U.S.-ELECTIONS: Blacks, Latinos, Asians Face Mixed Fortunes

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Nov 7 1996 (IPS) - The 1996 election year — dominated by advertisements that deplored black welfare recipients, Mexican immigrants, and Asian fundraisers — has ended with a sigh of relief from much of the country’s minority population.

Following the 1994 elections, in what was dubbed “the year of the angry white male”, Tuesday’s vote was undramatic, with most African American and Latino members of the House of Representatives securing new two-year terms.

“Congress is going to be a much more moderate body,” predicted Lisa Navarrete, spokeswoman for the National Coalition for La Raza, a Latino affairs group. “We may mitigate the assault on our community over the past two years,” since Republicans first seized both houses of Congress, she added.

There were also a few dramatic firsts. Democrat Julia Carson became the first African American woman to be elected to Congress from Indiana when she defeated State Senator Virginia Blankenbaker.

Gary Locke, a Democrat of Chinese descent, won the race to become Washington’s governor, and the first Asian governor of any of the 48 states on the U.S. mainland (the other two are Hawaii and Alaska).

Locke’s victory was all the more remarkable given the Western United States’ history of Chinese discrimination, as well as political and media attacks on Asian-American fundraisers, including dismissed Democratic campaign aide John Huang, in recent weeks.

But the election also marked a new reversal for minorities with the passage in California, the largest state, of Proposition 209, an initiative that would allow all public institutions to disregard race or gender in hiring decisions. The measure, opposed by President Bill Clinton, won support from 55 percent of California voters.

According to a CBS poll, Proposition 209 won over 77 percent of white voters, compared to only 6 percent of black and 10 percent of Latino voters.

Even in California, though, the voters who turned out for the initiative didn’t prevent Clinton’s victory in the state, noted Robert Borosage, former political aide to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. “Affirmative action didn’t turn out to be the ‘wedge issue’ that they thought it would be, but it won, unforunately,” he said.

Navarrete said that Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole tried to use the Proposition 209 and anti-immigration drives in California to win the state, but failed. Nor did race play a decisive role in most Congressional races, she contended.

One of the more significant results, in fact, was the ability of African American incumbents to hold Congressional seats even after a Supreme Court decision that redrew several voting districts which had previously had sizable black populations, argued Joe Beasley, southern regional coordinator for the National Rainbow Coalition.

The Supreme Court decision deemed that voting districts had to be “compact” and could not have race as the deciding factor in their composition — thus disallowing several odd-shaped, winding districts in the South which gathered together parcels of black voters.

The black-majority districts had increased the number of black representatives in the House to 45 by 1992, and some analysts had feared that the redrawn districts would supplant those incumbents with conservative whites.

Black and Latino representation did in fact decline slightly, with several incumbents, including Louisiana Democrat Cleo Fields, resigning rather than fighting in new, white-majority districts. But two black Georgians — Democrats Cynthia McKinney and Sanford Bishop — prevailed in districts that were only one- third African American to win new terms on Tuesday.

“The victories buck the trend,” Beasley said. “Historically, white voters don’t vote for African Americans…It might signal a new day here (in the South).”

McKinney was able to stave off an attack from Republican John Mitnick even despite a controversy over the past few days when Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, visited Georgia.

Despite outrage from Jewish voters over Farrakhan’s trip and subsequent comments by McKinney’s father that the candidate herself called “anti-Semitic”, the incumbent managed to hold together a coalition of white and black women that secured her victory, Beasley argued.

Bishop, a former Rainbow Coalition delegate when the Rev. Jesse Jackson founded the organisation a decade ago, adopted a more conservative line, including support for Clinton’s cutting of federal welfare benefits, that also won him white voters. Beasley said that, by seizing the “good old boy agenda,” Bishop proved that he “would represent farmers the way they want to be represented.”

Not all African American candidates won over a broad coalition of blacks, working class whites and women in the way that McKinney and Bishop did. Democrat Harvey Gantt lost his second consecutive bid to unseat rightist Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina when he secured only some 30 percent of the white vote.

Similarly, Mexican-American schoolteacher Edward Morales, despite a strong Latino turnout in Texas, could not draw white voters away from Republican Senator Phil Gramm.

In many Southern states, Beasley contended, “the Democratic Party is still a racist institution.” As a result, he added, white Democrats still often prefer white Republicans to minority candidates — a factor which has strengthened Republican control of the region.

However, black voters turned out to support some white Democrats, notably in Louisiana, where 91 percent of the African American vote went to Mary Landrieu, who won a Senate race against Republican Woody Jenkins. Clinton also reaped gains from non-white voters, winning some 90 percent of the black vote and 70 percent of the Latino vote, according to several exit polls.

Ironically, one of the two black Republicans in Congress, Connecticut Representative Gary Franks, lost his race when a multi- racial coalition with strong union support backed white Democrat James Maloney.

The American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) gave Franks a paltry rating of 8 percent on union issues, and noted he voted with House Speaker Newt Gingrich 90 percent of the time. Franks claimed he had been hit by “the worst personal smear campaign of anyone in Congress.”