Dirty Little Secrets

The result was so irrefutable that by the time U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen asserted in a victory speech that there would be "no more elections decided by race" in Memphis, it resounded like an echo.

Because from the moment early-voting election returns showed him prevailing over former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and his race-based campaign, those paying attention had already thought, spoke, tweeted, Facebooked or shouted the same conclusion.

Yet, those early returns were telling a different story in countywide contests, where county mayoral candidate Mark Luttrell and all eight of his fellow Republicans jumped to what turned out to be insurmountable leads -- despite the fact that 57 percent of early voters had cast Democratic ballots in state and federal primaries.

All but one of those Republicans was white, and all but one of the Democrats was black. The first superficial analysis -- a lot of white Democrats crossed over to vote for a lot of white Republicans -- was hard to square with Cohen's post-racial promise.

"The truth is black candidates have been voting for white candidates for a long time," said Rhodes College political science professor Marcus Pohlmann, who has written books about local race and politics. "The dirty little secret is white voters have not been voting for black candidates very much."

Shelby County Democratic Party chairman Van Turner said he wanted to look closely at precinct-by-precinct data before reaching conclusions, but acknowledged the conventional wisdom that "simple crunching of numbers indicated white Democratic voters would swing the election one way or the other."

In the days leading up to the election, interim county mayor Joe Ford's campaign made direct appeals in news conferences and in neighborhood canvassing to white voters. The Republicans are right-wing, they said in phone calls and rallies. They associated local Republicans with Sarah Palin and the tea party movement, forcing even Luttrell to distance himself from right-wing rhetoric.

Scott Banbury, a Midtown neighborhood activist, had quipped that he would scrape the Obama bumper stickers off cars of white Democratic voters who crossed over to support Republicans.

Pleased that Cohen won handily, Banbury on Friday wasn't quite ready to call white Democrats traitors. Like others, he cited the unprecedented efforts by Republican gubernatorial candidates and GOP candidates in the 8th Congressional District to motivate Republicans, and questioned the quality of Democratic campaigns and candidates in general.

It's also true that turnout by registered black voters, especially in the 9th Congressional District that includes most of Memphis, was lower than expected. As a proportion of the county's registered voters, turnout in the mostly white 7th and 8th Congressional Districts was unusually high -- while only about one-third of the county's voters are in those districts, the 7th and 8th districts generated about 45 percent of voters.

Republican county chairman Lang Wiseman has insisted that the Republican candidates -- which included African-American probate court clerk candidate Paul Boyd -- were much stronger and therefore more capable of motivating their voters to turn out.

Pohlmann said he's eager to see what, if anything, the data will say about the impact race may have had in those countywide races.

"Cohen's statement is very optimistic," Pohlmann said. "I don't know if it's quite justified

-- Zack McMillin: 529-2564