Good points!
African American and immigrant voters are indeed increasingly
a voting block to be reckoned with in the suburbs and even rural
areas. And in outstate Minnesota and even South Dakota the first
american's vote goes almost entirely to democrats also, and is often
the margin of victory for democratics candidadates like Congresswoman
Herseth of South Dakota.
I've done a lot of get out the vote work in Hawthorne and
other ethnic diversity rich inner city neighborhoods. Comparing the
census data with voter turnout, I find even saturation get out the
vote efforts like we did for the general election of 2004 still leave
us with a wide gap between the census count of voting age population
and voter turnout.
Why? First off, here in the Northside we have lost a lot of
population since the 2000 census. Then we have the sad results of the
felony criminalization of drug addiction and street level drug
dealing- in Hennipen county as a whole about 25% of African American
men are serving some sort of criminal sentence, and IIRC in Jordan
that number reportedly exceeds 50%. Worse yet, many off these folks
don't know that once they have served there sentences they can vote.
The other source of disappearing voters is the slowness of the
citizenship process, thusly by the time immigrants become citizens
they've often already fled Minneapolis for the suburbs and beyond. It
is also notable that the groups with traditionally higher voter
turnout, seniors, fled Hawthorne and other inner city neighborhoods
in the 1990s and that trend continues.
So with minorities, immigrants, and the original Americans
fleeing Minneapolis to become political power blocks in the suburbs
and beyond, Minneapolis' power at the legislature and in congress
continues to diminish.
getting out what's left of the vote in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
I have often said that many of the African American voters who care to vote
have moved to the suburbs. Although I have not seen any surveys of surburban
black voters, I did find this section of the new City Pages election post
mortem interesting.
Bill Dooley (Kenny)
"All that aside, the most diminished political force this year may be the
African American voter. The turnout this year in traditionally black
precincts
was markedly lower than in recent years, in both the primary and the general
elections. Gerrymandering of districts is only part of the reason the
southside Eighth Ward will have its first white representative in many years;
residents of the ward's core black neighborhoods simply didn't turn
out to vote in
the September primary, costing African American candidate Jeff Hayden a place
on the November ballot.
In the Fifth Ward, general election turnout was also low, and the council's
lone African American rep, Natalie Johnson Lee, was trounced by Don Samuels.
(Samuels is black, but it should be noted that he takes care to identify
himself as a Jamaican immigrant.) Ralph Remington, who is African
American, was
elected in the relatively affluent and white Tenth Ward.
Finally, it's worth noting that some of the perceived distaste for Rybak in
the African American community plays out in this year's results, much as it
did in 2001. Of the city's 131 precincts, McLaughlin only carried 26. All but
five of those, when compared with 2000 U.S. census data, were in
predominantly
nonwhite wards. --G.R. Anderson Jr. "
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