By the numbers 
The electoral racial divide 
By Asa Gordon
D.C. Statehood Green Party

In point of fact, white men are already in convention against us in various ways and at many important points. The practical construction of American life is a convention against us. Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may. Examples are painfully abundant. 
-Frederick Douglass, 1883

	Asa Gordon

Such practices were painfully abundant in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Gore won the 2000 popular vote by virtue of the black vote; Kerry won the 2004 Electoral College by virtue of the black vote. They both won the presidency under the Constitution, but they failed to win the white vote. In the end, they lost the election because they both acquiesced in the suppression of the black vote. The Democratic presidential ticket in both elections (with the honorable exception of John Edwards) made the same racial choice: a presidency won by allowing black votes to prevail over the clear choice of white voters was not worth having. They knew, as all of us, that if they had chosen to do so, the "liberal media" would have led the charge that they were "playing the race card" in order to win.

All the national media polls on the presidential race for 2004 deliberately masked the nation's racial divide. The obscurantism in the reported presidential polls is, at best, subliminally racist. The national pre-election polls that reported a near statistical dead heat in the presidential race belied the under-reported fact that it was so only because of the nonwhite population. In particular, African-Americans accounted for the purported near 50/50 split among American voters. For white America as a whole, the presidential race was not close, and indeed this was the case for black America as well. 

For Al Gore, John Kerry and the Supreme Court, the best interest of the country was represented by the majority will of the white electorate, not by a constitutional election that ultimately reflected the political aspirations of a nonwhite minority electorate. In 2000, Bush represented the majority choice of the white electorate, but not the national electorate. CNN exit polls reported that Gore edged out Bush by just over a half-million popular votes, a difference that represented only one-half of 1 percent of the total votes cast nationally. However, the close national vote obscured the wide racial chasm in the popular votes cast. The CNN polls reported that 54 percent of the national white vote was cast for Bush, with 42 percent cast for Gore. The margin was even more pronounced in the votes cast by white males, with a ratio of 60 percent to 36 percent in favor of Bush. Blacks, on the other hand, cast 90 percent of their votes for Gore and only 9 percent for Bush. Thus, the Supreme Court was faced with deciding an election that pitted the overwhelming political aspirations of African-American voters against the expressed will of a solid majority of white Americans.

In 2004, every pre-election poll taken demonstrated that a majority of the white population who supported Bush held false beliefs about the war in Iraq. Richard Cohen reported on a poll showing that "72 percent of Bush's supporters believe Iraq did in fact possess weapons of mass destruction, and 75 percent believed Hussein gave al-Qaeda 'substantial support.' These beliefs are false, in contradiction of the facts, and even Bush, when pressed, has admitted that" ("Hold Bush Accountable," Washington Post, Oct. 28, 2004).

A Washington Post/ABC News poll reported that "African-Americans are far more likely to oppose the war than white Americans…. Sixty-one percent of African-Americans…said they opposed 'the United States having gone to war with Iraq,' compared with 20 percent of white Americans who answered the poll…. Overall, 72 percent of Americans said they support military action" ("For blacks, the war is another divide; African-Americans oppose the conflict more than whites do, polling finds," Washington Post, March 25, 2003). The polls establish that the majority of white Americans are impervious to factual contradictions and place a perceived threat to "their" security above any realistic threat to the nation. The nonwhite population as a whole does not share this irrational fear. Thus national polls present to Americans and the world at large a false representation of the nation's consensus. The polls mask the racial divide. It is not because white Americans are in the main uninformed. They are presented with the same propaganda as the nation's minorities. 

The irrational fear of the loss of white privilege trumps logic among all classes of the white electorate. The Republican Party appeals to white nationalism move scores of working-class whites to vote against their clear economic interest, while they sacrifice their youth on behalf of a class they naïvely believe they will soon join. The Democratic Party makes vain appeals, in denial of a neo-confederate culture that undermines their ambivalent accommodationist messages. Only the Green Party shows promise of having inherited the interracial progressive legacy of the transforming abolitionist movement. The Greens are the only party since reconstruction to call for national legislation to enforce the citizens' right to vote, as established in the 14th Amendment, Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution. They call for legislation that would override the Supreme Court's ruling that no guaranteed right to vote exists in national elections (Bush v. Gore, 2000). 

Democratic and Republican officials are generally unresponsive to citizens' pleas for enforcement of Section 2. During the Dec. 8 forum on voting irregularities in Ohio in the 2004 national election, Rep. Conyers (D-Mich.) declared, in response to an inquiry as to why the voting rights remedy in Section 2 had never been applied, "I do not have an exact comment as to why we haven't used it in the past." Informed of my civil action to enforce Section 2, as highlighted in a congressional research report, Conyers asked, "Could you make sure that we get the benefit of this historic lawsuit to our members so that we may take it under consideration?"

The electoral racial divide is the fruition of a historical legacy of sustained willful denial by a consensus of white America. For African-Americans it is "the practical construction of American life."

Asa Gordon is executive director of the Douglass Institute of Government and chair of the DCSGP-Electoral College Task Force. Contact him at electorsus@aol.com or www.electors.us. 

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