Democrats Trying to "Get Out the African-American Vote" or KKK?

from CNN

Police are investigating the burning of a black church in Mississippi during which vandals spray-painted "Vote Trump" on an exterior wall.

A 911 call reporting the fire at Hopewell Baptist Church in Greenville came in at about 9:15 p.m. Tuesday, police said. Firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze.

Most of the damage to the 111-year-old church was to the sanctuary, pastor Carilyn Hudson said at a news conference.

"We do believe that God will allow us to build another sanctuary in that same place," she said, though the extent of the damage was unclear.

There were no reports of injuries; no one had been in the building since about 1 p.m. Tuesday, Hudson said.

from the Washington Times

Democrats’ fears are coming true about Hillary Clinton’s limited appeal among blacks, as numbers from early-voting states show the bloc isn’t as fired up for the Democratic nominee as it was for President Obama.

In key battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, early voting patterns show that blacks aren’t casting ballots in the same numbers they did four years ago, when they helped propel Mr. Obama to re-election.

The president is working furiously in the last week of the campaign to spur blacks and young people to vote. At a rally for Mrs. Clinton in North Carolina on Wednesday, he criticized state officials as trying to suppress the black vote and accused Republican nominee Donald Trump of trying to intimidate blacks from voting.

“Donald Trump is calling on his supporters to monitor ‘certain areas,’” Mr. Obama said at the University of North Carolina. “Where are those ‘certain areas’ he’s talking about?”

The problem for Mrs. Clinton is critical in Florida, the biggest battleground prize, where blacks have accounted for 11.58 percent of all early voters this year. University of Florida political scientist Dan Smith reported on his ElectionSmith blog that in 2012, blacks made up 15.83 percent of early voters in Florida.

In North Carolina, black turnout is down 16 percent from four years ago. Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, in Salisbury, North Carolina, said registered Democrats are 4.2 percent behind their same-day total numbers from 2012, while registered Republicans are 4.5 percent ahead of their pace four years ago.

He noted a “steady continuation” of a trend in absentee ballots that bodes ill for Mrs. Clinton in North Carolina: “white voters overperforming their 2012 numbers and black voters underperforming their 2012 numbers.”

Mr. Bitzer said in an interview that the big deficit among black voters has been “slowly chipped away” in the past two days, but it’s still behind the pace of four years ago.

“It is an important part of the Democratic coalition that Secretary Clinton needs,” he said. “I think visits like the president’s to North Carolina send a signal that there’s still work that needs to be done.”

Mr. Obama made his third trip of the campaign Wednesday to North Carolina, a state he won in 2008 but lost in 2012. He called Mr. Trump “somebody who vilifies minorities, vilifies immigrants, vilifies people of the Muslim faith.”

“If you accept the support of Klan sympathizers … then you’ll tolerate that support when you’re in office,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the endorsement of Mr. Trump this week by The Crusader, a publication with KKK ties.

The Trump campaign called The Crusader “repulsive” and said its views “do not represent” Trump supporters.

The president also blasted state officials for having enacted a law that required strict voter ID and cut back on early voting. It was overturned by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July, with a judge calling the Republican-supported measure “one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.”

“They don’t want you to vote,” Mr. Obama said. Mr. Trump “has been getting help from Republican politicians in this state who have been trying to keep you from voting. What’s been going on here in this state has been really troubling. It was one of the worst voter suppression laws in the country, here in North Carolina. Not back in the 1960s — now.”

In an interview earlier in the day with radio host Tom Joyner, Mr. Obama acknowledged that black turnout in early voting states is lagging.

“I’m going to be honest with you right now, because we track, we’ve got early voting, we’ve got all kinds of metrics to see what’s going on, and right now, the Latino vote is up. Overall vote is up,” Mr. Obama said. “But the African-American vote right now is not as solid as it needs to be.”

The radio show has a largely black audience.

North Carolina is a must-win state for Mr. Trump, and early voting among white voters is up about 15 percent from four years ago. The president said black voters must turn out at the polls for Mrs. Clinton the same way they did for him.

“I know that a lot of people in the barber shops and the beauty salons and, you know, in the neighborhoods who are saying to themselves, ‘Well, you know, we love Barack. We especially love Michelle. And so it was exciting and now we’re not excited as much,’” the president told Mr. Joyner.

“You know what? I need everybody to understand that everything we’ve done is dependent on me being able to pass the baton to somebody who believes in the same things that I believe in. So if you really care about my presidency and what we’ve accomplished, then you are going to go and vote,” he said.

A President Trump, he said, would “reverse everything I’ve done over the last eight years.”

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, which tracks black political participation, released a survey Monday showing that an “overwhelming majority” of black voters consider the presidential race “a high-stakes election.”

