

To supplement Todd's delegate estimates, I looked at something much easier to compute: the extra popular votes Clinton would have amassed in 13 primary states with significant black populations -- Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin -- had she won just 20 percent of the black voters in those states. For obvious reasons, I kept Illinois and New York off the list, but you'll notice that Arkansas, South Carolina and Tennessee are also missing. Why?

Like New York, Arkansas was a home game for Clinton and, at 25 percent, she exceeded the 20 percent threshold. In South Carolina she came pretty close (19 percent), perhaps because at that early juncture, and following her comeback win in New Hampshire and her caucus victory in Latino-dominated Nevada, some cynical black voters remained unconvinced that Obama had the juice to win the nomination. (The morning of the South Carolina vote, Bill Clinton made his controversial Jesse Jackson comparison in an effort to pre-spin Hillary's expected loss, but it's unclear whether many blacks in South Carolina would have heard about his comments prior to voting.) As for Tennessee, it voted on Super Tuesday, long after Obama was viable, but Clinton again exceeded the threshold (with 22 percent), perhaps as a result of her husband's connections to the state via Al Gore. But whatever the reasons, the notion that Clinton was doomed to 10 percent or less of the black vote everywhere is simply untrue. The above figures strongly suggest that she could have done better.

And the difference it would have made is striking: In those 13 other states, had she drawn just 20 percent of the African-American vote, Clinton would have shifted more than 270,000 votes from Obama to herself, a net swing of more than half a million votes. Which, by the way, is roughly the amount by which she trails Obama in the overall national popular vote right now. Just imagine how hard Clinton's spokesman Howard Wolfson would be spinning right now if Clinton were tied in the popular vote without Florida and Michigan, while still trailing among pledged delegates.

All of which brings me to a final point about the concentrated power of the black vote in the 2008 Democratic primary: The black vote was to Obama what small-state white voters in the Electoral College were to George W. Bush in 2000 -- namely, a concentrated bloc of voters whose power magnified their preferred candidate's electoral support beyond their absolute numerical value. For African-Americans, this should come as a pleasant irony, given the controversies about the counting of their votes in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio four years later.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has not given up on African-American Democrats. As Indiana and North Carolina approached, she seemed to be trying to build on her Pennsylvania victory by reaching out anew -- perhaps especially to African-American women. The most obvious evidence of this is Clinton's new television ad featuring America's most prominent contemporary black poet, Maya Angelou. "She intends to help our country become what it can become. She dares to say human beings are more alike than we are unalike," says Angelou in the ad. "I have found the person I think would be the best president for the United States of America."

The problem for Clinton is that too few other African-Americans, male or female, have reached this same finding. In her inimitable meter, Angelou proclaims in the ad that she "watched [Clinton] become interested in public health and in education for all the children -- and I watched her stand." But Clinton failed to stand for African-American Democrats when the chance presented itself late last fall and into early January, even if doing so meant firing key staffers or dressing down her own husband. Doing that might have denied Barack Obama the near-universal claim to their support he now enjoys, and the black-white coalition he built from it. For Hillary Clinton, the price of that failure may turn out to be nothing less than the nomination itself.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)