On Tuesday, November 6, 2012,  the economy, unemployment, Big Bird, binders full of women and bayonets will take a backseat to the only poll that maters in electing a president and vice president – ballots cast in the polling booth.

Either way, history will be made on Election Day. Barack Obama will become the first Black president elected to a second term (as well as the first) or Mitt Romney will become the first Mormon elected president of the United States.

Obama is relying on his strong organizing ground game to propel him to victory, a strategy that relies heavily on Blacks, women, labor unions and youth. Romney is relying on high unemployment numbers and a sour economy to clear the path for a victory.

However, David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a progressive public policy think tank in Washington, D.C., doesn’t think that will be enough for the former Massachusetts governor.

 “A lot of White working class union employees, like in Ohio, know that [Romney] is anti-union,” Bositis said. “He opposed the bailout of the auto industry. He and the Republicans opposed extensions of unemployment benefits.”

Read more at The Greene County Democrat.

In Bibb County, Ala., on Tuesday, a Democrat named Walter Sansing was in a race for county commissioner against a Republican named Charles Beasley, who was on the ballot despite the inconvenience of having died several weeks earlier. Mr. Beasley won.

That is what kind of Election Day it was in the South. Elsewhere Republicans may be wailing and gnashing teeth, but in the mid- and Deep South states, they had yet another cycle of unchecked domination.

For the first time since Reconstruction, Republicans took over the Arkansas legislature, and won the state’s last United States House of Representatives seat held by a Democrat. North Carolina elected a Republican governor and took over at least three Congressional seats. The last Democrat in a statewide office in Alabama was defeated. In most Southern states, the margins of victory for Mitt Romney were even larger than the lopsided margins for John McCain four years ago.

“It was kind of weird on Wednesday for Republicans here,” said Jason Tolbert, a conservative blogger and a columnist for The Arkansas News Bureau. His conclusion: “In Arkansas, we’re a right-of-center state in a nation that’s drifting further and further to the left.”

Despite the local victories, Republicans in the South are aware that many of the post-election analyses have found the party’s image problems to be in the approach and the appeals that have led to its near total victory here. Southern Republican politicians continue to cruise smoothly to victory on the votes of white, socially conservative evangelicals. While some leaders have succeeded with a more centrist platform, like Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a large part of the Southern electorate still rewards politicians who promise to crack down hard on criminals and illegal immigrants, assume a defiant tone when speaking about the federal government and dismiss the idea of gay rights out of hand.

Nationally, this approach has been putting up diminishing returns.

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“If the Republicans don’t adapt and the Democrats become the dominant party, the government is going to start imposing policies on the Southern states,” said David A. Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at The New York Times.

Dr. David Bositis discusses the role of the African American vote in the 2012 presidential election and what the outcome means for minority communities at a forum on November 7, 2012.

This video can be found on C-SPAN.

The American people have decided that President Obama should be given another term in office to continue leading the nation toward economic recovery and expanded opportunity for all. Amid the rancor of the 2012 campaign, an electorate that was focused on the economy – and presented with two starkly different visions for fixing it – chose to support the President’s program aimed at balanced deficit reduction, job growth, health care reform and public investment in education, technology and infrastructure.

While Governor Romney fell short of creating a winning coalition, we commend him and his family for their spirited and enduring commitment to public service and to the very highest ideals of our nation during this hard fought campaign.  We hope and trust that his party will continue its quest to establish a vision and message that will resonate with people of all races and from all segments of society.
 

View the entire press release by clicking the link below.

Join the Joint Center for a post-election forum featuring our senior research associate and political expert Dr. David Bositis on Wednesday, November 7, at the Joint Center offices in Washington, DC. Enjoy a light lunch as we recap the election and discuss what the outcomes mean for communities of color.

Space is limited. Please RSVP to 2012PostElectionEvent@jointcenter.org.

This event will be streamed live on CSPAN. You can also join the discussion on Twitter by following #jcvote12 and @jointcenter.

Marcus J. Coleman, Ph.D., of the Joint Center and Ajay Krishnan Subramaniam of New Light Technologies present their recent research on voter ID laws and their effect on African American voter turnout at this brown-bag luncheon. African American Voter Access: Reduced Opportunity to Political Participation examines conditions in counties in Virginia, Florida, and Pennsylvania using Geographical Information Systems analysis to determine how access to proper identification can be linked to the African American vote.

For more information on this program and his voter access research, please contact Dr. Coleman.

When Americans go to the polls on Nov. 6, support for President Obama will remain virtually unchanged among Black voters, some experts predict.

