In the hours leading up to the first face off between President Obama and his Republican challenger Wednesday night, a primary question was which Mitt Romney would show up. But in the end, analysts and viewers were left wondering: Where was Obama?

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During a viewing party hosted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies that included a largely African-American audience, Obama elicited many positive responses, but in a discussion after the debate, it was clear that they felt that his performance was lackluster.

"He seemed soft," said one attendee.

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With two contests down, and several more to go, all eyes are now on South Carolina, the first state in the GOP presidential nominating race to boast a significant African-American population. And while as in New Hampshire and Iowa, Blacks will play a minimal role, that doesn’t mean that people of color around the nation should ignore what Republicans will be saying as they vie to win the first-in-the-South primary and, ultimately, the GOP nomination.

Rep. James Clyburn, Congress’s highest-ranking African-American, was waiting for frontrunner Mitt Romney’s arrival in his home state on Wednesday. After congratulating him on his New Hampshire primary win, Clyburn said that in South Carolina, “things are a little bit different.”

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David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said that Obama will definitely have to up his game.

“The economy is just starting to pick up and Obama will have to do everything he can to keep it going in that direction,” Bositis said. “If the GOP tries to damage the economy, which it’s perfectly capable of doing, including Romney, and make people suffer if it ups their chances of winning, he has to call them out and make everyone aware of what they’re doing.”


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As a result of a controversial new redistricting map, first-term Rep. Hansen Clarke has announced plans to run in a redrawn district that was for decades represented by Rep. John Conyers, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

According to David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Clarke, who ousted long-serving Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick in 2010, probably has a better chance of winning the now-whiter district than Conyers because the elder statesman may be too vocally liberal and “out there” for its new voters. Conyers told BET.com earlier this month that he was considering running in the 13th district that Clarke currently represents, but has not yet announced a decision.

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Val Demings, the first African-American woman to serve as Orlando, Florida’s police chief, announced this week plans to run for the city’s 8th District congressional seat, now filled by freshman Republican Daniel Webster. She may first have to face off in a primary with the district’s former Rep. Alan Grayson (D), a victim of the voters’ Democratic fatigue during the 2010 midterm elections that gave House Republicans the majority. He also announced plans this week to attempt a return to Washington.

Demings, who served as Orlando police chief from December 2007 to May 2011, when she retired, said in an interview Thursday with WFTV.com, "We're dealing with some tough issues right now, and I want to be a part of developing solutions.” She also guaranteed that she would have the resources to run a competitive race. Demings has already won the support of Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who, the television station reports, “has access to people she will need to raise money.”

Orlando is in a state of transition and, like many cities around the nation, has experienced major population shifts. But instead of Blacks moving out, as has been the case in Chicago and Detroit, the city’s 2010 census shows that the state’s African-American population has surged by 250,000 people in the past 10 years, says David Bositis, senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. The same is true of the area’s Latino population. These shifts could bolster Demings’s chances, because when Florida creates its new redistricting map, the 8th will likely become a majority-minority district. But it’s not yet clear whether it will be majority Black or majority Latino, since the state is still in the early stages of the redistricting process.

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African-Americans have migrated in significant numbers from the urban core to the suburbs and from large metropolitan parts of the North to the South in the past ten years. As states redraw political districts, the impact of their exodus is varied. Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania will each lose congressional seats. Lawmakers in some Republican-controlled states have created redistricting maps that dilute minority voting power by trying to concentrate African-Americans in a contained area so they can influence the outcome in as few districts as possible. In others, minorities claim the lines being drawn don’t accurately reflect the demographic shifts that in a fair process would result in more minority lawmakers.

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As David Bositis, senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told BET.com, “individually they have relatively little influence, but together they can accomplish a lot. And as the population change evolves, “they can in effect become the governing majority.”

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With 99% of precincts reporting, Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Florida) handily won his state’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, beating billionaire opponent Jeff Greene by 57% to 31%.

“Because the people of the state of Florida stood with me tonight through $26 million-plus being spent against us, we made history in this state, because the state of Florida was not for sale, will not be for sale, and we will stand up and continue to deliver,” Meek said Tuesday night.

Greene didn’t enter the race until April, vowing to spend however much of his own money it took to win—and he did. For a while, it seemed like a series of negative ads linking Meek to corrupt Miami businessmen would put Greene over the top. But after running what David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, describes as a “vanity campaign,” Democrats decided that Meek was the more serious candidate.

Read the Full Story at Black Enterprise.

WASHINGTON — This year the United States is experiencing one of the hottest summers on record. Whether that can be attributed to climate change is a question that is being debated. But whatever the reason for extreme weather conditions, whether it is hurricanes or sweltering heat, one thing is certain, researchers say: their impact is greatest on children and other vulnerable populations.

This article was previously available at diverseeducation.com.

WASHINGTON — Single parenthood is never an ideal situation. In African-American communities, it is an epidemic that puts children on a disparate path even before they are born. Studies show that 70 percent of African-American children are born to unmarried mothers and 40 percent of all children, regardless of race, live in homes without fathers. As a nation, the United States ranks 28th among developed countries in infant mortality rates, which is 50 percent higher than the 2010 rate predicted in 2000 of 4.5 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

 The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Commission on Paternal Involvement in Pregnancy Outcomes (CPIPO) released a report this week on fathers’ influence on child health and development. CPIPO aims to improve paternal involvement by “reframing debates and informing research, policy and practice” to encourage and support increased involvement by expectant fathers. Its goals also include identifying barriers that prevent men from being more involved and finding options to overcome them and developing a national media strategy to promote a more active male role. The center, whose research largely focuses on African-Americans and other peoples of color, held a report briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Rhis article was previously available at diverseeducation.com.

African American voters will play an important role in battleground states during the November mid-term elections. Like most other Americans, the economy will significantly influence their ballot choices, but climate change also will be a key consideration.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies released a report Thursday that analyzes African Americans’ opinions on climate change and the midterm elections. The findings are based on four random digit dialing telephone surveys of 500 black voters conducted between Nov. 11 and Dec. 1, 2009, in Arkansas, Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina. The states were chosen because they each will have many closely contested races whose outcome black voters could impact.

This article was previously available at blackenterprise.com.