Missouri voter registration for the November 6 midterm elections closes on Wednesday, October 10. Any hope Democrats have of fighting Trump, saving Senate seats like U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill’s and tossing out House enablers of white nationalism like U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner in Missouri and U.S. Rep. Mike Bost in Illinois will depend on a black-and-blue wave at the polls.
A coalition of community organizations operating under the umbrella name of Missouri Black Votes has spent the summer trying to guarantee that very thing, attending community picnics, street fairs, cookouts, parades, festivals, and neighborhood parties, pounding the pavement and registering voters in a powerful display of grass-roots retail politics.
Preliminary figures show they registered 27,616 voters in St. Louis and 27,445 voters in St. Louis County, while also working in Jackson County, around Kansas City. “This is a statewide non-partisan push to create access for voting,” said Angela Pearson, spokesperson of Missouri Black Votes. “This is a fight for a stronger democracy and a larger number of participants in the process.”
Since the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in 2012, 17 states, including Missouri, have used the phony excuse of almost non-existent voter fraud to restrict voting rights. In Missouri’s case, it’s a voter photo ID law designed to fight something that happened once in Missouri, in 1936, voting while pretending to be someone else. The real purpose of the law, pushed by Republicans for over a decade, is to depress turnout among poor, non-white voters. (Though the law is now in effect, that law provides for people without official photo ID to vote with other evidence of their identity if they sign a statement that they are who they claim to be.)
From May through September, Missouri Black Votes fought to counter voter suppression tactics by registering new voters and making sure people who had moved updated their voter registration. There are, literally, crates of the new registration forms that the election boards of both St. Louis city and county are going through right now. If the past is any indication, some forms will be brand-new voters, many will be from voters updating a change of address, and some of the forms will be incomplete.
Incomplete forms can still result in valid registrations, though. The election boards send letters to people with incomplete forms, offering them the chance to – literally – fill in the blanks and complete the registration process. St. Louisan Denise Lieberman, head of the Advancement Project’s Voter Protection Program, is optimistic. “It looks like the people they’ve signed up are making it onto the rolls,” she said. “Missouri Black Votes is one of the best when it comes to verifying information.”
Oddly, a good deal of mainstream coverage has not focused on the problem itself – voter suppression laws requiring activists to pound the pavement to make sure people are registered – but instead on criticizing the solution, pointing out that Missouri Black Votes is funded by the Black Progressive Action Coalition. The Black Political Action Coalition focuses on non-partisan issues, like voter registration.A similar-sounding and affiliated, but separate group, Black PAC, is a traditional political action committee. Black PAC was created in 2016 to support candidates who will support an agenda to dismantle structural racism and increase social and economic opportunity. Last year, BlackPAC helped to defeat accused pedophile Roy Moore in Alabama. And Black PAC is funded by wealthy donors tied to the pro-Hillary Clinton Super PAC Priorities USA Action.
What that means here is that wealthy Democratic donors are shoveling money into actually getting people registered to vote, rather than junkyard dog attack TV ads, which is probably the most civically engaged way of using dark money pipelines.
Right-wing ideologue Mark Steyn once bragged about how the minority of white conservatives continue to have success at the polls, saying, “The future belongs to those who show up.” That, plus voter suppression and racial gerrymandering, can work wonders. Just look at the U.S. Senate vote that finally railroaded Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court. The GOP senators who voted for Kavanaugh represent only 44 percent of the U.S. population.
The claims by Missouri Black Votes that they’ve registered around 87,000 mostly African-American voters statewide could go a long way toward breaking the white conservative stranglehold on American politics. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that, as of Trump’s election, there were 414,000 registered black voters in Missouri. A registration bump like this, even if less than half are new voters, creates an entirely new dynamic in a state Trump won by 19 points.
Take the Senate race between Claire McCaskill and Josh Hawley. Polls show it’s dead even. And despite many black voters’ anger at McCaskill for pursuing a strategy of trying to pry loose a few hundred votes here and there in rural Missouri and not speaking directly to African-American concerns, the choice between her and Hawley is stark. Hawley, who positions himself as a religious conservative, has praised Trump, has sued to stop insurance coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions, and has claimed that what he calls voter fraud (translation: pesky black people voting) is a threat. A surge in black registration could keep the Missouri Senate seat out of the hands of an extremist Republican.
Equally important is Amendment 1 on the November 6 ballot. The so-called “Clean Missouri” amendment would take the power to draw Congressional districts out of the hands of the Republican supermajority in the Missouri Legislature and give it to a professional state demographer, who would create clean, compact congressional districts based solely on population and not on racial gerrymandering. Passing Amendment 1 could break the Republican hammerlock on Missouri’s House seats (six out of eight) by re-drawing districts. Democrats would have a fairer chance of being elected to Congress outside of St. Louis and Kansas City. The African-American vote is vital to that.
Long-term, an increased black vote can help to launch what Yale constitutional law professor Jack Balkin calls the “New Progressive Era” in American life. Balkin has written extensively that the 40-year run of conservative political ascendancy which he calls “the Reagan regime” is ending. The howls of white conservative rage now are the last roars of the dinosaurs. While bad times lay ahead (think of a Kavanaugh Supreme Court), Balkin writes that political mobilization by the majority, pan-ethnic, progressive America inevitably leads to a New Progressive Era.
With the midterms less than a month away, we’ll see if these new voter registrations mean Missouri will join that march.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, author, and activist. Follow him on Twitter at @charlesjaco1.