The report said 75 percent of blacks in Western states consider the election “very important,” compared with 90 percent of blacks in the Midwest, 89 percent in the Northeast and 83 percent in the South. The study didn’t compare those percentages with voter attitudes in the 2012 election.

But the report also noted that Mrs. Clinton “may not be as popular as Barack Obama among black voters.”

“In fact, 67 percent of all black voters described President Obama as someone they like very much, while Clinton garnered this response from only 29 percent of all black voters,” the report said.

Black voters gave Mr. Obama 95 percent support in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012. Given those high levels, Mrs. Clinton’s team has been concerned from the start about how to attain a similar level of support to preserve Mr. Obama’s winning coalition of minorities, women and young voters.

Leaked emails from the personal account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, show that well-connected Democrats have been voicing concern for months about her campaign’s lack of effective outreach to black voters.

Frank White Jr., who raised $2.3 million for Mr. Obama’s reelection four years ago, wrote to Mr. Podesta earlier this year with a warning about black voters.

“I’m hearing the same complaint in political circles that I continue to hear while fundraising. ‘The campaign doesn’t value black folks and takes us for granted,’” Mr. White wrote. “Can I make a suggestion? A black campaign vice chair or senior adviser would go a long way during the primary and send the message that Hillary puts her actions where her mouth is, and actually does appreciate the black vote.”

Mr. Podesta replied, “Right now I think we should do this right after Super Tuesday.”

In February, Clinton campaign official Sara Latham advised Mr. Podesta to reach out to various black leaders, saying “there are five calls that would be extremely helpful.”

The list included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom she said “has declined all of our overtures to publicly endorse” but whose approval ratings in South Carolina, a key primary state, are “through the roof.”

She also asked Mr. Podesta to call former NAACP CEO Ben Jealous (“rumored to publicly support Bernie”), a reference to Mrs. Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.

The campaign also wanted Mr. Podesta to win over Democratic National Committee Black Caucus Chairwoman Virgie Rollins, who was said to be “supportive but wants a higher level touch.”

The fourth black leader on Mr. Podesta’s list was former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume. “He is with us,” but it is worth “a call,” Ms. Latham wrote.

Finally, there was the Rev. Al Sharpton. “We all know about the Rev,” Ms. Latham wrote. “Doubtful he publicly endorses, but I think it’s worth circling back before the meeting and making a direct ask.”

Cui bono?

Black Turnout Falls in Early Voting, Boding Ill for Hillary Clinton

from the NY Times

African-Americans are failing to vote at the robust levels they did four years ago in several states that could help decide the presidential election, creating a vexing problem for Hillary Clinton as she clings to a deteriorating lead over Donald J. Trump with Election Day just a week away.

As tens of millions of Americans cast ballots in what will be the largest-ever mobilization of early voters in a presidential election, the numbers have started to point toward a slump that many Democrats feared might materialize without the nation’s first black president on the ticket.

The reasons for the decline appear to be both political and logistical, with lower voter enthusiasm and newly enacted impediments to voting at play. In North Carolina, where a federal appeals court accused Republicans of an “almost surgical” assault on black turnout and Republican-run election boards curtailed early-voting sites, black turnout is down 16 percent. White turnout, however, is up 15 percent. Democrats are planning an aggressive final push, including a visit by President Obama to the state on Wednesday.

But in Florida, which extended early voting after long lines left some voters waiting for hours in 2012, African-Americans’ share of the electorate that has gone to the polls in person so far has decreased, to 15 percent today from 25 percent four years ago.

The problems for Democrats do not end there. In Ohio, which also cut back its early voting, voter participation in the heavily Democratic areas near Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo has been down, though the Clinton campaign said it was encouraged by a busy day on Sunday when African-American churches led voter drives across the state.

The disappointing black turnout so far could foreshadow a larger and more intractable problem for Mrs. Clinton and the Democratic Party as they rethink their place in a post-Obama era. One of the biggest uncertainties Democrats have been forced to confront in this election is whether Mr. Obama’s absence from the ticket would depress black enthusiasm, which was at historic levels in 2008 and 2012 and would have been difficult to replicate under even the best of circumstances.

The Clinton campaign believes it can close the gap, especially in North Carolina and Florida, by Election Day. And Democrats are seeing substantial gains in turnout for other key constituencies like Hispanics and college-educated women, which have the potential to more than make up for any drop-off in black voting.

But this election could determine if the Obama-era level of participation among blacks is sustainable. It could also show that the Democratic Party, which has benefited enormously from population shifts that have left the country more diverse, is facing a demographic reckoning of its own.

“We’ve had back-to-back elections in this country of high turnout where black voters have set the pace, and it’s going to be really interesting to see if that continues post-Obama,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster and the author of “A Black Man in the White House,” which draws on his research of voters over the last eight years to examine the Obama phenomenon and the resulting backlash.

