Two months before President Barack Obama won re-election, Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele embarked on a damage control tour to assure Pennsylvania voters that the Republican-controlled Legislature really wasn't out to suppress anyone's vote, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Too many folks, apparently, had taken too literally House Republican Leader Mike Turzai's quip that the state's voter ID law was "going to allow Gov. [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."
"We are doing the most aggressive public relations campaign this state has ever seen, to both educate the voters on the election in November and then to make sure they know about photo ID," Ms. Aichele said during a visit to Chartiers Valley High School.
"The message is -- if you care about this country, vote. I'm expecting -- and it would please me to no end if we had -- the biggest voter turnout we've ever had in Pennsylvania," Ms. Aichele said.
It was the kind of hope that stunk of the Corbett administration's usual Pollyanna. Left unexplained by the former math teacher was how a voter ID law considered by many to be one of the most draconian in the nation could possibly result in a larger voter turnout in Pennsylvania.
Fast forward eight months to a headline in The New York Times this week: "For First Time on Record, Black Voting Rate Outpaced Rate for Whites in 2012."
It turns out that Ms. Aichele was on to something, although she couldn't possibly have known that when she made her prediction. It was Republican orthodoxy at the time that black turnout for 2012 would be much smaller than it was in 2008.
Conservative pundits assured the party faithful that black voter disenchantment was widespread and that Mr. Obama's support for gay marriage would further depress enthusiasm among older, more religious blacks who never miss an election. What the pundits never counted on was the level of indignation that voter ID laws would generate, especially among citizens who have a collective memory of what voter disenfranchisement felt like not too long ago.
No one predicted a record African-American voter turnout in 2012. Even the most optimistic Democratic partisan would've been happy with a rate identical to 2008. Republicans were predicting a turnout closer to that of 2004, if not earlier. They were confidently telling each other that 2008 was a fluke and that 2010 was a better indicator of what would happen in 2012.
No one predicted that black turnout nationally would reach 66.2 percent in 2012, compared to 64.1 percent for non-Hispanic whites. On the contrary, we all expected hundreds of thousands of voters to "disappear" from the rolls of key states.
It was concern about the fairness of the election that prompted so many African-Americans to turn out in record numbers in the states that allow early voting and stand in line -- all day, if necessary -- in states that didn't. That's what happens when people get mad and expect the worst. They wanted to see for themselves how far the architects of voter ID laws were willing to take their politically opportunistic assault on the democratic process.
When all of the votes were tallied, 1.8 million more blacks turned out in 2012 than in 2008. Black women led the charge, but black men weren't that far behind. Middle-aged and older blacks voted the most. And as many conservative commentators have pointed out, 90 percent of them voted for President Obama, which may explain why the outreach to blacks by the GOP in the last election cycle was minimal or non-existent.
Ignoring the black vote was a self-fulfilling prophecy by a party that ironically claims to be colorblind. Blacks may represent the highest voting rate in America as of 2012, but it doesn't make us any more visible or relevant to the GOP than we were a decade ago.
There's also the very strange phenomenon of 2 million missing white voters in 2012, compared to 2008. The nation's overall turnout rate dropped to 61.8 percent from 63.6 in 2008. The new political orthodoxy is that having Mr. Obama on the ticket energized the black vote, but expect that to go away once the next white Democrat is nominated for president.
That's a stunningly clueless bit of analysis and wishful thinking. If nothing else, Mr. Obama has taught black Americans -- and everyone else -- that we all have a stake in the system and that the only way to maintain a seat at the table is to pull up a chair and vote.
In two weeks, we'll see how many blacks will factor in this city's future by voting.
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