Black voter participation in Wisconsin has decreased

• Mandela Barnes is the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin.
• To win statewide, he will need to score big in Milwaukee and Madison, key Democratic strongholds.
• Black voter turnout across the state has declined in recent electoral cycles.

Parishioner Amber Smith expressed her admiration for Mandela Barnes. After he presented a brief but passionate sermon at this largely Black church on a recent Sunday morning.

She applauded the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate for speaking “with conviction”. And noted that he made “quite forceful remarks.”

However, Smith, a 30-year-old Milwaukee resident who works in higher education. This indicated that she was still unsure about whether or not to vote for him.

She said, “I’m leaning toward that, but I need to know more.”

Smith’s remarks highlight a difficulty for the Barnes campaign. Barnes, the state’s current lieutenant governor, will need to win big in Milwaukee and Madison, both Democratic strongholds. In order to win the general election statewide.

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His capacity to actively turn out Black voters, a crucial Democratic base, will be crucial to that uplift. In recent elections, there has been a fall in black voter turnout across the state.

The race is expected to be close, and because Wisconsin is a purple state (Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won it by fewer than 30,000 votes in 2018 and President Joe Biden by less than 21,000 votes in 2020), strong Democratic turnout efforts in every part of Milwaukee County will be essential to victory. According to data released earlier this month by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, voter registration in the state is approaching record levels for a midterm year and includes a record number of young voters. However, the commission, which oversees elections in the state, does not collect the information by party affiliation.

As the state’s first Black lieutenant governor, Barnes created history. According to state Democrats and organizers, the question at hand isn’t whether many Black voters are choosing between Barnes and the Republican incumbent, Sen. Ron Johnson. In other words, will they even vote?

The Rev. Greg Lewis, co-founder and executive director of Souls to the Polls Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization that primarily works in African American neighborhoods, said, “You have to keep making clear the strength and power of their vote and that when Black voters come out they make the difference.”

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“As a result of the fact that our white brothers and sisters are evenly divided, this is a period when the minority vote will be crucial. If we can persuade those in positions of authority, that influence will help Democrats win, he asserted.

Barnes also thought it was apparent what was at stake.

He recently told that you should “show up in the community and don’t take any location for granted.”

Despite the fact that Wisconsin voters cast more ballots in 2020 than ever before, turnout in wards with a majority of Black people fell from 2016. That came after a sharp decline from 2012 to 2016 in that. When compared to 2016, Milwaukee County’s overall turnout in 2020 was essentially unchanged. Strategists and political observers have hypothesized that Black turnout in the 2020 election likely decreased due to the pandemic, while in the previous election they blamed Hillary Clinton’s campaign for not doing enough on the ground and a strict voter ID law that caused confusion, particularly among Black voters in Milwaukee County. Democrats point out that Democratic turnout in Milwaukee County and the state as a whole climbed from 2014 levels in the most recent midterm campaign, and some data suggested that Black voter turnout had grown as well.

The Barnes campaign announced that it was organizing get out the vote campaigns and that it would continue to give priority to reaching out to Black community leaders and religious figures in Milwaukee and around the state.

Organizers and party leaders, for their part, assert that they have continued to develop effective turnout strategies aimed at the Black community and are optimistic that they will turn out votes. After the 2016 election, the state Democratic Party revamped their voter engagement and turnout strategies, notably by setting up teams to specifically target Black voters. In the previous six years, a number of Black voter engagement organizations have sprouted up in the state, while those that already existed have mainly expanded.

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