I’m not going to regurgitate the obvious, other than to say when Democrats focus on turn out–which means cozying up to, if not embracing, the politics of mass mobilization (and the potential decrease of institutional control that entails)–they win. But here are a couple of other things:
- According to the Washington Post exit poll, for every two black men that voted, three black women did. I can’t help but think there are structural factors at work here (incarceration, gender-biased voting caging).
- This is going to make a lot of Republicans think very hard about embracing the current tax bill (and other legislation).
- As I’ve been saying ad nauseam, Democrats have three components of their base (in alphabetical order): labor, liberal Democrats, and minorities. Labor isn’t much of a factor in Alabama, but minorities (34%, mostly Black) obviously are. This was the classic liberal (white) Democrat-Black Southern coalition (with the obvious caveat that plenty of Black voters are liberal Democrats). This model will not apply in all places.
Still pleasantly surprised by this.
Thanking my black sisters for this one.
It’s not just incarceration but excons that didn’t know that they can vote now. Alabama used to prohibit ex felons from voting but that changed recently and there was a push last month to inform people. But I bet it still depresses turnout when people just don’t get the news.
People often just don’t know. This is epidemic in Pennsylvania that people including ex cons themselves and even people who work for the government too in offices that actually have to provide voter registration often just assume ex cons can’t vote when I believe that’s never been the case in Pennsylvania. I don’t know why so many assume it’s the case. But I’ve been the person correcting someone on this more times than I can remember. I overheard someone asked at a DMV if they wanted to register to vote and the person said he couldn’t because he had a felony conviction and the DMV employee didn’t contradict this. And that’s part of their job. Why don’t they know? I even heard of one case of someone at a parole office telling someone they can’t register to vote.