Kerry tries to shore up black vote

Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry has spent part of the past three Sundays at predominantly black churches in Florida and Ohio, as a new poll shows President Bush doing twice as well among black Americans as he did in 2000.

Turning out black voters at a higher percentage than the general population, Republican pollsters said, was critical to Democrats’ success in the 1998 congressional elections and to Democratic candidate Al Gore’s popular vote win in 2000.

Now Mr. Kerry is following the path that Mr. Gore and President Clinton paved to black church altars in the final days of their campaigns.

But the new poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found Mr. Kerry drawing 69 percent support among black residents and Mr. Bush receiving 18 percent, suggesting that Mr. Kerry has some distance to go.

“I think the poll is reflective in one sense of a trend I’ve seen the last six weeks, of a trend toward President Bush among African-American voters,” said Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, a Republican who is traveling to key states with other black Republicans to combat Democrats’ charges of voter intimidation.

“The Democrats are concerned about that, which is why you see this stepped up effort to demonize the president and the party by calling us racist,” Mr. Steele said.

Some Democrats simply don’t believe the numbers.

“If they’re saying Bush is at 18 percent among black voters, that’s a non-starter,” said Morris Reid, a Democratic communications strategist who said blacks consider Mr. Bush’s record so terrible that “if he gets 5 percent of the African-American vote, I’ll be shocked.”

Some Republicans also scoffed at the numbers privately, saying Mr. Bush will be lucky to match the 8 percent of the black vote that he received in 2000.

Still, Republicans and Democrats both think that if Mr. Kerry loses a significant part of the most reliably Democratic portion of the electorate, his chances for winning the election drop considerably.

But, Mr. Reid said, “If the African-American community shows up to 80 to 90 percent plus in the Kerry column, then this guy might become president. The real issue is: ‘Are they going to show up at 80-plus?’”

He said that turnout matters particularly in key states such as Ohio, where black voters make up a substantial portion of the electorate in Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus.

Mr. Kerry has made stops on two of the past three weekends in predominantly black churches in Ohio, where the pastors have said he represents the next figure in the civil rights struggle.

Mr. Reid said such appearances do help turnout.

“This obviously is going to work to Kerry’s favor, and I think he’s really put an emphasis on this now,” he said.

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