Advertisement

The Turnout Myth

You sometimes hear that something or other (these days likely involving Barack Obama) will boost black turnout in the South and put heavily black states like Mississippi into play. I used to think something like this was possible until I read Tom Schaller’s book which convincingly argues that black turnout in the South is actually already quite high and that the blacker a southern state gets the more fanatically Republican the state’s white population becomes so this is basically hopeless. At any rate, go read the dime store version of his argument. I’d like it to be true that winning Mississippi was a good reason to back Obama in the primary, but it’s not.

Advertisement