Republicans are already gloating about the elections coming this fall. With Joe Biden lagging in the polls, Trump’s Big Lie rousing the Republican base, inflation distracting from the remarkable jobs recovery, Democrats look to be in trouble. Much can change in the months left before the election — and one central question is whether increased registration and voting among African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans will begin to turn more districts and more states blue, particularly those in the South.
Here Georgia provides the model. In Georgia, a remarkable 95 percent of eligible voting-age citizens are registered to vote. This is primarily the result of the state deciding to automatically register citizens when they obtain their driver’s license. (There are, sadly, still more than 250,000 citizens, disproportionately people of color, who are barred from voting because they are incarcerated or on parole or felony probation.)
In Georgia, over two-thirds of voting-age citizens cast a ballot in the presidential election of 2020. Voter participation was up across lines of race and education. Over 60 percent of eligible people of color voted. That turnout was due, in no small part, to the year-round organizing that came out of the Stacey Abrams Georgia Project during and after her run for governor in 2018. The project mobilized efforts to reach voters in their homes, educate them about how to vote and what is at stake, and helped turn their vote out for the election.
Can that energy and program be replicated in other states where Black, Latino, and Asian American voters can make a difference? Consider in Arkansas, less than 43 percent of eligible people of color cast ballots in 2020 (that was down from 52.9 percent in 2016). That compared to over 51 percent of non-college white voters casting ballots and nearly 72 percent of college-educated white voters. Arkansas has the lowest turnout of any state in the union, and not by accident. As Janine Parry, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, noted: “Arkansas for 200 years has designed a system to produce low voter turnout, and that system has worked exactly as designed.” Similar disparities were seen in South Carolina, where 52 percent of eligible people of color cast ballots in 2020 — down from 63 percent in 2016 and elsewhere across the South.
You can write to the Rev. Jesse Jackson in care of this newspaper or by email at jjackson@rainbowpush.org. Follow him on Twitter @RevJJackson.
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