Election Watch: Will African-American voters decide the election?

As the 2006 mid-term elections near and races tighten, each party is now focused on turnout: making sure their base of committed supporters get to the polls and vote.

Republicans continue to face doubts about whether their core voters, white conservative Christians, are motivated for election day. But Democrats are also concerned about turnout of their party's most reliable constituency, African-American voters, who could well make the difference in Southern states like Florida, Tennessee and Virginia, as well as contests in Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It's not that black voters are likely to vote Republican. In a recent AP-AOL Black Voices poll, 89% of black respondents said they were unhappy with George Bush and 83% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job. More than 80% think the Iraq war was a mistake and the failed response to Hurricane Katrina cemented disenchantment. As the AP story leads, "So much for the Republican charm offensive toward minorities."

Even when African-American voters agree with Republicans on the issues, a Reuters story today points out that they've still tended to remain loyal to Democrats on election day:

Even black voters who support the death penalty, oppose gay marriage and abortion and consider themselves religious activists generally resist conservative Republicans in favor of Democrats who led the civil rights struggle that guaranteed them the vote more than four decades ago.

The last two weeks of the campaign have only helped Democrats, with racial controversies surrounding such high-profile GOP candidates as senate candidates Bob Corker and George Allen undermining GOP overtures to cross race lines. As columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee argues on Black America Web:

[The racially-coded ads against Harold Ford in Tennessee] ought to bug the hell out of black GOPers. Because while Democrats may take the black vote for granted, unlike Republicans, they rarely, if ever, stoop to exploit racial prejudices to get votes when the going gets tough.

The question is whether these controversies will quell or merely deepen what New York Times reporter Ian Urbina described as "disillusionment" among African-American voters:

For Democrats ... black voter turnout will be crucial on Election Day. But despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally, there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans.

"This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we're having to go out of our way to counter them this year," said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist. [...]

Democrats' worries are backed up by a Pew Research Center Pew Research Center report that found that blacks were twice as likely now than they were in 2004 to say they had little or no confidence in the voting system, rising to 29 percent from 15 percent.

As a result, Democrats plan to boost the presence of lawyers and other voter advocates at the polls, much as Republicans have in recent elections through "voter integrity" monitoring. But such efforts demand precious resources and potential trade-offs, as the Times points out:

Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University and author of "Stealing Democracy: the New Politics of Voter Suppression," said the threat of voter suppression presented difficult strategic decisions.

"Voter suppression is a real threat," Mr. Overton said, "but Democrats can't invest so much into voter protection that they don't have adequate resources to turn out their voters to the polls in the first place."