In 2011, as Illinois politicians redrew congressional district maps, they exercised a power grab that was intended to protect those already in office or even gain more seats for Democrats.

Officials split some of the state's growing Latino population between districts already represented by Democrats and those where they hoped to see Republicans lose. An incumbent Democrat like former Chicago-area Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. was supposed to have little problem holding a seat that for three decades has been held by an African-American. But in 2011, no one knew then that Jackson would spend a portion his term in seclusion trying to manage a mental illness. And no one knew that, after winning reelection earlier this month, Jackson would resign amid allegations of misappropriated campaign funds.

Now, with Jackson out and Illinois set to stage a special election in February, Jackson’s former district could end up being represented by a white Democrat from Chicago’s suburbs. And for the crowded field of mostly black candidates that have expressed interest in Jackson’s old job, winning support of Latino voters and at least a smattering of white voters may be the key to victory.

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In the 1970s and 80s, political power struggles flared in cities around the country as whites decamped to the suburbs, said David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Minority voters were frequently divided among crowded fields of black candidates, leaving room for well-financed white candidates often backed by conservative business interests to win by narrow majorities, Bositis said.

That’s a pattern that dominated elections in cities like St. Louis for decades, according to Bositis. In the 1980s and 1990s, the number of black elected officials peaked in cities like Los Angeles. Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, cities like Baltimore and Gary, Ind. -- a city which was then about 90 percent black -- began to elect more liberal white politicians with substantial support from black voters. Black officeholders had to work harder to appeal to white liberals and, in the Dallas and Los Angeles areas, even fought to have them drawn into their once overwhelmingly black districts. Now, the growing presence of Latinos will likely spur a new political resort that begins with more politicians courting Latino voters and may later lead to an increase in Latino officeholders, Bositis said.

"But in a lot of places that’s still a ways off," Bositis said. "It’s not just about population numbers. Its also about age."

Read more at The Huffington Post.

When Timothy M. Kaine took his message of bipartisanship to the crowd gathered at the Virginia NAACP’s annual convention, the crowd nodded in agreement as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate criticized an obstructionist Congress working against the country’s first black president.

“Watching people decide they would like to proclaim [that] their success would be making the president not successful, I just decided to get in and run,” Kaine told the audience last month. “I do know how to work together with all kinds of people.”

Kaine spoke to the crowd for nearly half an hour in his opponent’s absence, although both candidates were invited.

The following day, GOP candidate George Allen showed up at the convention in Fredericksburg, working the crowd at a sit-down dinner.

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“Reaching out to African Americans, especially in the days when African Americans were having a hard time here . . . that was like a moral imperative for him,” said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “He’s one of the politicians in Virginia who African Americans just really, genuinely like.”



Read more at The Washington Post.

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.

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.

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.

While advocates of voter identification laws say the goal is to prevent fraud at the polls, Rep. Elijah Cummings insists that what is really at work is voter suppression during a campaign that promises to be a tighter than ever race for the presidency.

“As many as one in four African-American voters, more than one in six Hispanic voters, and about one in ten eligible voters overall do not possess a current and valid government-issued photo ID,” wrote Cummings in a press release Sept. 18, citing a NYU School of Law Brennan Center for Justice analysis of a voter rights bill he co-introduced with 13 House of Representatives members.

The bill, introduced as the America Votes Act of 2012 by Cummings and Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), targets the drive spearheaded by Republican opponents of President Obama to require voters to produce government issued identification at the time votes are cast.

Read more at The Afro.

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.