The Gantt Report
Black voters giveth and Black voters taketh away!
Everybody is talking about how Republicans pulled a coup by winning the US senate seat in the recent Massachusetts special election to fill the seat previously occupied by Ted Kennedy.
It wasn’t a poorly ran campaign, it was another arrogant campaign that took Black, organized labor and other ethnic and special interest voters for granted.
I’ve been saying it first for years and I’ll say it first again. Democratic candidates won’t be able to win a rat race without extraordinary support by ethnic voters!
White voters are practically evenly divided. Some are Democrats, some are Republican and some are Independent. President Obama and other Democrats must have huge support among Black and ethnic voters to win.
In Massachusetts, some Black voters that did cast ballots for the Democratic candidate said they didn’t like the candidate but felt a Democrat would be supportive of Barack Obama’s legislative proposals.
In other words, just like in many elections, those Blacks that supported the Democrat were merely voting for the lesser of two political evils, so to speak.
Oftentimes, the winner of elections is usually the candidates that work the hardest. The loser in Massachusetts that was once ahead by about 30 percentage points in the polls, thought that she was a shoe in and didn’t have to campaign much at all.
She didn’t knock on many doors, didn’t make many appearances in critical precincts and neighborhoods and Lord knows that she didn’t hire the consultants that could motivate and influence Massachusetts voters.
History is the best teacher. If you’re running for office in 2010 and do the same thing that Democrats did in Massachusetts, God knows you’ll get the same results.
If you don’t know, I’ll tell you. Republicans will hire whoever they think will help them win. Color doesn’t matter, race doesn’t matter and political affiliation doesn’t even matter.
Black people voted for Barack Obama. They didn’t turn out in record breaking numbers for Democrats. If Obama had not run, perhaps Blacks could have been motivated to vote for someone such as Colin Powell or maybe even Jesse Jackson again.
For Democrats to be successful in November, they must respect Black voters, patronize and hire Black political professionals, spend money with Black newspapers and other media outlets and have a campaign that addresses issues of concern to Black voters.
We like health care but we like jobs and money more. We’d like to end wars but we’d like to save our homes more.
Satan is tricky. Political candidates and political issues change but the political devils remain the same.
We are not going to vote for you in large numbers just because you’re a Democrat. We won’t even vote for you just because you’re a boot licking, handkerchief headed Negro.