“That is the big X-factor,” Mr. Belcher added. “Can we disconnect our mobilization, our messaging from the cult of the candidate?”

Working in Mrs. Clinton’s favor even if her share of the black vote declines is the fact that she has built a political coalition different from Mr. Obama’s. She is counting on an electorate that is more Hispanic and includes more white voters — especially college-educated women — who would have considered voting Republican but are repelled by Mr. Trump.

Marc Farinella, who ran Mr. Obama’s North Carolina campaign in 2008, said it was obvious the level of energy had fallen among African-Americans. But, he added, “I’m not entirely sure it’s completely necessary for her.”

“She’s got other dynamics and advantages that Obama didn’t have,” he said.

In few places are the disadvantages Democrats face more pronounced than in North Carolina. Though a federal court curtailed the Republican-backed law that reduced the number of days of early voting, localities were left to decide how many polling places they would open.

In Guilford County, about an hour’s drive west from the state capital, the population is roughly one-third black. For the first week of in-person early voting there, voters could go only one place to cast a ballot, the Guilford County Courthouse in the county seat, Greensboro. In 2012, there were 16 locations.

The banner headline on the local newspaper, The News & Record, captured the funk: “Ballot Box Blahs,” it said Tuesday. A total of 88,383 ballots were cast in the first 12 days of early voting this year, down from 100,761 in the first 12 days of 2012.

The black vote was also lagging, at 34 percent of the turnout this year, compared with 40 percent in 2012.

Some black voters, like Ronald Brooks, said they simply needed more time to make a decision this year. It was just easier, Mr. Brooks said, in 2008 and 2012, when he had voted for Mr. Obama.

Mr. Brooks, 31, a mental health worker, was still weighing his options on Tuesday morning. He said he was worried about Mrs. Clinton’s trustworthiness, given that she had set up a private email server as secretary of state. “What were you trying to hide?” he said.

His hesitation reflected a generational divide among African-Americans: Older voters have an affection for Mrs. Clinton and her husband, and a fear of Mr. Trump, that many younger voters do not share.

Democrats in North Carolina have been fighting other efforts they believe are intended to disenfranchise blacks. A federal district judge scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning in a suit by the state N.A.A.C.P. charging that at least three North Carolina counties, prompted by Republican challenges, have illegally struck 4,500 residents from voter rolls.

The state N.A.A.C.P. president, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, said the purges were little more than election trickery aimed at disenfranchising legally registered voters. “It’s sickening and disgusting, what is going on,” he said at a news briefing on Tuesday.

Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at Catawba College, said the racial composition of the early-voting electorate in the state so far is off from 2012. White voters make up 72 percent of those who have cast ballots; black voters are 22 percent. In 2012, early voters were 67 percent white and 27 percent black.

Inside the Clinton campaign, crunchtime has begun. Addisu Demissie, the campaign’s national voter outreach and mobilization director, said in an interview on Tuesday that he felt good about where North Carolina stood, given how the election rules had changed. There and in other states like Florida and Ohio, he added, the campaign believes it is in a strong position to leverage its organizational advantage over Mr. Trump.

“We need to continue to work,” Mr. Demissie said. “We know that most people are driven by deadlines,” he added, “and we will see, as we have seen in this campaign at every point, a ramp-up in activity and in engagement from us as the deadline approaches.”

Florida has emerged as another potential soft spot of black support, despite efforts by the state to make it easier for more people to vote early. It added five more days of early voting, plus a sixth on the final Sunday before the election in many of the largest urban areas like Miami.

Yet African-Americans are underperforming their participation rates from 2012. Daniel A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, compared the early voting so far in minority-heavy Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties with that in 2012. He found that of those who have cast ballots this year, 22 percent were black, 40 percent were white and 31 percent were Hispanic. In 2012, the breakdown was 36 percent black, 35 percent white and 23 percent Hispanic.

“If the Clinton campaign doesn’t ramp it up,” Professor Smith said, “Florida will be in doubt.”

Still, Mrs. Clinton maintains a huge organizational advantage, not to mention a likely lead among the people who are now voting in the critical Western battlegrounds of Colorado and Nevada, where Democrats have cast more ballots. And in a sign of how narrow Mr. Trump’s path is, Mrs. Clinton could lose Florida, North Carolina and Ohio and still beat him.

Maryland Early Voting Demographics by County (Thru cob Monday, 10/31/16)

from Maryland Scramble
Data above includes "provisional" ballots.

The machine is getting the Democrats out... but who are the (I)'s turning out for?
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for the most up-to-date Early Voting turnout info from the Maryland State Board of Elections

pps - My counts show that 58.4% of all Early Voters were women and that 70.4% of those Early Voting women were registered Democrats.