A topic that has come up here in the past and in comments at Political State Report are arguments over racial slippage–or a tendency in some places for support of black candidates in polls disappearing in the election. Charlie Cook made comments that suggested Obama might suffer from such an effect and Rich Miller took him to task in his weekly column.
Cook usually knows his stuff, but he should have looked at Illinois history before he predicted that Obama would need a big lead in the polls to win.
Unlike those southern states Cook described, Illinois has a history of electing African-Americans in statewide races.
Roland Burris was elected to three terms as state comptroller, beginning in 1978. In 1990, Burris was elected the state’s attorney general.
In 1992, Carol Moseley Braun won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, beating all the polls, confounding the pundits and upsetting incumbent Alan Dixon. In November of that year, Moseley Braun again beat the polls in her win against Republican Rich Williamson.
Moseley Braun lost her seat to Peter Fitzgerald in 1998, but she did better than all but one of the polls predicted.
In 2002, Secretary of State Jesse White won all of the state’s 102 counties in his re-election bid, out-performing every prediction.
This spring, Obama took on six opponents, including two-term comptroller Dan Hynes and multimillionaire Blair Hull, and won with an astounding 53 percent of the vote. No published poll even came close to predicting Obama’s final result.
Another problem with applying this racial slippage theory to Illinois is that it is based on just a few high-profile races in Republican-leaning states.
Illinois is trending more Democratic every year. While Republicans have scored major victories in Virginia and North Carolina, and they practically own Texas, Illinois is dominated by the Democrats. All but one statewide constitutional officer is a Democrat. Both chambers of the General Assembly are Democrat-controlled, and the Illinois Supreme Court has a solid Dem majority.
There is no reason to think that legitimate black candidates in Illinois suffer from the color of their skin with the electorate. While one can find some voters who might have problems with the race of an officeholder, there is no evidence that race has negatively impacted any general election race. Moseley Braun improved over the polls despite have several scandals in 1998. If there is a test case for when such an effect should have occurred, that was it. It didn’t happen.
If Obama were to lose, it wouldn’t be because of his race, it would be because of an effective Ryan campaign that can paint itself as the center and Obama to the left of Illinois. The problem with this happening come from two reasons. One, Ryan is running essentially as George Bush and Bush isn’t popular in Illinois. Two, the campaign has shown little in the way of effectively getting its message out.
And for an great column on the challenges of policing Iraq, read last week’s column on the Illinois 233rd National Guard MP Unit which just returned from duty in Iraq.
ArchPundit