Tag Archives: African-American

Countering the Record

By Jim Ellis — Thursday, May 18, 2023

Elections

Jacksonville, Fla., former local news anchor Donna Deegan (D).

The media is covering Tuesday’s elections — particularly in Jacksonville, Fla. and Colorado Springs, Colo. — as Democratic or liberal upsets, but much more exists below the political surface that the analysts are either ignoring or missing.

To recap, Democratic former local news anchor Donna Deegan scored a 52-48 percent victory over Republican Chamber of Commerce CEO Daniel Davis. The media analysts portrayed the race as an upset since the Republicans held the Jacksonville mayor’s office for the past eight years in the person of term-limited incumbent Lenny Curry.

In actuality, the upset was Curry winning the past two elections, and not Deegan scoring this most recent victory. Though the Republicans now have a 400,000-plus person voter registration advantage statewide in Florida, Democrats considerably outnumber Republicans, by approximately five percentage points, within Jacksonville.

Additionally, the combined minority population in the city, led by the African-American contingent at 31 percent, now comprise a slight majority. Considering that Democrats do much better than Republicans within these communities, a victory for them in the citywide mayor’s race is less than surprising.

Furthermore, Deegan did not emphasize typical Democratic themes in her communication points. Rather, she issued detailed plans on infrastructure, affordable housing, downtown redevelopment, emergency health service, and creating a plan for attracting further state and federal aid for local projects. Therefore, her broad-based plan was more comprehensive and sellable than her Republican opponent’s approach.

In Colorado Springs, Independent candidate Yemi Mobolade, easily defeated Republican former Secretary of State Wayne Williams. Though Mobolade grew up in the socialist country of Nigeria, his campaign talking points were hardly based upon those values.

Mobolade is the city’s Small Business Development administrator who emphasized business, community and leadership development, entrepreneurship, and ministry in his successful mayoral campaign. His was not a left of center message, and though Republicans lost this mayoral race, it was not a liberal who won.

Philadelphia’s Democratic mayoral primary ended much differently than polling projected. Though the data consistently showed as many as five candidates having a chance to win the primary, the final result proved decisive. Former Philadelphia City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker captured the party nomination in rather easy fashion, a 33-23-22-11-9 percent margin over former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, ex-City Councilmember Helen Gym, former City Councilman Allan Domb, and businessman Jeff Brown.

All of the politicians are “formers” because Philadelphia has a resign-to-run ordinance in effect for city officials. Therefore, in order to seek a different office than the one held an official must resign before declaring a new candidacy.

In Philadelphia, the analysis coverage was not necessarily miscast, but a key point was glanced over. That is, the candidate furthest to the left and the one who drew the most support from the vocal progressive left movement, which included endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), was former City Councilwoman Helen Gym. In what is a liberal city, Gym fared poorly, attracting only 21 percent of the vote in what was for her, a disappointing third-place finish.

The winner, Parker, campaigned much differently — as a centrist who said she wants to “stop the sense of lawlessness that is plaguing our city.” She pushed the themes of increasing law enforcement and cracking down on the city’s rapidly rising crime rate. Likely as a result, she attracted much of the Philadelphia political establishment’s support. Term-limited Mayor Jim Kenney (D), while not formally endorsing anyone in the race, admitted to the local media that he cast his own ballot for Parker.

While Republicans lost mayoral elections in two cities they had controlled for the past eight years, the reasons leading to victories for those who won on Tuesday night appear beyond the typical ideological paradigm. As in most elections, success rewarded the candidate(s) whose messages best met the voters’ needs. Once again, we see that this is the lesson future candidates need to understand.

Monday’s Retirement

California Rep. Ed Royce (R-Yorba Linda/Fullerton) | Facebook

California Rep. Ed Royce (R-Yorba Linda/Fullerton) | Facebook

By Jim Ellis

Jan. 10, 2018 — It’s getting to the point where literally every day we witness a new retirement announcement from Congress, and Monday was no exception.

In another surprise political decision, veteran California Rep. Ed Royce (R-Yorba Linda/Fullerton), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed that he will not seek a 14th term this year, preferring to dedicate his last year in Congress to finishing his committee agenda.

