Until Sen. Barack Obama’s startling wins in Iowa and South Carolina and close defeat in New Hampshire, Blacks in Alabama were almost evenly divided between him and his rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Alabama Democratic Conference (“ADC”), the state’s leading Black political organization, had given its nod to Clinton. ADC president and political king maker Joe Reed urged Blacks to vote for Clinton, saying America wasn’t ready for a Black president.
Meanwhile, the Alabama New South Coalition, the ADC’s rival organization, placed its chips on Obama.
(Right) Obama at Bartow Arena After Iowa Caucus Win: Whether the Black vote will be enough for Obama to clinch a win in Alabama is still inquestion…
Now, there is no divide, said Rep. Arthur Davis (D-Birmingham), the first among Alabama’s influential Black leaders to jump on the Illinois senator’s presidential bandwagon.
“The Black community in Alabama is strongly rallying behind Barack Obama,” said Davis, chairman of Obama’s campaign in Alabama. The ADC will certainly squeeze out some votes for Sen. Clinton in smaller rural counties that don’t get much exposure to national or even state media. That’s where the ADC has the strongest influence on voters.”
But in the state’s urban and suburban areas, Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile, where Blacks constitute large blocks of Democratic voters, Davis predicts an easy win among Black voters by margins of 75 percent or more.
Obama now has 68 percent of the Black vote in Alabama, up from 54 percent within the past month, while Clinton’s share of Black voters dropped from 20 percent to16 percent in the same period, according to a recently released poll by Capital Survey Research Center, the polling arm of the Alabama Education 
Association.
Among White Democrats, Clinton’s share grew from 47 percent to 51 percent within the past month, while Obama’s stayed the same at 17 percent, according to the poll.
Due to the shifting allegiance of Black voters, AEA polls, with a 5 percent margin of error, now give Obama a slight lead in Alabama over Clinton, 44 percent to 37 percent.
The numbers are in sharp contrast from September, when she had 40 percent of Democratic voters compared to his 21 percent.
Whether the Black vote will be enough for Obama to clinch a win in Alabama is still in question, as he would also have to pull in at least a quarter of White voters, as he did in South Carolina.
(Left) Senator Barack Obama speaks at UAB’s Bartow Arena Jan. 27. Click here to see more of BV’s video of his visit to Birmingham.
{hwdvideoshare}id=134|width=560|height=340{/hwdvideoshare}See BV video of Obama’s Birmingham speech here {flv}Obama in Bham 1-26-08 Part 1_VP6_512K_Stream{/flv}
But Obama spent a year going back and forth to that South Carolina. In contrast, he has made only three trips to Alabama, including his 2007 visit to Selma in commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” the infamous beating of civil rights marchers by state troopers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
But each visit brought large numbers of enthusiastic Whites across social and party lines.
One is Mary Katherine Backstrom, a recently-married 23-year-old who has been an Obama supporter since reading his book “The Audacity of Hope.” He is the first Democrat she plans to vote for.
“I was raised in a Republican household,” Backstrom said. “So it’s almost like a religion, you know; you just blindly vote. “Honestly, the message started to matter to me. I started researching platforms and realized there wasn’t a Republican candidate that was going to meet the needs I wanted my children to have in the future. That’s what attracted me to Obama.”
Having spent a year without health insurance, the University of Alabama at Birmingham student said helped bring Obama’s message home to her.
His speech last week at the university energized a racially-mixed crowd of about 10,000 with a message of affordable health care, money for primary education and college, fair wages, honest and effective government, equal treatment, and troop withdrawal from Iraq.
The Jefferson County registrar’s office in Birmingham processed close to 4,000 voter registration applications between Jan. 21 and 25, a dramatic surge leading up to the Feb. 5 primary; hundreds of applications came from the university, officials said.
Statewide, voter registration is up 58,341 since November 2007, a dramatic increase compared to presidential primaries in 2004 and 2000, according to figures from Alabama’s Secretary of State office.
“The thing that really fires me up about Obama in particular is, it’s the most unappreciated voters who are making the difference in his campaign,” Backstrom said, “the college voters, the Black voters.”
Real estate agent Marquelon Sigler, 28, canvassed Birmingham neighborhoods Saturday for Obama. Like other Blacks, he too questioned whether the time was right for a Black president, despite being impressed with Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention and with the political platform outlined in the senator’s book.
“But when I saw that he could raise the money, that people were buying into his message of hope and change, I knew he could go all the way,” Sigler said.
It’s young voters like Backstrom and Sigler who Obama is successfully reaching with his message.{mospagebreak}
Amaya Smith, spokeswoman for the Obama campaign in Alabama, said young campaign workers, some fresh from South Carolina, have made more than 16,000 phone calls, and knocked on 7,500 doors in two days.
The grassroots campaign includes the standard techniques, phone banks and television commercials, but it also targets young voters through YouTube videos, e-mails, mobile phone text messaging and ringtones.
P
eople aged 18 to 25 are turning out overwhelmingly for Obama in the early primary states by as much as 67 percent, Smith said, so much so that the campaign has organized Students for Obama, where college students work to turn out the vote among their peers on campus.
However, Larry Powell, a political communications professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham, questions whether young voter turnout will give
Obama the boost he needs to win Alabama, and the Democratic nomination.
“In every past election in memory, there has always been a campaign that tries to register and turn out young voters on their behalf,” Powell said. “They always fail, because they don’t get to the polls for various reasons. However, there is a different kind of interest behind Obama than there has been in the past.”
Powell attributes young voter interest to the general public’s disenchantment with President George W. Bush’s administration, and Obama’s ability to articulate a vision for change that reaches across socio-economic, racial and generational lines, even if his vision is somewhat short on specifics.
“Having something to vote against, and something to vote for, is a double motivation,” he said. “They are the ones most affected by the Iraq war and education, and young White voters don’t see color like their parents or grandparents did.”
Mobile County held early voting last week, because Super Tuesday coincides with the city’s annual Mardi Gras celebration.
Voter turnout was so high in some polling places, Smith said, that election officials ran out of Democratic ballots. Some local organizers were troubled that these incidents happened at large, predominantly Black polls.
“People are excited about the kind of change that Sen. Obama represents,” Smith said. “So, we’ve seen record turnouts this year. “(Mobile) is an indicator of the turnout we’ll see in Alabama, and not just Alabama, but all across the country.”
This story was written for the Afro American Newspapers.
More video footage from Obama’s Visit to Birmingham:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
