Artur Davis, as the national media likes to point out, failed in his bid to become the first African-American governor of a state in the Deep South, losing last night in the Democratic primary. Of course, before you blame racism for the defeat, you might note that, as Kos points out, Davis lost his own majority-black congressional district. Badly.
However, that is not to say that there is no racial angle in this race. To a very large extent, this election was about Alabama's racial politics, but not about white Southerners who would not vote for a black man. It was about a black politician who shunned his own party's black establishment so brazenly that he destroyed himself.
Davis loss in Alabama a sign of black establishment's clout
In April, Davis announced that he would not seek the endorsements of the state's four main African-American political organizations. Now, the endorsement of the oldest and largest, the Alabama Democratic Conference, was probably never forthcoming. ADC head Joe Reed has long loathed Davis, and the feeling is evidently mutual. Davis' vote against Health Care Reform (and his own constituents' interests) was apparently the last straw.
But the endorsements of the other groups, such as the New South Coalition, might have been available. The NSC announced, when endorsing Sparks, that Davis' refusal to attend the NSC's meeting in April cinched their endorsement of Sparks. The other groups followed suit.
Now, it's still possible that these groups would have endorsed Sparks anyway, although it would have been very difficult for them to not support the first African-American with a reasonable chance of being Alabama governor. (And if he had not run so consistently away from the President -- who I remind you is a personal friend of long standing -- those groups might have gotten a "back off" call from Washington and stayed effectively neutral.) But by shunning these groups, and in his announcement making it clear that he thought their time was past, he did more than secure their endorsements of Sparks. He woke those groups up.
Their influence had been fading. The old Richard Arrington machine in Birmingham has completely lost control in recent years, and now broken in two. Reed had spent most of the last few years feuding with Alabama State University over the school removing his name from a building there. Reed, Arrington, and other leaders are mostly veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, and as such have been active since the sixties, or even the fifties, and are now old men. Davis did not get the support of these groups in 2002 when he unseated Earl Hilliard in the Congressional primary.
But rather than somewhat lukewarm opposition as in 2002, Davis now faced a united, and angry, black political establishment. His snub energized this opposition, and in a low-turnout primary that was largely overshadowed by the fireworks on the Republican side, they were the only people who were energized.
I did not tour a lot of polling places yesterday. But from what I saw, I can tell a few things. One is that turnout was lower, far lower, than in the 2008 Presidential primary. I work next to a polling place in an African-American neighborhood in Tuscaloosa, and there was hardly any traffic. (One African-American I spoke with yesterday did not know that the election was that day -- who has an election the day after Memorial Day?) The other is that there was basically no public support for Davis. Sparks supporters, almost all of them African-American and likely ADC or NSC members, were everywhere. I saw no Davis campaign workers anywhere. In an election basically devoid of enthusiasm -- despite the historic nature of what Davis was trying to accomplish -- basically the only people who were enthusiastic were African-American political activists who were primarily motivated by the chance to work against an African-American congressman.
The HCR vote damaged Davis, and coming out in favor of HCR helped Sparks. Netroots support for Sparks did probably help a little. But essentially, this triumph belongs less to Sparks than it does to the veterans of Alabama's black politics, who showed that there's a little fight left in the old lions yet. And if the Republicans continue their infighting (and we don't yet know who will face Bradley Byrne in the runoff election, and may not know for weeks, with the runoff set for just six weeks from now) an enthusiastic African-American political establishment might yet carry a Democrat to the governor's mansion in 2010.
But it won't be Artur Davis.