Race and Crime In The Big City: The Baltimore States’ Attorney Race (Part 2)

This is Part 2 in a continuing series about the surprising result in the 2010 Democratic primary for States’ Attorney for the City of Baltimore.

For a broad overview of what’s going here, check out Part 1.

Here’s where I lay out how I’m going to try to answer the question of why I was so surprised to see Gregg Bernstein get elected as Baltimore’s next State’s Attorney when everything I’d assumed about Baltimore politics and the politics of race in America told me that result would be nearly impossible.  

I don’t have the precinct data for the 2010 Primary yet, so here I’m laying out more of my methodology and what I’ll be looking for in the data when I obtain it.

In preparation for the 2010 number crunching, I classified the city’s precincts (using data from Dave’s Redistricting App) into six categories as follows:

Type I. Predominantly White (non-Hispanic), less than 30% Black, low (<5%)Hispanic and Asian.

Map Color: Red

These 58 precincts are mostly out in the periphery of the city. (Note that while there are predominantly white precincts in central Baltimore, most of them are covered by one of the other categories.) Most but not all are lower-density neighborhoods; some are affluent while others are working class. The precinct with the highest percentage of white residents (96%) is found in the Locust Point neighborhood.    

Type II. Significant (>5%) Hispanic population.

Map Color: Green

With two exceptions (one in far NW Baltimore, the other in Brooklyn in the far south), these 17 precincts are clustered in the Fells Point, Canton, and Highlandtown areas. Nearly all of them are majority non-Hispanic white; the highest Hispanic concentration is in a precinct in Upper Fells Point, an area whose streets have acquired a definite Latino flavor at 32%.    

Type III. Significant (>5%) Asian population.

Map Color: Yellow

Identified primarily with the education and medical industries, the Asian population of Baltimore is concentrated heavily in a corridor that runs from the Inner Harbor through Midtown up to Charles Village, where Johns Hopkins University is located. A few precincts in the Hampden area (which is also near JHU’s main campus) also narrowly qualify. Most of these 23 precincts have a white majority while a few are majority black; the closest district to having an Asian plurality is, not surpringly, the one containing JHU’s Homewood campus at 24%. As a group they are the most racially integrated category of precincts.  

Type IV. Whites largest group, Black >30%, low (<5%)  Hispanic and Asian.  

Map Color: Gray

These 12 precincts can be found all over the city, but one cluster of them are located in northeast Baltimore along Harford Road area and another cluster of them can be found in northwest Baltimore along Northern Parkway.  

Type V. Blacks largest group, White >30%, low (<5%) Hispanic and Asian

Map Color: Aqua/Teal

These 18 precincts are also scattered across the city, but a large number of them are clustered in northeast Baltimore near Morgan State.

Type VI. Predominantly Black, less than 30% White, low Hispanic and Asian (<5%)

Map Color: Blue

Dark blue covers the majority of the map, as you’d expect in a city with overall demographics like Baltimore’s. Not all the areas covered by these 163 precincts are created equal. Some are dense while others resemble suburbs; some are prosperous while others are very poor. Overlooking one precinct in East Baltimore with 5 residents, I found one West Baltimore precinct that contained 1576 residents, 11 of them identifying as something other than Black.

(Note: If it proves useful, I may draw a finer distinction between precincts where there is a non-trivial non-Black minority that’s still less than 30% vs. precincts where essentially no one else lives.)

And these Type VI precincts are going to be the most interesting to study. To what extent did they abandon Patricia Jessamy? Did they do so uniformly or did her re-election campaign have a tighter grip on some areas than others? Did the gentrification of a few of these areas make a noticeable difference?    

Unfortunately for me, Baltimore City has done a fair amount of precinct consolidation between the map that appears in the Redistricting App and the 2006 election, making my job a lot harder. In some cases I was forced to conclude in some cases that the demographic data was wrong based on precinct results (I doubt that a precinct that Dave’s App says is 90% black and a precinct where Ben Cardin got triple the votes of Kweisi Mfume are truly one and the same) but the more correction of that nature one does, the greater the danger of assuming one’s conclusions. I used my best judgment but there’s still going to be some noise in those numbers.  

So, armed with a precinct address list, I also sliced the city up into 20 unequal zones, clusters of broadly similar neighborhoods that I tried to group together in as logical a fashion as I could. I’ll explain the zones in Part 3.  

