Regardless of which of the two leading candidates wins this year’s gubernatorial race in November, it will set a precedent in Massachusetts politics — Kerry Healey would become the first woman to hold the state’s corner office and Deval Patrick would be the first African American to do so.
Patrick’s trailblazing is also part of a growing trend of African-Americans running for state offices across the nation.
Boston University political science professor Christine Rossell said the new wave of black candidates is an overdue result of the Civil Rights Movement.
Rossell said today, these candidates’ minority status usually works in their favor, as long as they maintain a “conservative persona.” White voters — who make up the majority in most states — want diversity in high office, but like candidates who don’t remind them they are black, Rossell said.
“We’re seeing the second and third generation of the civil rights movement — buttoned-down, Ivy-League-educated candidates, instead of ethnic candidates who cannot appeal on a state level.”
When black candidates like Patrick act conservatively, white voters perceive them as shrewd decision-makers, Rossell said. She added that although only 5 percent of African-Americans vote Republican, white voters embrace black Republican candidates because their politics makes them adopt a conservative persona as well.
In Massachusetts, where voters have elected Republican governors for the past 15 years, Patrick’s politics hurt him far more than his ethnicity, Rossell said.
“Massachusetts voters would love to vote for a black person,” she said. “They’ll do it despite the fact that he’s a Democrat.”
Although he is not running on a statewide level, Democratic state legislator Keith Ellison’s bid to represent Minneapolis in the U.S. House of Representatives is new in its own way. Ellison is both African American and Muslim.
Ellison campaign manager Dave Colling said his campaign has not used his candidate’s religion as a positive or a negative, but added that other groups have done both. While Minneapolis’s Somali community has campaigned for Ellison, Colling said Republicans have painted Ellison as an extremist and used religious slurs. Ellison, Colling said, remains detached.
“He doesn’t wear his religion on his sleeve,” Colling said. “It’s just not part of our campaign.”
While African Americans have gained seats as mayors, state legislators and congressional representatives, only one state — Virginia — has elected a black governor. There is also only one black senator in the U.S. Senate.
An unprecedented five candidates are seeking to change that. Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is running for the corner office in his state. Michael Steele is seeking the seat vacated by retiring senator Paul Sarbanes. In Tennessee, centrist Harold Ford, Jr. is hoping to be the South’s first black senator since Reconstruction.
That Steele and Blackwell are Republicans is also a new development for a party that has struggled to shed its homogenized image, according to the campaign websites.
All these candidates may face tough battles in the general elections, however, not because of their race, but because of their state’s politics. Ford is a Democrat running in a Republican-dominated state, while Steele and Blackwell both face climates unfavorable to Republicans, according to an Aug. 26 Christian Science Monitor article.
Another black gubernatorial candidate, former Pittsburgh Steeler Lynn Swann, is expected to lose to the popular Democratic incumbent in his state of Pennsylvania.