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.

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.

Following the first debate between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, talk show host Bill Moyers said: "Romney was widely lauded as the winner of the first presidential debate. The loser, many agreed, was the truth..."

Both men clashed at the University of Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 3, offering their prescriptions on domestic and economic issues before moderator Jim Lehrer.

Jill Sheppard-Davenport, and her husband Lee, joined more than 100 people at a debate watch party at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Northwest.

"I enjoyed watching it and definitely approved of Obama's concentration on substance," said Sheppard-Davenport, a mental health specialist who has lived in the District for two years. "Romney engaged the audience but I got a little frustrated because it's not easy to look at a guy and say the things he did wrong, but I heard a lot more of that from Romney than what he would do going forward."

Conservative commentator and talk show host Armstrong Williams and Steve Walker, deputy national political director of the Democratic National Committee, who engaged in a mini-debate before the telecast, summarized the strong points of the candidates and explained what each needed to do to be deemed successful.

Read more at The Washington Informer.

When then-candidate Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, a lot of the credit went to the eye-popping 76 percent turnout rate among African-American voters.

Virginia, too, saw its large share of black voters help put Mr. Obama over the top in a state that hadn’t supported a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson. The results revived Democrats’ hopes for a new Southern strategy and for a new coalition between traditional black voters and progressive newcomers to the growing knowledge economies of northern Virginia and the Raleigh-Greensboro-Charlotte triangle.

But in these two Southern swing states, some polling and anecdotal evidence is giving rise to Democratic concerns that African-American enthusiasm for President Obama has slipped as a result of stubborn economic despair, deteriorating inner city conditions, a sense among voters that Obama no longer needs the black vote to win, and disagreements over social issues, including the president’s embrace of same-sex marriage. Heightening those concerns is the recognition by campaign strategists and analysts that, to win reelection, Obama likely needs to get close to the 65 percent of black voters who turned out in 2008 to vote in 2012.

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Black support for Obama could be seen in a California snap poll taken by SurveyUSA shortly after Wednesday’s first presidential debate, in which everybody surveyed but African-Americans thought Mitt Romney won.

Moreover, in this election, voting for Obama is less about racial pride and more about policy – particularly that Republican policies hold fewer specific rewards or distinct promises for the black community, suggests David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, in an interview with the Tennesseean newspaper in Nashville.

“African-Americans are still facing a lot of hardships,” he told the paper. “But Republicans are offering nothing more than the same of what they had under George Bush, and what they had under George Bush was hard times – with no promise of things getting better.”


Read more at Yahoo! News.

While pundits and Obama supporters were moaning Thursday morning about how Mitt Romney gained momentum by aggressively going after the president in their first debate, fact-checkers were busy sorting out the truth from half-truth from outright inaccuracies.

Romney, it appears, certainly had more swagger, but Obama had stronger command of the facts.

The Republican nominee rejected parts of his own tax plan, denying he intended to increase tax breaks only for the rich. He also failed to respond with details when asked where he would get the money from to cut taxes for all Americans, increase defense spending and not increase the deficit.

His quick answer was he would put more Americans to work in better paying jobs, which would mean more people paying taxes, which would help close the gap.

Romney’s advisers before the debate essentially told him to stick with jabbing the president, tagging Obama with the still struggling aspects of the economy and not get mired down in the details. Leave the policy wonk patter to Obama and appeal to emotion.

Clearly, the plan worked, at least for a night.
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In an interview last month, David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said that Obama and the Democrats had not done a good job of making clear how the Romney plan would hurt Americans, especially the poor and people of color, even during Obama’s acceptance of the Democratic Party’s nomination at this year’s convention.

The Democrats, Bositis said, did a terrible job, “including Obama—his worst performance is not talking about how much he’s done…”

Read more at the Atlanta Black Star.

On a hip-hop radio station in northeast Ohio, a swing state where turnout among black voters may decide the presidential election, listeners are being exhorted to vote this year — not just for a candidate, but to send a message.

“There are forces at work that don’t want you to vote,” intones an ad produced by the station that mentions no parties or candidates, “and will do anything they can to make it difficult for you to vote. You’re stronger, you’re smarter than that.”

Those “forces,” in the eyes of many minority voters in Ohio and other battleground states, are Republican state legislators who have sought to limit early voting and impose voter identification requirements — moves widely seen as an effort to tamp down turnout by African-Americans.

In Ohio, that effort has mostly failed, with many new restrictions either overturned by the courts or hastily repealed by the Legislature itself in the face of popular uproar. But in the process, Republican legislators seem to have handed a powerful rallying cry to those seeking to maximize minority-voter turnout.

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“The fact that the Republicans are trying to keep black people from voting is only going to want to make them want to vote more,” said David A. Bositis, an analyst of minority voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.

Read more at The Boston Globe.

Fresh from a controversial NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll which stated that Mitt Romney will receive 0% of the Black vote, the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies followed up with its own poll of the Republican National Convention Attendees.

The report discovered that there were  47 African Americans who were part of convention delegates at the 2012 Republican National Convention which just wrapped in Tampa, Florida. That number amounts to  2.1 percent of total delegates.

Although it seems like a stark miniscule amount, in actuality, it represents a jump in Black representation compared to the last convention.

Read more at Politic365.

Deidra Reese isn't waiting for people to come to her to find out whether they are registered to vote.

With iPad in hand, Reese is going to community centers, homes and churches in nine Ohio cities, looking up registrations to make sure voters have proper ID and everything else they need to cast ballots on Election Day.

"We are not going to give back one single inch. We have fought too long and too hard," said Reese, 45, coordinator of the Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Reese is part of a cadre of black women engaged in a revived wave of voting rights advocacy four years after the historic election of the nation's first black president. Provoked by voting law changes in various states, they have decided to help voters navigate the system — a fitting role, they say, given that black women had the highest turnout of any group of voters in 2008.

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African-American women, who number about 20 million in the U.S., have long been the largest group of Democratic voters in the country, said David Bositis, senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at ABC News.

While New Orleans has Mardi Gras, Tampa has Gasparilla and New York City owns New Year’s Eve, Washingtonians like to make their parties political, and few come bigger than tonight’s debate-watching festivities all around D.C.

The National Press Club is hosting a party at its headquarters downtown, just two blocks from the White House, starting with the debate at 9 p.m. Nearby, George Washington University College Democrats and College Republicans will watch together at a joint viewing party on campus. Speaking of joint events, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies parties at 805 15th Street NW. The Woman’s National Democratic Club and the Congressional Black Associates, the Urban League, Madyun Group and Cheeky Sasso Entertainment and Marketing Group are also hosting debate parties in the District tonight.

Read more at Bloomberg.

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and its President and CEO, Ralph B. Everett, Esq., will hold a presidential debate watch at the Joint Center offices on Wednesday, October 3, 2012 at 8 PM. Join us for an evening of enlightening political discussion and a viewing of President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney’s debate on domestic policy.

Read more at Politic365.