It’s the biggest untold political story in Charlotte, and until last
week, Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon was probably the only one who fully
grasped its implications – or even noticed it at all.
That is, until Creative Loafing began showing a Charlotte voter registration
spreadsheet to the city’s political strategists. The county Board of Elections
tracks voter data largely by county, of course, and the city of Charlotte contains
a confusing tangle of shifting precincts split between the city and the county.
Because of that, what had happened over the last decade was hard to track and
went largely unnoticed by both Democratic and Republican campaign managers and
strategists.
Their reactions to the spreadsheet included gasps, a few “wows” and “can I have a copy of that?”
What drew their attention wasn’t the ratio of Democrats to Republicans, which has stayed largely the same over the past decade, but the columns that contained white and black voter registration numbers.
Like clockwork, white voter registration has decreased by a single, nearly unnoticeable percentage point each year during the past decade. At the same time, black voter registration has been increasing each year by another, single percentage point. The result?
Just a decade ago, African-Americans made up a quarter of Charlotte’s electorate. Now they make up a third. To political number crunchers, these numbers are huge. So is the trend; if it continues, in a little over a decade, the city will be close to evenly divided between white and minority voters. And with each year that passes, it will become harder and harder for Republicans to win the mayor’s race and citywide offices.
At the moment, no one is better equipped to take advantage of this trend than Cannon, the city’s highest-ranking African-American politician. With numbers like these, the question for Cannon isn’t if he’ll run for mayor, but when. And the more he thinks about it, the more attractive the mayor’s race this fall looks.
“I would say from all the support that seems to be coming our way, I’m somewhat inclined to make a move to run for the mayor’s office,” says Cannon. Nothing definite, obviously, but his campaign will announce its final decision in the coming weeks.
While Latino migration to Charlotte and Mecklenburg County has made the headlines, a significant African-American migration to Charlotte has also been taking place over the last decade, virtually under city politicos’ radar. While Charlotte’s white population grew by 21 percent between 1990 and 2000, the city’s black population grew by 40 percent.
Because black voters typically show up to vote in much smaller numbers than their white counterparts in non-presidential elections, it wasn’t until fall of 2004 that the full power of the new black electorate in Charlotte reverberated up and down the ballot. Until November, the city and county’s moderate white voters usually split their tickets between the parties, producing a ballot of winners from both parties. This time, Democrats in competitive county and statewide races swept every office they sought. Democrats won all three at-large seats on the County Commission and John Kerry won the county as well.
The new bottom line in Charlotte is that when black voters show up in full force at the polls, adding their votes to those of white Democrats who sometimes split their tickets, they decide who wins. And because black voters are so overwhelmingly Democratic, it means that Democrats win.
Can Dems repeat their Fall ’04 success?
If Patrick Cannon runs, winning won’t be easy. Sure, Cannon is young, successful, attractive and popular with voters of both races, but he has also never done better than second in the four-way at-large race for City Council, although Republican Pat Mumford, the first place winner in 2003, only beat Cannon by two votes.
Meanwhile Pat McCrory, a Republican who has held the office for a record-breaking five terms, has nearly $200,000 sitting in a campaign account, can raise more money easily and is better known than Cannon.
Just five years ago, a mayoral challenge by Cannon against a popular Republican like McCrory would have been unthinkable. Though even Cannon admits that it would be tough to beat McCrory, the city’s changing racial reality places it in the realm of the possible. And it’s not just Democrats who say so.
Even McCrory’s longtime campaign manager, Victoria Smith, whose initial response to the statistics above was “Wow,” acknowledges that even though she’s certain McCrory would beat Cannon if the two ran this fall, things here are changing.
“What’s so great about Pat McCrory over these last five elections is that he does cross over and get bipartisan support, but I don’t know,” Smith said. “It is getting harder and I think, if anything, it is quite justified for Pat (McCrory) to run again given what happened with the County Commission. We need to keep a Republican mayor in this town.”
Brian Francis, campaign manager for former County Commissioner Ruth Samuelson, a popular white Republican whose political career was derailed by high black turnout this fall, also sees the writing on the wall.
“If the Democrats can replicate that in off-year elections as well as presidential elections, Republicans have a huge problem,” said Francis. “There’s no other way around it. The numbers just don’t work.”
But replicating the November 2004 level of African-American and Democratic turnout in November 2005’s citywide election would be a real feat for the local Democratic Party, which at the moment is struggling to find the money to keep its headquarters open.
That’s a far cry from where the party was in November, when over 200 volunteers, working 40 to 60 hours a week, making phone calls and knocking on doors, produced the greatest Democratic turnout in the county’s history. Of course, that huge turnout was also funded by what was probably the largest chunk of change ever dropped on Mecklenburg County in an election. Though no official figure exists, the unofficial consensus from Democratic strategists who would know is that various tax-exempt organizations and the campaigns of Erskine Bowles, Mike Easley and John Kerry pumped about $1.4 million into Mecklenburg County over several months in an effort to get themselves elected.
