CONCERN THAT BLACK
VOTER TURNOUT IS WEAK
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
With almost three million early votes already cast in North Carolina, are African Americans, and particularly Black men, being setup as the “fall guy” if Vice President Kamala Harris loses the presidency against Donald Trump Nov. 5th?
Martin Luther King III, oldest son of the late civil rights leader, thinks so.
"This election is not going to be won or lost by the number of Black men that support or do not support (Harris), even though it's going to be probably razor-thin," King told USA Today recently. "You can't go and say, well, it's Black men's fault."
"That's where it seems like it's trying to go," he added.
Former Pres. Barack Obama seemed to think so too, which is why he addressed a group of Black men during a recent stop at a Harris Pittsburgh campaign office.
"You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses,” Obama said to the group. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren't feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you're coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
Just days before the Nov. 5th general election, there is concern that VP Harris is not attracting the same level of Black voter support as Pres. Joe Biden did in 2020. Four years ago, Biden got 87 percent of the Black vote cast. It has been projected that for the 2024 election, Harris may only pull 70%.
Some projections have Republican Trump garnering a possible 20% of Black male voters nationally.
With the presidential race against Trump so tight in literally every battleground state, including North Carolina, the Black vote, once again, becomes a crucial piece of the puzzle for a Democratic victory.
And thus far, political analysts like Thomas Mills, publisher of the weekly newsletter Politics NC, doesn’t like what he sees.
“So far, there are more than 67,000 fewer African American voters than there were in 2020 at this point in the in-person voting period,” Mills wrote after the first four days of the early voting period began Oct. 17th. “That’s a huge deficit that Democrats should be scrambling to address. They need to be shifting money and people to connect with Black voters and get them to the polls.”
“The problem is widespread,” Mills continued. “In Durham County, there are 4,500 fewer Black voters this year than four years ago. In Mecklenburg, the number is 5,000. In Wake, it’s a little more than 3,000. In Cumberland, the Black vote is down by 5,000. In Guilford, the number is more than 8,500.”
“The problem is apparent in rural counties, too. In Wilson County, there are more than 1,000 fewer Black voters so far than the same period in 2020. In Halifax County, Black vote is also down more than 1,000. Same in Nash County.”
Mills continued that there has been an “internal argument” within the Democratic Party about the apparent poor allocation of resources to stimulate the Black vote. There are those who “believe there’s been too little investment in Black GOTV (get out the vote) efforts,” Mills continued, adding, “North Carolina might exemplify the validity of that criticism.”
There has been reporting that the Harris campaign has been concentrating on suburban women, given the strength of the abortion issue for Democrats.
“If these shrinking numbers hold through the election, they will almost certainly put North Carolina out of reach for Kamala Harris and will likely jeopardize several council of state seats,” Mills added.
That might explain why on Wednesday, VP Harris came back to North Carolina for the 20th time (Trump spoke in Rocky Mount as well). It might also explain why the DNC has launched a last minute “historic’ seven figure ad campaign titled “I Will Vote” to attract Black voters on 48 Black radio stations and 55 Black publications across the nation, including in at least one newspaper here in North Carolina.
According to recent polling, VP Harris is leading with those who have already cast early ballots in at least three swing states. Trump is leading with likely voters who have yet to go to the polls.
Here in North Carolina, according to The News and Observer, a Marist College poll found Harris “…edged out Trump 55% to 43% among those who said they’ve already voted. But the former president led Harris 53% to 45% with likely voters who haven’t yet cast their ballots. Trump also led Harris by two points among likely voters who are undecided, including voters who are leaning toward one candidate. Similarly, Trump outpaced the vice president 53% to 42% with independents in the state who are likely to vote. When the results are broken down by race, the former president held an 18-point lead among white voters — 58% to 40%. In 2020, Trump won white voters by 33 points. Harris had an even larger lead among Black voters — 80% to 19%.”
According to NBC News, of the seven key battleground states, there are reports of North Carolina “slipping” away from the Harris campaign. Destruction by Hurricane Helene, along with the rampant misinformation associated with it, is seen as one reason.
And strangely enough, the fact that the governor’s race between Josh stein and Republican Mark Robinson turned out not to be as competitive as expected is seen as another reason why as many voters as expected aren’t driven to the polls.
At presstime, The Hill reported, "New polling from the Alliance for Black Equality, a super PAC mobilizing Black voters in swing states, found that Harris has increased her support by 10 points with Black Generation Z men since early October."
"Overall, Harris’s support among young Black men increased from 59 percent to 69 percent between Oct. 4 and Oct. 19."
Over 27 percent of North Carolina’s 7.8 million registered voters have gone to the polls thus far. Early voting ends Saturday, Nov. 2nd at 3 p.m. across the state.
Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5th., polls open at 6:30 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m. statewide.
Photo identification is required.
All mail -in absentee ballots are required to be delivered to your local county board of Elections office by 5 p.m. Tuesday, Election Day.
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JUDICIAL PANEL TO RULE
ON NC NAACP VOTER ID
LAWSUIT
By Cash Michaels
Contributing writer
Even though voter photo identification has been a legal and electoral fact for North Carolina voters for at least two elections so far, a three-judge Wake County Superior Court judicial panel heard arguments last week in a 2018 NC NAACP lawsuit seeking to do away with North Carolina’s voter ID law.
The civil rights organization argues that when the 2018 Republican-led state legislature enacted the voter ID law, based on referendum passage of a constitutional amendment mandating voter ID, it did not have the legal right to do so because the NC General Assembly was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered, contrary to federal law.
During the years prior, federal courts had already ruled that the NC legislature had illegally targeted Black voters through racial gerrymandering and legislatively to diminish their influence during prior elections.
The NC NAACP maintained that because republican state lawmakers, in particular, were responsible for the racial gerrymandering, any laws their majority passed during that period were unconstitutional, ad should be ruled legally null and void.
The state NAACP hopes to have thrown out the state constitutional amendment mandating voter ID, on which the subsequent law is based on, as well as a state constitutional amendment mandating a seven percent cap on the NC income tax rate.
Given the long history of this case, the NC NAACP actually won its argument in Wake Superior Court, lost in the state Court of Appeals, and partial won in 2022 in the then Democratic - controlled State Supreme Court.
While agreeing with the NC NAACP in principle, the state High Court sent the case back to Superior Court after questioning some of the evidence presented, ordering a new analysis and new order after a new trial.
Republican legislative leaders, meanwhile, are seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed, saying that it would be impractical to rule that legislation passed by the NC General Assembly during the period in question was unconstitutional.
"When challenging an act of the General Assembly, you have to prove that act’s unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt," argued Martin Warf, attorney for GOP legislative leaders.
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