This brief outlines the strategy that African Americans should adopt in the 1996 elections. Rather than ignoring the major races, local races should be seen as tied to the overall success of the Democratic party and local party organizations should be revitalized to concentrate on getting out the vote.
African Americans' political strategy for the 1996 presidential election needs to be adapted to unusual circumstances. The Democratic candidate, President Clinton, holds a clear lead and his challenger is regarded as having small chance of being elected. While many African Americans may view Clinton as simply being the lesser of two evils it is certainly clear that the Republican party does not offer an alternative. The reaction to this situation may be complacency. Voters may simply assume that Clinton will be elected, as the media has been telling them for months, and that there is no need for them to get out and vote. Many voters are not convinced that Clinton himself has much to offer the African American community and so they will allow someone else to elect him. While this attitude seems reasonable it is, in fact, the road to the continuing decline of African American influence in national politics.
African American influence has reached its low point within the Democratic party. People are not interested in working within an organization that seems to place their concerns very low on the list of priorities. Some have suggested that African Americans' best course of action would be to work outside the party, from the local level, in order to create "a parallel system of political organization rivaling those of the major parties [that] would give local bargainers and candidates the ability to include local political commitment in national bargaining scenarios" (Walters 205). This solution is only partially correct -- the African American communities need to build on the Democratic party organizations that already e...