“I think Black support for Obama would be the same,” according to David Bositis, senior analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on Black issues. He added, “In terms of turnout, 2008 was a record year. But if there’s going to be a difference this year, it’s going to be small.”

The prediction is puzzling to some given the dramatically different voting climates of 2008 and this year.

“There’s no comparison. The climate was much more uplifting in 2008,” Bositis said.

Back then, most Americans were willing to take a chance on a then-unknown candidate who sold them on his vision of hope and change. African Americans were buoyed by racial pride in the nation’s first viable Black candidate.

Read more at The Afro-American.

Before coming of age as a student at Hampton University, Carl Gray was a staunch, frequently lone defender of his conservative values. Ask him to recall a specific time where classmates or friends really challenged or debated him on his politics, he can’t remember one -- because a teacher or administrator always got in the way to defend liberal policies and the fellow students that believed them.

“That in itself was discouraging to know that teachers and professors wouldn't even allow for students to have their own discussions regarding political beliefs,” said Gray. “It was 'My way or the highway' in those classes. You either agree with the liberal philosophy or face the wrath. I often felt that I was being indoctrinated rather than taught. I actually learned more on my own, by reading both sides and making my own conclusion.”

Gray’s story is a common one on historically black college campuses around the country. As terms like "redistricting," "job creation" and "equal opportunity" hover around the culture of African Americans and their vote, a growing number of HBCU students and young alumni are supporting conservative values. It is a counter-cultural revolution in the face of traditional politics championed by black college students, but a throwback to the values that conservative HBCU students and alums say aren’t far from what black colleges have always promoted, and need for future progress.

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The increase of HBCU students and alums identifying as conservative or Republican is consistent with an uptick in black participation within the Republican Party overall.

In an August 2012 study by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the number of black delegates participating in the Republican National Convention increased 20.5 percent from 2008, with 47 delegates comprising 2.1 percent of the total delegation and up from 39 delegates who appeared at the 2008 RNC Convention in Minneapolis.

According to The Joint Center, which has surveyed black Republican participation since 1984, conservative partisanship dropped from nearly 15 percent in 2004 to just over seven percent in the 2008 presidential election.


Read more at The Huffington Post.

After receiving poor marks for his performance in his nationally-televised debate with Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, President Barack Obama received a much-needed boost from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report showing that unemployment fell to 7.8 percent in September, the lowest it has been in nearly four years.

The September report released last week is significant because, unlike in previous months, the rate did not drop because “discouraged workers” dropped out of the labor force.

Not all of the news was encouraging. Even though the unemployment rate for blacks dropped to 13.4 percent in September from 14.1 percent in August, it remained relatively flat for black men (14.2 percent in September vs. 14.3 percent in August).

The unemployment rate for white men decreased from 6.8 in August to 6.6 percent in September. The jobless rate for white women ticked down two-tenths in September to 6.3 percent. Black women saw the biggest decrease in the unemployment rate among adults, falling from 12 percent in August to 10.9 percent in September.

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“It’s a very mixed picture. I wouldn’t say that we’ve turned the corner, but I would say that unemployment rate is down some, but we still have a large amount of people working part-time for economic reasons,” said Wilhemina Leigh, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a public policy think tank.

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For many black men, the same set of circumstances that will prevent them from voting in the November 6 presidential election also block their ability to earn a living wage.

“A felony conviction is like an economic death sentence,” said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

The number and types of jobs are significantly reduced for ex-felons, said Bositis. Even though some companies have special programs to help ex-offenders return to the job market, they can’t keep pace in some southern states where 20 percent of blacks have prior felony convictions.

Read more at The Charlotte Post.

Americans love the tough guy, the guy who kicks butt and takes names, who mops the floor with his opponents, who has the quick one-liners that can shut a conversation down.

It’s why we like Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, action flicks with memorable lines and lots of action. It’s why we love James Bond, the Matrix series and even Star Wars.

It’s why Mitt Romney “won” the debate against Barack Obama, and why many Americans view the former Massachusetts governor as a better leader, even if they don’t agree with his policies.

A Quinnippiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll, showed likely voters in Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin – considered three battleground states – said Romney had gained strength in leadership skills.

“About two-thirds of the voters in each state said Mr. Romney has strong leadership qualities, more than said the same of the president,” The Times reported Thursday on the poll’s results.

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Lest Obama supporters get really nervous, however, there is still good news out there for the president.
 
According to David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, "the odds are still 2-1 for Obama (vs. 3-1 before the debate). The polls today [Thursday] are good for the president and first-time claims for unemployment fell 30,000 last week."
 
So voters can go for the "tough guy" with movie star looks, or they can go for the real thing.


Read more at BlackAmericaWeb.