Zone Legend

1. Brooklyn & Cherry Hill (dark blue)

2. Federal Hill/Locust Pt. (dark green)

3. Southwest Baltimore (purple)

4. Edmondson (red)

5. West Baltimore (mustard yellow)

6. Near West Baltimore (teal)

7. Downtown & Midtown (gray)

8. East Baltimore (blue-gray)

9. Fells Point & Canton (light blue)

10. Highlandtown (magenta)

11. Frankford (bright green)

12. Northeast Baltimore (pale blue)

13. Northwood/Govans (tan)

14. Waverly/Montebello (olive)

15. Roland Park/Homeland (orange)

16. Charles Village (light green)

17. Hampden (dark blue-gray)

18. Mt. Washington/Cross Country (light yellow)

19. Park Heights (yellow-green)

20. Forest Park/Arlington (light pink)

I’ll go into more detail on these in Part 3. But for now…the Federal Hill, Fells Point, Highlandtown, Roland Park/Homeland, Hampden, and Mt. Washington zones are predominantly white. The Brooklyn/Cherry Hill, Southwest Baltimore, Downtown/Midtown, Northeast Baltimore, and Charles Village areas are somewhat racially mixed. The remaining nine zones are predominantly black.  

OK, now that that’s out of the way…here are the assumptions about the data I’m going to be getting that I’m looking to test….

1. Primary turnout across the board was lower in 2010 than in 2006.

* Among Baltimore City residents, this election turned out to be the major primary contest this season, catching the lion’s share of the headlines. None of Governor O’Malley, Senator Mikulski, or the three incumbent U.S. House Democrats who represent parts of the city had serious primary challengers. There was one high-profile State Senate race (out of six in the city total) in District 46 where veteran George Della was challenged by plucky newcomer Bill Ferguson; other than that, the legislative races were mostly relatively quiet.  

* In 2006 there was a hotly contested primary for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Paul Sarbanes, in which Kweisi Mfume and Ben Cardin attracted most of the attention, and a free-for-all battle for the MD-03 seat left vacant by Cardin. There was also much more activity in the legislative races than this year, particularly in the District 40 where two delegates and a host of others contested a vacant State Senate seat while another crowd of hopefuls did battle for the three House of Delegates seats.  

I’ll be looking for turnout drops in different types of precincts and different parts of the city to see if any pattern emerges.

2. There is little demographic spread between the Democratic primary electorate and the general electorate as a whole, both compared to what one might normally assume and the state of the electorate in 2006.  

* I’ve explained that Maryland is a closed-primary state, that the Democratic primary is the “real” election in Baltimore City, etc. enough times.  

* However, there’s been even less reason to register Republican recently. 1996 was the last year the Republican primary was a bigger event than the Democratic one at the Presidential level. There hasn’t been a truly competitive high-profile GOP primary for any state office since 1994. There has been pretty strong incentives, even for conservatives, to get in on the Democratic action, especially in Baltimore, whether it was Obama vs. Clinton, the ’07 mayoral contest, or the ’06 Mfume vs. Cardin Senate primary. (This state of affairs, BTW, will change considerably in 2012, with a likely contentious GOP nomination.)  

* The result I’m positing is a somewhat more conservative Democratic primary electorate, as many of those new votes are the ones who might have registered Republican or remained unenrolled but for the conditions I outline below. (There is a danger in reading too much into anecdotes, but I did see a fair number of Bernstein’s signs on the same yards as Bob Ehrlich signs.)

To test this proposition I’ll be looking for a change in the number of Republican voters as well. While the contest between Bob Ehrlich and Brian Murphy for the GOP gubernatorial nomination was not exactly a thriller, it was at least more interesting than what usually appears on their primary ballots most midterm years.

3. Jessamy received a very low share of the white vote in 2010.

* Anecdotally, I found literally zero support for Jessamy amongst my white friends and neighbors, and that’s probably a more liberal group than is found in the city as a whole.  (Anecdotes of course don’t equal data, but it’s part of a greater pattern.)

* My commute and travels have taken me through most neighborhoods in Baltimore at least once during the run-up to this election. While I did see a fair number of signs endorsing Jessamy, I never saw a single sign supporting her candidacy in any neighborhood I knew to be populated mostly by whites. (For what it’s worth I did see a handful of Bernstein signs in mostly black neighborhoods, but they were far outnumbered by signs for Jessamy.)  

* Getting into real numbers now….Stephen Fogleman, despite not running much of a campaign, actually carried a majority of the city’s predominantly white precincts when he ran against Jessamy in 2006. They don’t do exit polls for races like this, so some extrapolation and interpolation are necessary, but I would guess Fogleman got about half of the white votes.  So that portion of the electorate was clearly  primed to vote against her a second time.  

* If I do find some significant support for Jessamy in any of the predominantly white areas, I’ll be looking for distinctions between where it is found and where it is not found. Looking at 2006 I found a slightly larger, though still not especially dramatic, gap among white neighborhoods between those I knew to have a reputation for being hotbeds of progressive activity (e.g. Bolton Hill, Roland Park, Mt. Washington) and those that do not have such a reputation (e.g. Federal Hill, Highlandtown.) I’ll be looking for convergence or divergence.

