The WSJ had an interesting item yesterday on the Obama campaign’s registration efforts, and the number of voters Obama’s team can and will bring into the process this year, most notably in the South, where Democrats haven’t carried a single state since 1996.
On a hot afternoon in this southern U.S. town, Tom Wolf, a field organizer for Barack Obama, delivered the fruits of hundreds of hours of staff effort — 130 voter-registration applications — to the Wake County Board of Elections office. They had been filled out by a handful of Republican-leaners, a few dozen young adults and scores of older African-Americans who stopped voting years ago.
Those older blacks were the focus for Mr. Wolf, a foot soldier in one of the most unconventional aspects of the Illinois senator’s presidential campaign. Sen. Obama reckons that a surge in black voters will put in play long-solid Republican regions across the country, lifting Democratic candidates for all offices, from the White House to Congress to state legislatures. “I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I’m the nominee, goes up 30% around the country, minimum,” Mr. Obama said at a campaign event this past winter.
This focus on new voters is unusual. Most presidential campaigns concentrate on firing up their base or wooing independents. Voter-registration drives are treated as an afterthought, overshadowed by fund raisers and door-to-door canvassing. […]
For Sen. Obama, the registration initiative is at the fore, especially since the main reason for low black turnout is low registration. The U.S. Census Bureau says that while registered black voters turn out at a rate generally even with white counterparts, qualified African-Americans register at a lower rate nationally — 68% to 75% for whites. The gap is particularly stark in the battleground state of Florida, where only 53% of eligible blacks were registered in 2004, compared with 71% of whites. In Virginia, it was 58% to 72%.
So, to borrow a cliche, Obama intends to “grow the pie,” instead of just slicing the old one differently. And looking at the landscape, there appears to be a real opportunity for Obama to get hundreds of thousand of voters, especially in the South, into the process.
Will it work?
First, the numbers matter. There are about a half-million qualified African Americans who didn’t vote in 2004. In North Carolina, the number is 343,000. Similar results are found throughout the region, and the Obama campaign is making a concerted effort to reach those would-be voters and get them registered.
On the other hand, there’s my friend Tom Schaller, who argues today that the drive to boost turnout among black voters won’t produce Southern victories.
Two pervasive and persistent myths about racial voting in the modern South are behind the notion that Mr. Obama might win in places like Georgia, North Carolina and Mississippi.
The first myth is that African-American turnout in the South is low. Black voters are actually well represented in the Southern electorate: In the 11 states of the former Confederacy, African-Americans were 17.9 percent of the age-eligible population and 17.9 percent of actual voters in 2004, analysis of Census Bureau data shows.
And when socioeconomic status is held constant, black voters go to the polls at higher rates than white voters in the South. In other words, a 40-year-old African-American plumber making $60,000 a year is, on average, more likely to vote than a white man of similar background.
The second myth is that Democratic presidential candidates fare better in Southern states that have large numbers of African-Americans. In fact, the reverse is true, because the more blacks there are in a Southern state, the more likely the white voters are to vote Republican.
Given the data, Schaller argues Obama has a real shot at winning Florida and Virginia, but might as well give up hope for the rest of the region where, Schaller insists, Obama “cannot overcome reality.”
I’ve learned not to argue with Schaller’s math, even when I want to. That said, there are competing analyses of the Southern question, and I found Nate Silver’s take pretty compelling.
I’d just add, though, whether he should or not, Obama is eyeing the South, and will be investing time, energy, and resources in picking up some electoral votes in the Republicans’ dominant region. Unless the McCain campaign is prepared to gamble that Schaller’s thesis is iron-clad, McCain won’t have a choice but to invest resources of his own in the South, which in turn, will limit his ability to spend elsewhere.
Something to keep an eye on.