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A majority of black voters in Broward & Miami-Dade counties stayed home on Election Day

Black voters opted out on Election Day in Broward

Only 1 in 3 went to the polls, analysis shows

By Linda Kleindienst, Jeremy Milarsky and Gregory Lewis

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

November 11, 2006

A majority of black voters in Broward and Miami-Dade counties stayed home on Election Day, a key factor in the loss of Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Jim Davis.

Of the 1.2 million registered black voters in Florida, 273,188 live in Miami-Dade and 168,474 live in Broward. They are predominantly Democratic and those who did vote favored Davis over Republican Charlie Crist by huge margins.

In Broward County, black-majority precincts supported Davis over Crist 88 to 10. In Miami-Dade, it was 88 to 11. Numbers for Palm Beach County weren't made available in time for this report.

But a South Florida Sun-Sentinel precinct analysis shows only one in three black voters in Broward and Miami-Dade went to the polls. It was a worse turnout than the 2002 governor's race, a fact some attribute to a lack of spending and outreach in the black community -- and a Republican ad campaign that criticized Davis as having a weak civil rights record.

Coming off a bruising primary, Davis picked Daryl Jones as his running mate. In part, he hoped the black former state senator from Miami could energize South Florida's bastion of Democratic voters heading into a general election battle against the better-known and better-funded Crist. He also hoped to mend a rift with black voters from the primary, when all but a handful of South Florida black-majority precincts voted for Davis' Democratic opponent, Rod Smith.

Jones campaigned in predominantly Caribbean neighborhoods like Lauderhill and Little Haiti, said Carolyn Thompson of the Caribbean Power Vote, which is part of a national Democratic voting mobilization effort. He and Davis spent many Sundays worshiping in black churches and meeting with black leaders in South Florida. Their message focused on themes that resound in the black community -- more funding for schools, less emphasis on the FCAT, lower property taxes and property insurance rates, and automatic restoration of civil rights for felons who complete their sentences. But Thompson said that message didn't reach its audience; a lack of money and time kept the Democratic team from buying ads on Caribbean media and blanketing working class black neighborhoods.

"Our people are working two and three jobs," she said. "They get their information from the radio...the last day [of the campaign] we were in Jamaican and Haitian neighborhoods telling people who Jim Davis and Daryl Jones were and they didn't know."

While Broward precincts averaged a 44 percent turnout, it dropped to 34.5 percent in black-majority precincts.

"There's a correlation between spending and getting out votes," said U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Miramar, who donated $5,000 to the Broward Democratic Party's get-out-the-vote effort.

Crist -- who outspent Davis by at least 3-to-1 -- ran the most expensive campaign in the nation, raising nearly $20 million on his own. He also was the biggest beneficiary of spending by the Republican Party of Florida: $42 million in the last two months alone.

"If you gave us $50 million we could have run a pretty good turnout operation," said Karl Koch, Davis' chief of staff and top political adviser.

Davis lost to Crist by nearly 340,000 votes out of more than 4.8 million cast.

Still, getting a 34 percent turnout in Broward's black-majority precincts without a strong effort "should be credited rather than disparaged," Hastings said. "Will blacks come out in 2008? Yes, because there will be a substantial ground operation."

The countywide average turnout in Miami-Dade's precincts was 38 percent, compared with 33 percent in black majority precincts.

That's a major drop from the 2002 election, the last time a governor's race was on the ballot, when black precincts averaged a 42 percent turnout in Miami-Dade and 36 percent in Broward.

In the 2000 presidential election, black turnout statewide was a record 72 percent -- with 93 percent voting Democrat.

Besides poor outreach by the Democrats, black voters may have had lingering resentment over Davis' vote in 1990 to deny compensation two black Miami men who spent 12 years behind bars for a murder they did not commit. The vote became a flashpoint during the Democratic primary, when an anti-Davis campaign funded primarily by U.S. Sugar sent a series of mailers to black voters reminding them of Freddie Lee Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who were pardoned in the mid-1970s but waited until 1998 for state compensation.

Davis publicly apologized to Pitts and Lee after the primary and both endorsed him, but Broward Democratic Party chairman Mitch Ceasar said the damage had been done.

State Sen. Mandy Dawson, D-Fort Lauderdale, who broke ranks with her party and supported Crist for governor, criticized Democrats for not talking about issues relevant to black voters.

"Jim Davis' campaign to the black community was based on an apology," she said. "There is no savior coming for the African-American community. It will have to save itself by getting involved and getting cohesive."

Ceasar said the Democratic Party statewide and nationally needs to spend an extensive amount of time and effort in reaching out to African-American and Caribbean voters before the next election cycle. Black voters represent one out of every four of the state's 4.2 million registered Democrats.

"No group should be taken for granted, and this group least of all," he said.

Staff writer Alva James-Johnson contributed to this report.

Linda Kleindienst can be reached at lkleindienst@sun-sentinel.com or 850-224-6214.