I will look to compare Jessamy’s performance across these precincts with numbers from other races – Obama’s general election 2008 performance, the Mfume vs. Cardin Senate primary, the Clinton vs. Obama 2008 Presidential primary –  to see if there’s any correlation; and there could be a glaring pattern since, unlike with mostly black precincts in Baltimore, there’s often a fairly wide range. It’ll also be interesting to see how much those numbers compare and contrast with each other.    

* I’m not sure what exactly I mean by “very low.” Probably something like a reversal of what Fogleman got in predominantly black precincts in 2006, somewhere between 15-20%. Or perhaps a little lower.

4. The African-American share of the vote dropped significantly from 2006 to 2010.

* As described in #3 above, the pool of mostly  white swing voters eligible to participate in the Democratic primary increased with Democratic registration gains in Maryland. It’s going to be tough for me to separate out the validity of this assumption vs. the increase in marginal Democratic votes given the racial demographics of those marginal voters skew heavily white.  

* In the ensuing four years there has been some level of gentrification and migration. A new population of singles, young couples and empty-nesters has moved into Baltimore as family households continued (albeit more slowly than previously) to leave; when the discussion is limited to recent years, the latter group was generally more heavily African-American than the former. To test this proposition, I’m keeping my eye on the Near West Baltimore zone, a cluster of neighborhoods known to be current centers of gentrifying activity; if they moved away from Jessamy at a significantly higher rate than the other mostly-black zones, it would suggest gentrification was a factor behind the changes.  

* Though both 2010 and 2006 were federal midterm elections, there was no high-level draw to the polls that could compare to Barack Obama or Kweisi Mfume to drive up turnout in the African-American community. To test this factor, I’m looking to see if there’s a large racial gap in the turnout drop, or, alternately, if turnout rates in zones consisting mostly of low-income areas fell further than those with many middle-class residents.

* As I said above, of all the various legislative races, the one that got the most attention was the 46th District Senate race, the other contests being relatively quiet. Of the six legislative districts in Baltimore, the only one that isn’t majority black is…the 46th, which contains all the waterfront areas of Baltimore and is about 60% white.  

* There are no exit polls for races like this, so I’m going to have to compare the percentage of votes that came from Type 6 precincts in the two years and draw my conclusions about the changing demographic makeup primarily from that.  

5. The Latino community had relatively little impact on this race.

* On the one hand, I’d expect this community to be wary of a “law-and-order” candidate in the wake of what’s going on in Arizona and elsewhere; on the other hand, neither candidate mentioned immigration law and there is some indication that perhaps the Latino community in this area has been targeted, as Hispanics have been the victims of some recent high-profile homicides and robberies. Since the Latino community in Baltimore is mostly recent arrivals, many of whom will not be eligible or registered to vote, I’d expect their impact on the election to be relatively low.

* I’ll be looking for a spike in Bernstein support here out of proportion to the rest of the city, with the caveat that these were mostly areas where opposition to Jessamy was already fairly high. (Of my 20 zones, Highlandtown gave Jessamy her worst numbers in the city in ’06.) If I see Jessamy losing fewer votes here than elsewhere, perhaps it’s because a growing Latino community is a bit concerned about a States’ Attorney office too closely aligned with law enforcement.  

6. For the purposes of elections such as this one, the Asian vote is approximately functionally equivalent to the White vote.

 * This assumption will be tough to prove or disprove. Jessamy in 2006 did slightly better in the Type 3 precincts  than in the Type 1 or 2 precincts; I would tend to attribute this to those areas mostly being diverse generally than to anything specific about Asian voting patterns. There could a lot of reasons for this that have nothing to do with the Asian vote, but I will be watching for a different rate of movement to Bernstein in these areas than I see from other similar precincts with lower Asian populations.

The biggest X-factor here is to what extent the African-American vote moved towards Bernstein. While Bernstein couldn’t have won without at least some movement, there’s more than one way to win an election, even in Baltimore. If there was a class-based distinction for Jessamy’s default support in the black community it didn’t show up in a major way in the 2006 results. She appears to have won a slightly smaller share of the vote in predominantly middle- or upper-middle class black areas than in predominantly poor areas. Overall, her default level of support in the Type 6 precincts was somewhere in the 80% range.  What I’ll be looking for most in these precincts in 2010 is whether that small gap widened, stayed roughly the same, or reversed itself.

The other possible factor, to what extent there’s an anti-incumbency mood afoot in 2010, is going to prove more elusive to quantification in this instance. That this incumbent did markedly worse in 2010 than in 2006 could be a sign that more people wanted incumbents out of office, or it could be an indication that the challenger in the 2010 race ran a much stronger campaign.  

This all boils down to two questions:

1. Did people change their mind, and if so, what groups of people changed their mind the most?

2. Was the underlying electorate significantly different, and if so, how and why?

To be continued….