Can Clinton Rally Obama's Coalition?
"She needs black voter turnout in 2016 in order to win," said TownHall.com editor Katie Pavlich on anchor Gregg Jarrett's Fox News program. "And the way that she's going to do that is by perpetuating this bogus, race-baiting narrative that somehow voter ID laws disenfranchise minority voters."
Actually, that narrative is not so bogus. A report released last fall by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, on voter ID laws in Kansas and Tennessee found a dip in 2012 election turnout of about 2 percent points in Kansas and between 2.2 and 3.2 percent in Tennessee. As the Demoratic lawmakers who called for the probe suspected, the GAO found the declines to be greater among younger and African-American voters.
That's not a huge percentage but certainly big enough to have a significant impact in close elections. Yet the perception of minority voter suppression in itself is believed to have contributed to a surge in the nationwide black turnout rate in 2012 that, for the first time, exceeded the white turnout rate.
A big looming question: How much have black voters gotten over hard feelings left over from Clinton's long-running primary battle against Obama in 2008? A lot of people have long memories, especially in politics.
Another question: Are Obama's core supporters so disenchanted over what he was unable to accomplish against his strong Republican opposition that they won't bother to vote this time?
That's always possible. But here, too, Clinton has hope. She undoubtedly hopes that that her political adversaries overreact harshly enough to remind her base that things always could be worse. A lot worse.
========
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
