Martin O'Malley Needs Black Votes to Win in 2016.
he headline on the front page of The Washington Post’s September 15, 1999, late edition was startlingly politically incorrect: “White Man Gets Mayoral Nomination in Baltimore.” Martin O’Malley had defeated two African-American candidates, and thanks to Baltimore’s heavily Democratic makeup (roughly 90 percent of registered voters), he went on to become the rare white mayor of a majority-black city.
The headline provoked an outcry, and the Post quickly rewrote it, apologizing for having “distorted the role of race in the election.” Perhaps it did, but that headline continues to define O’Malley’s career as a politician who knows how to get black votes. After all, he attracted nearly a third of Baltimore’s black voters that year and a sizable majority of them four years later. After his two terms as mayor, O’Malley served two terms as governor of Maryland, beginning in 2007 and ending in January of this year. That state is a good proving ground for a candidate’s ability to garner black support, since it is over 30 percent black, one of the highest concentrations of African-Americans in the country.
With O’Malley now running for president, his success in attracting significant black support might seem a threat to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s presidential front-runner. The former first lady’s struggle thus far to generate much enthusiasm for her candidacy could provide an opening for a dark horse—in which case O’Malley, a former governor running to her left, would be arguably more likely to unify the party than Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Clinton saw what happened in 2008 when she lost the majority of the black vote to Barack Obama, and while the Irish-American, guitar-strumming former mayor’s presidential bid is never going to inspire black voters in the same way as that of the first African-American president, she has to worry that O’Malley might cut into her support there. Clinton was the front-runner eight years ago and knows a stumble is possible. . .
O’Malley backers point to other justice issues where he lined up with the black community, such as restoring voting rights for convicted felons and his effort as governor to abolish Maryland’s death penalty, which Benjamin Jealous, the former president of the NAACP, calls “the institutional extension of lynching.” Jealous says it was brave of O’Malley to take the stand: “Courage in defense of civil rights and human rights has resonance in the black community. Always has, always will.”
The O’Malley campaign plans to unveil an urban agenda in the coming months that, judging by his emphasis thus far, will focus heavily on the economy and inequality. . .
O’Malley has his backers. Even one of his most strenuous critics, The Wire creator David Simon, says if the former Maryland governor were to win the Democratic nomination for president, he'd have Simon's vote, thanks to other liberal policies like abolishing the death penalty and legalizing gay marriage. And given the fidelity of African-Americans to the Democratic Party, O'Malley would no doubt win the majority of their votes versus a Republican opponent.
http://www.newsweek.com/martin-omalley-tries-regain-his-standing-black-voters-win-2016-343346
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