Black Elected Officials

Rachel Swarns reports for The New York Times on the increasing ranks of African-American politicians successfully winning state and local elections in minority white constituencies. She sees these politicians as, in part, laying the groundwork for Barack Obama’s run.

Of course there’s also just the possibility of joint causation. Over time, cohort replacement has both made the population less white and somewhat less racist. At the same time, you probably saw a lot of race-related realignment in the 1970s and 1980s even in white-white races. In other words, both race and racial attitudes were a significant predictor of voting behavior in, say, 1988. And a white candidate like Michael Dukakis would still be subjected to attacks that were, in part, about race. And a white candidate like Bill Clinton would engage in tactics (Sister Souljah!) designed to reassure candidates that he wasn’t somehow too much of a race man. Plugging an actual black man into that role changes things, obviously, but there are some important structural similarities. Race has long been a factor in elections fought between a white Democrat and a white Republican, in other words, so partial precedents can be found all over the place.