This fall, with no national or statewide races on the ballot, the local Democratic Party will be largely on its own financially, as it usually is in City Council and mayoral elections, which fall in odd-numbered years.
At first glance, it would seem that Republicans should never be able to win races in Charlotte. Some 47 percent of registered voters are Democrats, 31 percent are Republicans and 21 percent are unaffiliated. But in those off-year city elections, Republicans usually turn out in large numbers. Year after year, about 46 percent of those who actually vote in city elections are Democrats, 40 percent are Republicans and 14 percent are unaffiliated. Republicans are able to win because half the unaffiliateds vote Republican, as do some Democrats.
And while a third of the city’s registered voters are black, African-American turnout typically runs at 25 percent or less, while white turnout hovers around 74 percent in city elections. That’s why, in city election after city election over the last decade, McCrory has been able to keep the mayoralty and two Democrats and two Republicans have won in at-large races.
It’s also why party strategists took minimal notice of the growing increase in black voter registration.
“Their propensity to register is greater than their propensity to turn out,” says UNCC political science professor Ted Arrington of African-American voters. “I think that what happened last year is that they were so pissed off at George Bush that they did in fact turn out. Whether they will turn out in November — and maybe for Cannon they will — nobody knows. If they don’t, there’s no way he can win.”
Even Cannon admits that the Democratic victory in Mecklenburg last fall might not be easily duplicated.
“I don’t think one can weigh what happened in the presidential election too much as you talk about elections that are off-year, where you don’t have the number of people that are coming out,” said Cannon.
So how did Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first black mayor, manage to win two terms between 1983 and 1987, then?
Those were different times, says Arrington, and Gantt had the full support of the business community, something Cannon, or most other Democratic challengers for mayor, likely wouldn’t get today. Historically, Arrington explained, “The business community saw that integrating the schools and busing and having a black mayor were steps they could take that could keep Charlotte as the city that works.” With national racial tensions down, he says, that trend has ceased.
Where’s the money?
For Cannon, raising money to fund the large turnout he would need in a mayoral race might be harder than it’s been in the past, because Charlotte’s business culture has changed as well over the last decade, says Arrington. Democrats, however, would be excited about having a genuine shot at the office and could make up the difference.
“A few years ago, you had the chairman of Bank of America contributing to Democratic causes and now you have got the chairman of Wachovia and Bank of America giving tens of millions of dollars for the (presidential inauguration) in Washington,” said Arrington. “People who used to be at least bipartisan in the business community, they’re just not there anymore. The business community has become much more hard Republican than it used to be.”
And in a place like Charlotte, where unscripted shakeups are frowned upon, Cannon may have a hard time making the case to some donors that it’s time for a major mayoral showdown.
“It’s always very hard when you’ve got an incumbent like Pat McCrory who hasn’t done anything seriously wrong,” said Arrington. “When you go to the people in the business community and say, ‘I want to run for mayor,” they say, ‘We have a mayor. What do we need you for?’ That’s very difficult to deal with.”
Cannon, however, has other possible sources of money for a campaign. The state Democratic Party has been targeting City Council and mayor’s races statewide in the past few years. Party Communications Director Schorr Johnson says the state party has helped Democrats win mayor’s races in seven of the eight largest cities in the state, and would likely put money into a competitive race in Charlotte, though how much is unknown.
Local Democratic strategist Tom Chumley says the state party hasn’t backed McCrory’s previous Democratic competitors because they weren’t considered to be serious candidates who could win. Neither did the local party. But if Cannon decides to go for it, both would pull out all the stops to help him win, says Chumley.
“We’ll finally put out a really, really strong effort for our mayoral candidate,” said Chumley.
Exactly what a strong effort by the party would look like in an off-year election, no one knows. Every Democrat CL talked to for this article, including Cannon, insisted that raising money for what would likely be the hottest race the city has seen in a decade wouldn’t be a problem. But so far, no one has been able to specify exactly where that money would come from. Sure, Cannon has raised $120,000 for council races in the past. But he’d need quite a bit more than that to beat the mayor.
“I think that Mayor McCrory has shown in the past that he has the capacity to raise a couple hundred thousand dollars pretty easily without a big-name competitor,” says Republican at-large City Council member Pat Mumford, who admits that he, too, might one day like to occupy the mayor’s office. “So if Cannon steps up and gets a lot of press, I think McCrory uses that to fuel his fire to go out and raise a lot of money. Raising money doesn’t guarantee a win, but McCrory’s name ID is just astronomical. That’s hard to overcome.”
