In the Balance of Power. Omar H. Ali

media businessman and billionaire Michael Bloomberg—running a fusion campaign on the Republican and Independence Party lines—was reelected mayor of the city with 47 percent of New York’s African American vote.²⁷ Like Perot, he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to run (as he would in his failed bid for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020). His most outspoken black supporter for his mayoral run, Fulani, had helped establish the Independence Party in the wake of the 1992 election. With almost no direct backing from Bloomberg himself, she led volunteers across New York City to rally support for his candidacy. Concentrating in Harlem and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, the Independence Party called on African Americans to vote for Bloomberg on column “C” (the column on the ballot where New Yorkers could vote for Bloomberg as an independent—column “A” being Democrat and “B” being Republican). In 2001, during his previous bid for mayor, Bloomberg had promised the Independence Party, whose ballot line he sought, to push for an enactment of nonpartisan municipal elections using the city’s initiative and referendum if elected. That year the Independence Party, with over 59,000 votes, gave Bloomberg his margin of victory. Keeping his promise, Bloomberg set up a series of Charter Revision commissions in which hundreds of New Yorkers had a chance to testify both for and against placing nonpartisan municipal elections on the ballot; the measure was ultimately defeated at the polls, largely at the hands of the Democratic Party, which strongly opposed it. But in 2005 the outpouring of support among African Americans would not only prove a serious indictment of the Democratic Party but point to the changing ways in which black New Yorkers were beginning to view themselves relative to both major parties.²⁸ As John P. Avalon wrote in the New York Sun, “something is happening in the African-American community. . . . The diversification of the black community economically and politically is changing the landscape. One recent sign of this is the surprising amount of support for Mayor Bloomberg among African American voters. . . . A recent WNBC/Marist poll showed the mayor receiving 50% support from black voters.” Avalon further noted, “The growing [independent black] trend is broad as well as deep—in 1998 only 5% of African American voters between the age of 51 and 64 identified as independents, but by 2002 that number increased fourfold to 21%.”²⁹

      It has taken the financial resources of white billionaire businessmen in conjunction with the grassroots organization of insurgent and independent black leaders for African Americans to help challenge the bipartisan establishment.³⁰ Millions of dollars are needed to run television and radio advertisements, conduct telephone banking, retain legal expertise, and petition drives, all of which are necessary to begin to compete effectively in the electoral arena. The laws and related rules governing the electoral process (written and passed by the two major parties’ elected representatives) are specifically designed to keep the Democratic and Republican parties in power: restrictive ballot access, single-member districting, gerrymandering, inequitable campaign finance laws, and discrimination against non–major party candidates in televised debates combine to marginalize even the wealthiest citizens. Underscoring the state of American democracy, when Fulani was asked by a reporter to reflect on what was more difficult in her run for president, being black or being a woman, she poignantly noted that “it was being an independent.”

      The election of President Obama to the highest office in the land as a Democrat was surely a milestone in the history of the United States; it was also the culmination of decades of on-the-ground organizing by ordinary people, many of them black independents, such as Fulani and her associates, in face of Democratic Party opposition. The tension remains (as Jacqueline Salit describes in the new Afterword to this book). One of the ways it took shape was in the 2016 presidential cycle. Black voters displayed diminishing support for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton. Early voting in battleground states, including North Carolina and Florida, revealed a 14 percent decrease in turnout in early voting among black voters, as upwards of two million voters, including many black voters, chose not to vote for the Democratic Party nominee in the general election despite strong appeals by President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on behalf of Clinton. Overall black voter turnout for the Democratic Party in 2016 dropped five percentage points from 2012 (with insurgent Democratic candidate Senator Bernie Sanders being bullied out of the nomination by what, by any measure, are strikingly undemocratic nominating procedures that give “superdelegates” extraordinary power to override the will of rank-and-file delegates within the party). Donald Trump was elected president to the stunned surprise of the nation—the same nation that had reelected Obama four years earlier. Many Democrats began to call for impeachment, which eventually came to pass. By 2018, however, African Americans were once again joined by white independents to back Democratic congressional candidates—this time by a margin of twelve points, revealing the critical role of African Americans when mobilized. In these ways, and other ways, African Americans have been a factor in the balance of power.

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      The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 initiated enforcement mechanisms (albeit, at times, unevenly applied) to protect African Americans’ right to vote, but the question for many voters and would-be-voters remains: What meaningful choices are there in a largely bipartisan electoral system? That is, what political options are there if one is not in favor of the dominant policies or practices of the Democratic or Republican parties?

      In 2004, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader, the only antiwar candidate with national stature (Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had voted for congressional war appropriations for the war in Iraq), was, at the instigation of the Democratic National Committee, removed from the ballot in more than a dozen states.³¹ The Democrats and their Republican counterparts who shared control of the Commission on Presidential Debates would also exclude Nader from the presidential debates. In an environment of such heavy-handed bipartisan rule, when independent and third-party candidates holding dissenting views are blocked from either appearing on the ballot or participating in televised candidate debates, political opposition to the major parties is marginalized to the point of virtual nonexistence.³² Bipartisan constraints have consistently stymied the growth of third-party and individual independent campaigns since the early part of the nineteenth century, ultimately providing few options for voters. African Americans in the antebellum North who were somehow able to meet the property and residency eligibility requirements to vote (as in New York, starting in 1821), or had not been excluded from the vote by statute (as in Michigan, starting in 1837, or Pennsylvania, starting in 1838), often had no choices in the electoral arena.³³ From the 1830s to the 1850s, the vast majority of candidates from the two major parties—at that time, the Democratic and Whig parties—were proslavery, or silent on the issue.³⁴ If one was against slavery, the electoral arena was a limited venue for expressing one’s views—that is, until black and white abolitionists forced the issue of slavery and its abolition onto public stages through mass campaigns by calling on candidates and elected officials to take a position. These abolitionists formed the antislavery Liberty Party, running candidates of their own. In the century thereafter, African Americans confronted a new bipartisan establishment, when the Democratic- and Republican-controlled government was largely unwilling to enforce the constitutional rights of black men and women in the Jim Crow South.

      In the current era, despite the legal gains of the modern civil rights movement, which successfully pressed elected representatives to pass federal legislation reaffirming the civil and political rights of African Americans (the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965), elements of a new Jim Crow have become embedded in the political process (that is, legalized forms of marginalization and disfranchisement not based on race but on non–major-party registration).³⁵ Independents in the twenty-first century, regardless of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or political ideology, face a kind of second-class citizenship in the electoral arena. They are legally and institutionally marginalized, not only in terms of ballot access but by their exclusion from televised debates through gerrymandering and the actions of bipartisan (as opposed to nonpartisan) election regulatory bodies—from the Federal Election Commission to the Commission on Presidential Debates—favoring the two major parties and their candidates.³⁶ Bipartisan restrictions to the ballot not only limit the choices available to voters but, as a consequence, determine the policies and practices that flow from having candidates elected from