If you haven’t already gotten yourself a copy of the recent survey results from the PEW Charitable Trust’s Philadelphia Research Initiative, you should run right out and get one, or download a copy from the Internet, right now.
That’s the report whose press release carried the headline: “Mayor Nutter Gets High Marks from Residents.” It goes on to say that Philadelphians are “More optimistic about their city than they have been for some time.“
That’s the survey that informed us on Thursday that Mayor Nutter received his highest approval rating from “whites, people making more than $100,000 and college graduates.”
My problem with the survey is that if Michael Nutter reads the report too quickly, he may get lulled to sleep and miss the most important point that should be drawn from the data, i.e., that the Mayor’s biggest base of support now resides among the people who constitute the smallest percentage of the city’s overall population.
If he just skims the headlines, he may very well miss the part of the story that says that he’s receiving his “lowest ratings,” "...from African Americans, from people making less than $30,000 a year, and from those who are not college graduates."
People with household incomes of $100,000+ think the Mayor’s doing a good job? That’s great, but that constitutes just 60,000 people out of 1.4 million Philadelphians, according to most recent data. In fact, the median household income in Philadelphia is $30,892. Only 15 percent of those with $100,000+ household incomes rated the mayor "unfavorable," as compared to the 24 percent and 25 percent "unfavorable" ratings he received from those in lower income classifications. Maybe people who have $100,000+ household incomes generally don't concern themselves as much about who the mayor is or what the mayor is up to.Maybe they think they can handle their own issues.
The Mayor has strong support among college graduates? That’s wonderful, except that college grads represent just 17.9 percent of our city’s population, leaving 82 percent of the population outside of that pro-Nutter category. The survey says that whites are relatively big Nutter supporters? That’s fine, except that non-Hispanic whites constitute just 39 percent of the city’s population, as compared to the 61 percent represented by blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
I say all of that to say that the Mayor probably shouldn’t see the PEW report as a reason to pop corks in celebration, just yet. No, he should look past the flowery language at the top of the press release and the related news reports, dig down into the numbers, and recognize that he has a great deal of work ahead of him to convince the City’s largest population segments--blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, collectively; people who are not college grads, blue collar workers and low-to-moderate income and poverty -evel households, that he wants to be their mayor, too.
So far, it seems they haven’t been getting that message.
Don’t just take my word for it, listen to Larry Eichel, long-time Inquirer journalist and now the Philadelphia Research Initiative’s executive director, who, in our conversation, agreed that: “It’s a fair reading of the poll to say that the Mayor is more popular among Philadelphians who comprise the smallest segments of the population.”
The fact is that despite Friday’s Inquirer story that said that Nutter received an “A” or “B” grade from 57 percent of whites, but from just 37 percent of blacks, was “consistent with the sort of support that Nutter had when he was elected." Here, we and the Mayor should both recall that he received significant Primary Election support from black voters (and, after all, in the last mayor’s race the Primary was the real election; the general was a foregone conclusion).
Notwithstanding the ongoing efforts by mainstream media to give the impression that white voters carried Nutter into the Mayor’s office and that blacks did not, the reality is that Nutter won 39 of the City’s 66 wards and, of those, 30 were predominantly black wards. By comparison, Nutter won just 8of the City’s 27 predominantly white wards (29.6 percent) and also lost the City’s two predominantly Hispanic wards to Tom Knox. Indeed, despite the Mayor having received support in upscale white wards in Center City and Chestnut Hill, Tom Knox and Bob Brady took virtually every other white ward.
In the City’s 27 predominantly white wards, the candidate with the highest vote tally was Tom Knox (35.2 percent) followed by Nutter (34.2 percent) and Brady (with 23.2 percent). Significantly, had the election been decided only by what white voters did on Election Day, Michael Nutter would have lost. Period.
In fact, Mayor Mike won each of the “West Philadelphia" wards, all four of the wards that comprise "Southwest, Grays Ferry, and Point Breeze," 8 out of 10 wards that constitute "North Philadelphia," and all five black-dominated wards in what the Committee of 70 describes in its neighborhood political profile as "Mt. Airy, Germantown and Logan."
Despite all of that, I clearly remember when the post-election campaign began to convince the new mayor that he should feel primarily beholden only to white voters for his victory.
That was the Sunday after Election Day, in an Inquirer editorial that congratulated the Mayor and “explained" to him and to all of us, that the true winners of the Mayor’s election, beyond Michael Nutter himself, were: the “New Philadelphians who make 'well over the City’s median income;' “young professionals or players in the creative community;” “affluent empty-nesters moving into Center City to savor the City’s cultural scene,” "Latino voters, the William Penn foundation, and the working press.”
The editorial, if you’ll recall, then went on to tell us who the “losers” were. They included, in the Inquirer’s opinion, the Democratic Machine, John Dougherty, Jannie Blackwell, Fattah’s Street Machine, Latinos (again), and the “race card,” because it “didn’t get played much,” and in Philadelphia, that’s big news."
Amazingly, black people, who comprise 45 percent of the City’s population and 61 percent of the City’s registered Democratic voters, were not mentioned in the editorial, at all. It was as if we, somehow, no longer existed, politically.
In light of the actual voting results, that was an omission that was, at least, fundamentally misleading and which began, in a very real way, the “myth” that Michael Nutter had no reason to be accountable to black voters.
Maybe he believed it. Maybe black voters believed it.
It shouldn’t have happened, in any event. The reality is that we have now reached the point where it appears that we have an African-American mayor and an African-American voting base, the largest in this overwhelmingly Democratic city, that have parted ways with one another in a significant way, if the survey is to be believed. For example, according to Pew, the mayor receives his lowest support, on a neighborhood basis, from West Philadelphia and North Philadelphia, and his highest support levels from South Philadelphia and the Great Northeast
I hope Michael Nutter pays careful attention to all of this. He's still got time to be “Mayor of all the People,” including wealthy and not-so-wealthy, including highly educated and lesser-educated, including blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians.
If the Mayor and the black community can get that done, it will be good for the Mayor, it will be good for the black community, and it will certainly be good for the viability of the City, as a whole. While we're on the subject, standing up for the highly respected Commissioner Ayers was a very good thing to do.
Uh-h-h, to coin a phrase: “Yes we can!”
############
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment