Two Weeks Out, 32% of Blacks Still Undecided in Philly's Mayor's Race

I want to be sure to point out, at the very outset, that I really do like Mike Nutter. In fact, the two of us actually graduated from the same high school--many years apart, but the same school.

On the other hand, I am a bit concerned that the combination of last week's Pennsylvanians for Effective Government(PEG) poll results and Sunday's Inquirer endorsement was presented in mainstream media as some sort of electoral "inevitability of Mike Nutter." I'm also wondering how such grand conclusions can be drawn when the PEG poll, itself, revealed that 32 percent of Philadelphia's African-American electorate is still "undecided," with two weeks left until "E-Day."

When you realize that African Americans constitute 61 percent of registered Democrats in the City, and that even PEG's leading candidate(Knox) only attracts 20 percent of the overall vote, currently, it's clear that this election will turn on how the numerically superior black electorate performs on May 15.

At the same time, with their blinders tightly affixed, the City's major dailies continue to sing the song that white and black voters, at least in this enlightened election, simply want "the same things," and that such a circumstance paves the way for a cross-over-fueled, Election Day victory for either Knox or Nutter. In its editorial endorsement of Nutter, for example, the Inquirer used a set of desired candidate characteristics that would seem to require a suspension of the laws of politics, especially for any of the candidates that would rely on votes from some of the City's more depressed neighborhoods. In making its case for the Nutter endorsement, the paper said that voters want "a mayor of the whole city, someone who won't just cater to his base, who won't pit neighborhoods vs. Center City."

Sounds like a good idea, but I'm hard-pressed to recall any recent Philadelphia mayor, other than John Street, who didn't "cater to his base." Rendell's base was clearly Center City; Rizzo's base included the Italian Community, the Northeast and the Police Department; Bill Green's base was Irish, Catholic, the River Wards and parts of the Northeast; Jim Tate's base was strikingly similar to Bill Green's. They all "catered," and the media never criticized them for it--not ever. In fact, their support in those areas was interpreted as a strength, a critical component of an effective city-wide election strategy. But now that African Americans represent the majority of Democratic voters, all of those rules seem to have changed.

In a strange companion piece to its Sunday editorial, the Inquirer's political beat writer, Tom Fitzgerald, went out of his way to try to prove that there is no difference between white and black voters, citing the Keystone Poll's Terry Madonna, who said: "...whites and blacks perceive the City to have the same problems so you don't have any racially divisive issues."

Is it true that the City doesn't still have "racially divisive issues" or is it, instead, just true that no one is talking about those issues, or talking about why they're important to the survival and maturation of the black community and to the City, itself? With black businesses participating in less than one percent of public sector and private sector contracts, with a commensurate 50 percent black male, functional unemployment rate, with blacks representing a disproportionately high percentage of local prison system inmates, with black children representing 70 percent of the enrollment at the City's performance-challenged public schools, with the term "dangerous neighborhoods" used as short-hand by mayoral candidates for black communities, there really do seem to be some issues in our City's black communities that require direct and supportive attention.

Those who may still be a bit confused as to why Mr. Nutter is having a tough time catching on with black voters need only to review the reasons the Inquirer gave for endorsing him. They included his "knack for pushing good ideas up the steep hill they have to climb at a venal, complacent City Hall." It's also interesting to note that Mike's greatest achievements, according to the paper, included fighting "chronic corruptions at City Hall, " campaign finance reform, the smoking ban, controls on pay-to-play and the creation of a board of ethics. While it's hard to find fault with any of those agenda items, it's commonly understood that these things were all of the Inquirer's favorite ideas, anyway, and none had any special relevance to the challenges faced by the City's black neighborhoods.

While we're on that subject, the Inquirer should be especially ashamed that its Sunday editorial writer casually dismissed Chaka Fattah's platform issue of "eliminating poverty" as something that "isn't really within a mayor's reach." With much of the City's poverty rate focused in black neighborhoods, that was harshly dismissive of a significant percentage of Philadelphia's families and, also, dead wrong.

Getting back to Mike Nutter, he has, for better or worse, always been very supportive of the Inquirer's editorial board agenda; perhaps that's why, even previous to Sunday's endorsement, the Inquirer has generally been so supportive of him. With that steady run of positive coverage, it's no wonder that Nutter(at 29%) outpolled even Knox (24%) and Brady(14%) among white voters in the PEG poll.

As I mentioned earlier, looming out there on the horizon, over the next two weeks, is the potential of an additional 67,000 black voters who have yet to select a candidate(projecting a 45% turnout of the still 148,000 black "undecideds"). By the way, those voters, according to PEG, place Nutter in a "most unfavorable statistical dead heat" with Bob Brady, at 24 percent and 25 percent "unfavorable," respectively. Unless Mike Nutter can quickly begin to resonate with black voters, either Fattah, who is PEG's leading, current, black vote-getter, at 23 percent, or Knox, who is the second preference for blacks, at 15 percent, could leverage that vote into a Primary Day victory.

According to the same Tom Fitzgerald article, "Around St. Patrick's Day weekend, orange and green 'Tom Knox, Irish Catholic' signs sprouted along the median of Roosevelt Boulevard." In my opinion, that was Candidate Knox simply reaching out to his ethnic base, and the local media, appropriately, saw nothing sinister about it.

A word to the wise: Philadelphia's black voters are still open to the same kind of direct appeal that Knox has already made to his fellow-Irishmen and that Bob Brady makes every, single day to his base in the skilled trades unions.

No matter what local media outlets want to believe, those kinds of appeals have always been an entirely appropriate way for political outreach to be done. It's a shame that the City's African-American mayoral candidates haven't figured that out.

No wonder Philadelphia's black voters are having so much difficulty making a decision.



######