The move was unexpected in that Royce appeared to be preparing his political operation for a major battle. Reportedly through the year-end financial disclosure period, he already amassed a treasury exceeding $3.5 million. Until this week, his actions suggested that he was well equipped to run a strong re-election campaign.

Unlike most of the other 31 Republican seats that are being vacated for the next election, Royce’s California district has strong Democratic conversion potential. The constituency voted 51-43 percent for Hillary Clinton, but backed Mitt Romney 51-47 percent in 2012, and gave John McCain a 49-47 percent margin four years earlier. The Romney and McCain votes are more consistent with the district electorate’s long-term political performance history, but this area of the state, like many regions in the nation’s most populous domain, is turning more Democratic as significant demographic change continues.

Continue reading

Odd-Year Election Recap;
Louisiana Governor’s Poll

Nov. 6, 2015 — Looking beyond the vote tallies in Tuesday night’s odd-year election we find that at least two voting patterns reappeared. First, we again see, as has been the case since the beginning of this century, that Republicans have a clear advantage in low-turnout elections while the Democrats do much better when participation factors are higher.

This same situation was evident in the pre-Reagan era of the 60s and 70s, but changed after the 1980 election. During the 80s and some of the 90s, it was Republicans who generally performed better when turnouts went higher.

In Kentucky, for example, Republican Matt Bevin scored a surprising 53-44 percent victory and, even though voter turnout increased by more than 150,000 people when compared to the last gubernatorial contest of four years ago, the participation rate was only 30.4 percent. Tuesday, just under 975,000 voters cast ballots in the race for governor. By contrast, the 2012 Kentucky presidential vote reached near the 1.8 million range, a turnout percentage closer to 60 percent of the registered voter universe for that particular election.

We also saw Republicans perform well in Virginia, where they held their majorities in both the state Senate and House of Delegates, losing no seats. The Mississippi races went heavily Republican with Gov. Phil Bryant (R) scoring a 67 percent re-election victory, the GOP taking most of the statewide races, and gaining a net one seat on the entire state legislative scorecard, within an aggregate of 174 (52 Senate seats; 122 House districts) electoral contests.

Continue reading

CNN Poll: Hillary Cruising
… Well, Not Really

July 6, 2015 — CNN/Opinion Research Corporation (ORC International) released their new monthly poll just before the Independence Day break, and the data detects major improvements for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but the polling methodology is largely the reason for the gains.

The CNN/ORC polls traditionally begin with surveying all adults, and then drill down to isolate registered voters. This has the effect of reducing the sampling pool well below 1,000 national respondents. They again do so in this poll.

During the period of June 26-28, a group of 1,017 adults from across the US was randomly selected. Of those, 890 were registered voters.
Continue reading >

IL-2 Special on Schedule – Sort Of

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) has set the special election to replace resigned Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL-2) for a Feb. 26 primary followed by a March 19 special general election, but the latter date will likely move. Illinois law requires a vacancy to be filled within 155 days of a vacancy occurring.

Quinn’s schedule falls within the current law’s parameters, but with local and municipal elections already scheduled for April 9, a move will be made to consolidate the two voting periods, per the request of local officials. Instead of asking a court to waive the legal requirements as first thought, Quinn will simply ask the legislature upon convening in January to change the special election law with an urgency clause. Such action will give him authority to move the special general election to April 9.

Since this is a heavily Democratic seat, the special general is irrelevant. What does matter is the Democratic primary, and that will stay on Feb. 26, since the municipal nominating contests are also that day.

Already, three candidates have announced their intentions to run. Former Rep. Debbie Halvorson (D-IL-11), who challenged Rep. Jackson in the 2012 Democratic primary, officially joined the race over the weekend. Quickly following her public move was Chicago Alderman Anthony Beale along with state Senator-elect Napoleon Harris. All three are Democrats.

Many more candidates are expected to file before the end of December. Though the district is more than 62 percent African-American, Halvorson hopes a crowded field with no run-off election will allow her to coalesce the minority white vote around her and overtake the majority African-American vote, which will be fractured among multiple contenders. Halvorson scored just under 24 percent against Jackson in March of this year, meaning that she has at least a small base from which to begin this campaign.