At John’s City Diner in Birmingham, DeJuana Thompson is constantly checking her cellphone for news about the whereabouts of Don Cheadle.
Between fielding calls from donors and volunteers, and speaking to the Guardian, Thompson, an Alabama native who runs an engagement organization called Woke Vote, has been waiting for the actor to land in Birmingham to join an effort to encourage black voters to cast their ballot in the midterm elections on 6 November.
They’ll be campaigning at the Magic City Classic, a big American football game, which features two historically black colleges and universities, Alabama A&M University and Alabama State University. It is an opportunity to “engage black voters in black sacred, culturally connected spaces” – a hallmark of her organization’s mission, Thompson says.
Organisations like Woke Vote have become especially important since 2013, when the supreme court struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which had helped stymie attempts to curtail the voting rights of minorities in Alabama and other southern states.
In the years since, the state has enacted a series of restrictive measures, many of which disproportionately affect African Americans, Latinos and other marginalized groups, making voting harder for them.
Despite this, black voters, especially black women voters, showed their voting power last year when the bloc was credited with being instrumental in the victory of the Democrat Doug Jones, who defeated the Republican Roy Moore in the race for Jeff Sessions’ open Senate seat.
A quarter of Alabama’s electorate is black, but initial post-election results showed that black people constituted 30% of the voter turnout in that race. Black women made up 17% of that night’s electorate, and 98% of them supported Doug Jones.
But the Jones win was a novelty in Alabama’s march toward a more Republican-dominated political environment. Of its seven congressional districts, only one district is represented by a Democrat – Terri Sewell.
According to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, all of the other districts lean heavily Republican. And as of this summer, Donald Trump’s popularity was highest in Alabama. As political observers are not anxiously awaiting the midterm results in the state, Alabama’s black voters are overlooked.
African Americans in the United States, Alabama included, reliably vote Democratic, but don’t reliably turn out to vote at every election. Efforts to get out the vote often fall to outside groups like Thompson’s.
“More blacks and more young people align with Democrats on the big issues, but too many Democrats often take both of those constituencies for granted,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. He believes that the Democratic party treats the “black constituency as a special interest rather than a trusted member of a larger coalition”.
According to Dr Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who studies African American politics, says the “the problem with that is that while you can predict that the people who actually do show up to vote will probably vote about 90% of the time Democratic,” a significant number simply do not cast a vote. “You’ve left low-hanging fruit on the vine,” she said.
Thompson was previously involved at a high level in community engagement at the Democratic National Committee, but found that getting a commitment for large funds to turn out black voters was a tough sell. So, she raised $2.5m to get Woke Vote’s operations started a year ago.
Now it operates in nine states, primarily in the south, including some with the most hotly contested gubernatorial races, such as Georgia and Florida.
But she is clear, “we fundamentally believe [that] in the current political context, change and liberation will happen by operating on the local level.” That’s why Woke Vote is also looking to promote black political leaders of the future.
One of those emerging leaders is Cara McClure, a Birmingham native and alumna of the Woke Vote fellowship program. As a candidate to be the first black person on Alabama’s Public Service Commission, she understands the importance of cultivating relationships within the black community before asking for their vote. We met in a Chick-fil-A in south-east Birmingham five minutes from her home.
As a formerly homeless single mother, she doesn’t have the usual trappings of a typical candidate. But like other Woke Vote fellows, she received training online and in person that “worked on just about everything, even my stump speech”, McClure recalls.
The commission is the “most important state agency that no one knows about” even though it regulates utility prices and hasn’t had a public hearing on utility pricing since 1982 (she mentioned that other states have hearings every three to five years).
In McClure’s opinion, she can now “marry issues of poor, marginalized communities to the work of the Public Service Commission” because while Alabama has one of the lowest average household income rates in the country, it is second highest for utility prices.
As the lone black woman on the nine-person Democratic state ticket, “all of the other candidates are looking to me to turn out the black vote for them,” she said. “It’s a lot of pressure.”
But, McClure asks, “Who’s getting the white vote for me?”
Will black voters in Alabama turn out this year? For Thompson, Volpe and Gillespie, it depends on how meaningfully and consistently black voters are engaged as, in Volpe’s words, “trusted partners”.
