Farai Chideya at FiveThirtyEight smartly addresses the question of why Bernie Sanders ran so much better among blacks in Michigan than she had in the South. On Tuesday Mississippi blacks voted about 88 percent for Hillary Clinton while a significantly different 65 percent did so in Michigan. Chideya wrote:
“[B]lack Americans have a variety of regional narratives that have shaped and will continue to shape the voting in the Democratic race. In the South, due to massive voter suppression before the civil rights era, there developed strong community mechanisms (often tied to institutions including churches) to mobilize voters once the civil rights acts were passed. Northern black voters had different voting patterns — more ability to vote earlier, historically; and different mechanisms of mobilization. But I also think the poisoned water and governance debacle in Flint has provided a backdrop for Sanders that resonates with Northern and Midwestern voters. I also wonder — but do not know — whether less Southern-style faith-community political mobilization means that television advertising will have more of an impact on black voters in the North and East.”
I addressed this question in a blog post yesterday, but Chideya alludes to a difference between Northern and Southern blacks which I thought of but didn’t include. I suspected that Southern blacks tend to be more socially connected, especially through churches, than Northern blacks.
Chideya, who I am sure knows more about this subject than I do, seems to take the same view. Northern blacks who almost all live in big metropolitan areas may be less likely to be active church members than Southern blacks, who live in rural and small town areas as well as larger metropolitan areas.
Older Michigan blacks may have a certain amount of social connectedness as members of unions — the United Auto Workers, teacher and other public employee union. But younger blacks are less likely to be union members, since the Detroit Three auto companies and the Michigan public sector haven’t been doing much hiring for the past decade.
People with strong social connectedness tend to vote similarly: consider the high Republican percentages in general elections among white evangelicals and Mormons. If there’s something to this idea, Hillary Clinton may well not equal the percentages she won among black voters in the Northern states to come — and after Tuesday, the only Southern states left to vote are Kentucky and West Virginia, both with lower black percentages of population than the national average.
