Tweet
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
With last year’s presidential election, pundits speculated that the United States had entered a post-racial political age. In Atlanta, voters — black and white – overwhelmingly chose Barack Obama for president.
But there was nothing post-racial about Tuesday.
When it comes to choosing a mayor, race remains the key predictor of how Atlantans’ will cast their ballots.
Black candidate Kasim Reed appears to have won Tuesday’s runoff election against white candidate Mary Norwood by only about 700 votes — maybe less – out of more than 83,564 votes cast. Reed has declared victory but Norwood has said she will ask for a recount. The election was the closest a white candidate has come since 1973 to becoming the chief executive of Georgia’s largest city.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Tuesday’s election shows votes were cast sharply along racial lines, splitting the city into the white north side and the black south side even more clearly than in the general election Nov. 3</span>. This pattern appears to have crossed class lines, with voters in wealthier and poorer sections all voting for the candidate who shared their skin color.
Reed appears to have won a thin victory because of an intense get-out-the-vote effort in black areas, as well as his ability to gain the support of many voters who previously backed City Council President Lisa Borders, who is also black. After coming in third in the general election, Borders endorsed Reed.
This summer, Reed told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “In a tough political campaign, inches matter.”&#8232;This election proved the point. At Reed’s victory rally Tuesday night, the largely black crowd cheered when it was announced he had won.
<span style="font-weight: bold">One supporter shouted “We did it! We did it!,” then paused and added, “But man, this thing was scary.”</span>
In his victory speech, Reed said the city must unite now to tackle crime, budget issues and other problems.
“This campaign now is really about the future of this city,” he said.
But voting patterns showed one of the closest mayoral runoffs in the Atlanta’s history was influenced by the past and by long-standing racial divisions among its neighborhoods. More than 56 percent of Reed’s votes came from predominantly black districts. About 15.6 percent of his votes came from predominantly white districts. The rest came from mixed districts. The reverse was true for Norwood. Sixty-two percent of her vote came from white districts and 14.5 percent of her vote came from black districts. These percentages roughly mirror the November general election, but Norwood’s turnout dropped slightly in black districts.
For example, the 11th district, on the city’s southwest side, is overwhelmingly black and the area Reed considers his political base. In the general election, 8,723 people voted, with Reed getting 5,116 votes, Norwood getting 1,801, and Borders getting 1,454. In the runoff Tuesday, 9,346 people voted — a 7 percent increase. Almost all of it went to Reed while Norwood’s vote total out of that district shrank by about 90 votes.
<span style="font-weight: bold">Norwood did well in predominantly white districts, in some cases better than she had done in the general election. In the white and wealthy district 8, on Atlanta’s northwest side, she received 8,959 votes in November, but 10,703 votes on Dec. 1.</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">Alton Hornsby Jr. , a history professor at Morehouse College who has written on race and politics in Atlanta for decades, said Tuesday’s election showed “Obama’s election last year was more of a fluke than any indication we are getting closer to post-racialism.”</span>
Hornsby said race has dominated Atlanta politics for decades, since even before Maynard Jackson’s contentious victory in 1973. After Atlanta became a majority-black city, black candidates always won. In recent years, Atlanta’s population grew to a record of more than 500,000, according to census estimates. Much of that growth came from white people moving into the city. According to census estimates, Atlanta’s black population dropped from 61 percent to 57 percent from 2000 to 2007. The white population increased from 33 percent to 38 percent. This year, the white voting bloc surged and came within reach of victory, according to Emory political science professor Michael Owens.
“The lid has been lifted off the truth that was already there,” he said.
Hornsby said Norwood’s strategy was a good one: produce large turnouts from white districts and try to win just enough votes from black districts to take the city. Reed’s opposite strategy just worked a little better this time.
<span style="font-weight: bold">“What it forbodes is that as close as this race was, if the white voting population increases even by a few percentage points, the next mayor is likely to be white,” </span>he said.
Comment