Hillary Clinton was never going to inspire the level of black turnout and Democratic percentage inspired by Barack Obama, the first black president, in 2008 and 2012. The national exit poll shows that blacks were 12 percent of the electorate in 2016, compared with 13 percent in 2012, and that their Democratic percentage margin dropped an 87-point victory in 2012 to 80 points in 2016.
Those numbers are necessarily imprecise, but they suggest that the net Democratic popular vote margin slipped by about 1.5 percent of the total electorate. That is roughly equal to the decline of the total Democratic popular vote margin between those two elections.
The black turnout decline may have been decisive in two states which were, to the surprise of most electoral strategists and analysts, carried by Donald Trump — Michigan and Wisconsin. In Michigan, the state Trump carried by the smallest percentage margin, the New York Times’ crack election analyst Nate Cohn notes that between 2012 and 2016, total voter turnout in 82-percent-black Detroit fell by 14 percent. He also noted that Detroit’s population has been declining, and added, “It’s hard to know just how much of this is lower black turnout instead of black population decline — the census can struggle to make population estimates in places with a declining population — but turnout certainly dropped faster than the reported population decline.”
Let’s look at the data.
The following table shows the population of Detroit according to the 2000 and 2010 Census counts and the 2015 Census Bureau estimates. It also shows the total population of other cities and townships in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties with populations that are 40 percent or more black. These jurisdictions (Ecorse, Highland Park, Hamtramck, Inkster and River Rouge in Wayne County; Lathrup Village, Oak Park, Pontiac, Royal Oak township and Southfield in Oakland County; Mount Clemens in Macomb County) include the large majority of black residents of the three-county area.
| 2000 | 2010 | 2015 | |
| Detroit | 951,270 | 713,777 | 677,116 |
| Others | 293,572 | 260,364 | 260,330 |
Note the large population loss in Detroit in 2000-10 and the continuing loss of population. Some of this loss is accounted for by movement to other places in these three counties — but not much. There has been significant net population outflow from Michigan, and from these three counties, during this entire period.
Voter turnout from these areas increased between 2000 and 2004, the four-year period during which turnout increased by the largest percentage nationwide in the last quarter-century, and again but to a lesser extent, again in line with the national pattern, between 2004 and 2008. But it peaked in 2008, as the table below shows, and has declined since.
| 2000 | 2004 | 2008 | 2012 | 2016 | |
| Detroit | 300,500 | 325,691 | 335,826 | 288,663 | 247,357 |
| Others | 106,358 | 120,381 | 126,356 | 120,489 | 115,297 |
What’s interesting here is that the sharp turnout drop in Detroit began in 2012 and continued in 2016; in both years turnout was down 14 percent from the previous election. There was only a minor turnout drop of 5 percent in each of the presidential years in the 40-percent-plus-black suburban communities, whose residents are more likely to be well-established individuals with families and jobs.
It’s notable that voter turnout in Detroit did not decline during most of the 2000-10 decade when population declined. Voter turnout rose by 35,326 between 2000 and 2008 while population declined by 237,493 between 2000 and 2010. The decline in Detroit’s voter turnout since 2008 was much sharper than the population decline indicated by the 2015 Census estimate. However, Nate Cohn’s caution about Census estimates is in order. Population-losing cities have contested and even litigated the Census Bureau’s annual population estimates, since they stand to lose money under federal and state aid formulas when their populations decline. There’s a non-trivial chance that Detroit is losing more population than the Census estimate indicates.
What seems likely is that black populations are declining in cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and St. Louis, not just in the central cities but in the entire metropolitan areas. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been criticized for not maximizing turnout in these overwhelmingly Democratic areas, but there simply is no way, short of election fraud, to turn out people who are no longer there.
There has been a net migration of black Americans from the North to the South — a reversal, of very much smaller magnitude, of the surge of migration that saw one-third of black Americans move from South to North in the 25 years from 1940 to 1965. That has negative political consequences for the Democratic Party in the North. If turnout in Detroit had been as high in 2016 as it had been in 2008, Hillary Clinton would have carried Michigan’s 16 electoral votes.
But the increasing black population in metro Atlanta’s eastern, southern and western suburbs has increased Democrats’ chances of carrying Georgia’s 16 electoral votes — not enough for Clinton to win there, but perhaps for a Democratic presidential nominee in the future. Georgia Republicans who don’t want this to happen should perhaps contact the newcomers and make the case that they shouldn’t vote for the liberal policies of the places they chose to leave behind.