Money aside, however, the local Democratic Party did spend the last year going door to door, making personal contact with voters and building an impressive voter turnout machine, which they used effectively in the fall. With enough money, that kind of organization could go a long way.
Is it even worth it?
As always, there’s the complicating issue of race, which could work for and against both candidates. McCrory and Cannon are moderate politicians who’ve done well among moderate white Democratic voters — the same voters who have on occasion been known to go with the white guy over the black guy, in the process derailing the careers of more than one African-American politician.
Then again, as Chumley points out, McCrory’s challengers have been so weak, the mayor has actually been getting 10 to 15 percent of the vote in precincts that are heavily African-American. Most of those votes would likely go to Cannon in a mayor’s race, he says.
But no matter how many scenarios Democratic and Republican strategists paint about a potential race, they always wind up back at the city’s racial demographics. If black voters really want an African-American mayor, they’ve got the numbers to put one in office if they show up at the polls. And as each year passes, if their numbers continue to grow as they have over the last decade, fewer and fewer African-American voters will have to show up to vote to impact city races.
Even if Cannon were to lose to McCrory, as long as the race is close, the face of Charlotte politics would inevitably change. Because McCrory has always had weak opponents, no one knows exactly how vulnerable he is to a serious challenge. It’s not a secret that there has been talk among voters of possible McCrory burnout. If Cannon gets close, it would show other Democrats exactly what it would take to beat McCrory, and perhaps encourage them to come out of the woodwork.
Some, like Chumley, think Cannon has a good shot at a mayoral win. “It’d be a 50/50 race,” he said.
But is it worth it? In Charlotte, the mayor’s position is a part-time job with little power attached to it aside from his/her ability to veto City Council actions. If Cannon decides to run, he’ll have to give up his at-large seat, which the party already plans to fill with another African-American Democrat, making it much harder for Cannon to regain his place in local politics if he loses.
Not everyone thinks it’s a gamble he should take.
“Is it really worth it?” asked Norman Mitchell, the County Commission’s senior African-American politician. “We can’t afford to lose him because he’s valuable, the senior elected official among black Americans in the county. We would hate to lose his experience to run for a position that is no more than just a figurehead.”
But if it’s what Cannon really wants, Mitchell says he will support him.
For the moment it appears that Cannon is waiting to see what McCrory will do. For most of the last decade, McCrory has been waiting for Republican Sue Myrick to stick to the term-limit plan she was so fond of when she first ran for Congress in 1994. Problem is, Myrick doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and her district, which covers parts of Union, Mecklenburg and Gaston counties, has gotten more and more blue-collar conservative. Even Republicans increasingly say that a big city, moderate mayor like McCrory could get stomped by conservatives in a Republican primary in the district. In a statewide race, McCrory’s Charlotte pedigree and mayoral title would be a weight around his neck. The bulk of the state’s voters is still blue collar, and have again and again rejected statewide candidates from Charlotte.
“This is a tough position for Pat,” said Mumford. And watching 28-year-old arch conservative Patrick McHenry, a Republican from Cherryville, win a Congressional seat this fall probably didn’t help.
“I can imagine that McCrory sees this kid, Patrick McHenry, all of 28 years old who has kind of done nothing, he’s in a Congressional seat in D.C. that is his to lose for the next 40 years and McCrory has been slogging it out over tough issues in a large urban area for years and is probably thinking ‘What’s fair about that?’ That’s got to be a tough pill to swallow.”
Moreover, even though US Sen. Elizabeth Dole recently asked the White House to consider McCrory for one of several federal government posts, including administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, more than one local Republican didn’t seem to think that he has much of a shot at landing one of the jobs.
“Those jobs are managing a bureaucracy of hundreds or thousands of people,” said one. “He just has no experience doing that. If you want to get things done, you’re going to want somebody who can manage a bureaucracy. So while a big city mayor who is a full-time mayor, who’s running the city, has a good shot at an administrative post like that, a part-time mayor with very little managerial experience is starting way behind.”
So at least for now, it appears that McCrory has few options beyond continuing to run for mayor time after time as the city’s demographics continue to change. McCrory’s crusade for light rail and an uptown arena angered a lot of conservatives in his party, and the mayor takes a near daily beating on local talk radio. Last year, some conservatives actually campaigned for his opponent, though obviously not with much success.
Meanwhile, potential challengers like Cannon bide their time on City Council, watching the time go by and getting antsy. If McCrory weren’t in the race, Mumford, a moderate to liberal Republican, said he’d seriously consider running. And even Mumford says he wouldn’t be surprised if a member of a growing list of retired business executives around here decided to take a crack at the mayor’s office.
But one thing is certain. If Cannon wants to test the waters of Charlotte’s changing demographics this year, he better dive in soon.
“He should be raising money by now,” said Arrington.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2005.
