Midterm surprise: Low Black voter turnout

December 4, 2022

Source: Axios

A record number of Black Democrats ran for Senate in battleground states during the 2022 midterm elections — but many of them failed to energize African American voters.

Why it matters: One of the most important stories in American politics is the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on white voters, as they lose ground with nonwhite voters.

“[T]he evidence so far raises the distinct possibility that the Black share of the electorate sank to its lowest level since 2006,” The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes.

“It certainly did in states like Georgia and North Carolina, where authoritative data is already available.”
Cohn says that can be seen as a reversion to Black turnout before the Obama era — but warns that it’s consistent with a pattern of nonwhite voters trending a bit more to the Republican Party since 2018.

By the numbers: Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s progressive lieutenant governor, was one of the biggest Democratic underperformers in Senate races. He came up 26,718 votes short — a margin that nearly matched the Democratic dropoff in the city of Milwaukee, compared with 2018.

By contrast, turnout in largely white and progressive Dane County (Madison) increased by about 7,000 votes from 2018 to 2022.
Barnes was the only Democratic Senate candidate to lose a state that Biden carried in the previous election.

Reality check: Even as Black turnout sagged in Georgia for the November election, African American voters are showing up in larger numbers for early voting in the Georgia Senate runoff.

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