Just like Atlanta. Finally. Except not quite in the way Charlotte elites had always planned.
The Charlotte Observer got it wrong again. Republicans weren’t the big losers in the Charlotte City Council races yesterday, as they reported. The GOP lost any significant influence it had in Charlotte years ago. No, the big losers yesterday were the white Democrat elites, who I like to call the uptown crowd. Yesterday, they lost control of the city.
Republicans will never hold a majority on the Charlotte City Council again, the Observer accurately reported. And if a 9-2 Democrat victory is what happens in an off year, non presidential election, it is doubtful that the GOP will ever hold a majority on the Charlotte City Council again the Observer opined.
I’d go a step further. It is doubtful if the GOP will ever hold an at-large seat on the Charlotte City Council again.
But that’s not even the biggest story here. That story the Observer missed entirely, as usual. Here’s what they wrote:
There are twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans in the city of Charlotte, and even unaffiliated voters outnumber Republicans. On a map, the moderate-to-conservative southern wedge of the city can’t match the rest of the pie. Democrats’ 2-to-1 edge in registration was reflected almost exactly in the vote: Mayor Anthony Foxx beat Republican Scott Stone about 2-to-1.
Um, yes. But this wasn’t just a Democrat victory. This was an African-American Democrat victory. Democrats may outnumber the GOP by 2-1, but more than half of Democrat voters are black, making them the largest distinct voting group in the city — and the group that determines who wins Democrat primaries, the only ones that matter anymore. The top of the ticket citywide went to three black candidates, Anthony Foxx, Patrick Cannon and David Howard, and two barely known white ones who spent almost no money and did little more than put their names on the ballot, but were swept along anyway.
The white Democrat candidates who won weren’t uptown chosen and groomed and spun through the social ringer of the Charlotte Chamber and the Myers Park Eastover social scene, as they would have been in years past.
When I began reporting here in 1998, bank and business leaders, often through the long arm of the Charlotte Chamber, controlled the political fates of Democrats and the moderate Republicans they allowed to win. The uptown crowd has now completely lost control to the new numero uno power broker in town, the Black Political Caucus of Charlotte Mecklenburg.
Get to know them. They now control the city. At the very least, nothing goes down here anymore without their approval.
This is because Charlotte became the third most moved to destination in the country for African-Americans about 10 years ago, according to the Brookings Institute.
Here’s what I wrote about that in 2005 in Creative Loafing:
Signs of this new migration are everywhere in Charlotte-Mecklenburg: in the schools, at the voting booth and in once solidly white neighborhoods that are now more diverse than ever. Yet, in Mecklenburg County, the trend has attracted little public notice, while the influx of Hispanics has grabbed big headlines.
That’s pretty typical of cities across the South that are fast becoming destinations in the new African American migration, said Robert E. Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. When Hispanics move in, it’s big news, because not many Hispanics have lived here before, said Lang.
“If African-Americans have been there all along, nobody notices [the new ones],” he added.
Between 1990 and 2005, approximately 103,000 new African-Americans called the Charlotte area home. The Hispanic migration during that same period totaled about 60,000.
This is just the transition to African-American political control that I predicted for years finally registering at the ballot box in a spectacular way. This is why the DNC is holding its convention here. The Dems won the state in 2008 by turning out Charlotte’s black Democrat population and they are hoping to do it again. This is why Democrat Governor Bev Perdue beat former mayor Pat McCrory on his own turf. And it means that Charlotte will be a very, very different place going forward.
* Headline changed after initial publication.
