Over the last few weeks or so I’ve read several stories claiming that, due to their more socially conservative and religious background, African-American voters may have a problem with voting for Pete Buttigieg in a general election.
Even the New York Times ran a piece re. this (providing nothing more than anecdotes as evidence):
www.nytimes.com/…
Now, I like looking at poll crosstabs, and I saw something really interesting in the Atlanta Journal Constitution poll of Georgia that was released today.
Here’s the poll below:
www.ajc.com/…
And the crosstabs:
ajc-isabetai.s3.amazonaws.com/…
The poll had good news for Democrats in that all of our main candidates appear to be leading Trump in the state:
- Biden 51%, Trump 43%
- Sanders 48%, Trump 44%
- Warren 47%, Trump 44%
- Buttigieg 46%, Trump 43%
- Harris 45%, Trump 44%
What stood out to me, though, were the numbers of how each individual Democratic candidate performed against Trump among African-American voters. You can examine the crosstabs yourself, but in summary, the numbers below indicate the percentage Trump would receive in Georgia among black voters against each Democrat listed :
against Biden 7.1%
against Sanders 7.7%
against Warren 8.7%
against Buttigieg 10.0%
against Harris 10.0%
The numbers for the last two Democrats, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, jumped out at me …
Yes, it appears it’s the same number for Buttigieg, who’s gay and for Harris, who is the only black candidate polled here. Furthermore, the exact breakdown among black voters in Georgia is:
Pete Buttigieg 76.5% — Donald Trump 10.0%
Kamala Harris 76.7% — Donald Trump 10.0%
And, if we want to go down even further into the weeds, the raw vote counts are:
Pete Buttigieg 237 — Donald Trump 31
Kamala Harris 237 — Donald Trump 31
Exactly the same ! (The slight difference in the percentage numbers is because the “don’t know/undecided” raw numbers are ever so slightly different; also, please keep in mind that the overall number of undecided voters is higher for the less “high-profile” candidates like Buttigieg versus, for example, Joe Biden in this poll.)
So, imho, a pretty clear and unambiguous repudiation of the proposition that black voters have any sort of problem voting for Pete Buttigieg in a general election (and keep in mind, with this poll we’re looking not just at African-American voters, but southern African-American voters at that).