African American Statewide Candidates in the New South

Abstract African American candidates for statewide office in the United States face unique challenges given the nation’s complicated racial dynamics. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the United States had elected only one African American as governor in its history—L. Douglas Wilder, a grandson of slaves who achieved this historic goal in 1989 in Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy. Numerous media accounts at the time declared a major breakthrough in racial politics in the United States with one national news magazine actually featuring in bold type on its cover “The End of the Civil War.” More than thirty years since Wilder’s election, while Black candidates have risen to office in states such as Illinois, Massachusetts, and California, there are not many successes for African American candidates seeking statewide office in the South. This is particularly puzzling because Blacks are most numerous in the South, as a percentage of the population. This book includes analyses of the campaigns of mostly unsuccessful and some successful Black statewide candidates in the South. The purpose is to untangle the factors that lead to electoral success for these candidates, and those that continue to hold them back, from the vantage of recent election cycles with some historically close races in the South featuring African American candidates for governor of Florida and Georgia (2018), for lieutenant governor in Virginia (2017), and for the US Senate in South Carolina and Georgia (2020). But statewide contests are not limited to state offices; some of the most important southern campaigns in the twenty-first century have featured Black candidates running in the southern presidential primaries. Most notably, Barack Obama’s 2008 nomination campaign blazed a trail in the South that many believed was a template for a new style of black politics. Examining broader regional demographic and political trends, the authors project that the South is on the threshold of a major breakthrough for African American statewide candidates, which will have a substantial role in not only fundamentally changing the political dynamics of the region, but nationally as well. This change will be driven by not only African American candidates and voters but a rising coalition regionally of minorities and also White voters increasingly willing to vote for Black candidates.