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Wed. Sep 04, 2002

McKinney Backers Talk Boycott

McKinney Backers Talk Boycott – This is pretty sad, but it is their right. Many McKinney supporters say they’ll boycott the polls in November and just stay home and pout, so that they can punish other worthy Democrats simply because they’re unable to cast a vote for Cynthia.

I’m not sure what they want to prove, but they don’t make their case well: "Alfonso Mallory, a south DeKalb activist who backed McKinney, cited the county’s black voting strength. As of August, there were 197,000 registered black voters in DeKalb and 169,000 white. ’Majette cannot mobilize the black support in south DeKalb like Cynthia McKinney,’ he said. ’There’s a vacuum, a serious vacuum in the leadership in south DeKalb.’ "

What Mr. Mallory fails to realize is that it was McKinney who was not able to mobilize black support. If she’d managed to get just one third of black voters to the polls, she might have won. 117,000 people voted in the primary. And there’s 197,000 registered blacks. McKinney only got 49,000 votes, which represents a number that is less than 25% of those registered blacks.

So, exactly who is it that can’t get out the black vote? In the vaunted McKinney south DeKalb stronghold of the Stoneview Elementary precinct, 169 people voted in the primary. In the 2000 election, 1,767 people voted in that same precinct, ten times as many.

Rather than attempt to punish Democratic candidates who they don’t feel supported McKinney, maybe they should try to find a way to punish the tens of thousands of black voters who didn’t show up at the polls. Of the people in DeKalb County …. north and south … who felt it was important to vote on August 20, it was no contest.

While it’s clear there are many unwilling to accept ”The Truth” (the focus of McKinney’s closing ad campaign), there are those who still speak it: "But several political leaders said the vaunted McKinney ’machine’ was an apparition. There were no precinct captains or an established hierarchy, said DeKalb NAACP leader John Evans—just McKinney’s ’machine of personality.’ DeKalb Chief Executive Officer Vernon Jones agreed, adding that McKinney’s absence won’t matter in November."