Correcting Michael Barone
Is never an easy task, but one small part of
this column is just plain wrong.
Take black Americans, the most heavily Democratic constituency -- 88 percent to 11 percent for John Kerry in the 2004 NEP exit poll. Blacks have been voting for Democratic presidential candidates by similar margins since 1964, when Republican Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act.
In fact, Blacks have been voting for Democratic presidential candidates by those margins since the days of FDR; there is a long passage in
The Making of the President: 1960 that remarks on Black voting patterns and notes that they had traditionally been Republicans right up until the Depression, and that it was the advent of welfare that caused them to switch allegiance.
Here's a snippet from the book:
Time was, forty years ago [i.e. 1920] when Negroes voted solidly Republican out of gratitude for Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. ("I remember," once said Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "when I was young in Kansas City, the kids threw rocks at Negroes on our street who dared to vote Democratic."). But Franklin D. Roosevelt changed that. Under Roosevelt, government came to mean social security, relief, strong unions, unemployment compensation. ("Let Jesus lead me and welfare feed me" was a Negro depression chant.) And, like a heaving-off of ancient habit, as the Negro moved north he moved onto the Democratic voting rolls.
