Alvin Greene - The Considered Choice of SC Democrats for the Senate

Members of the House and Senate are generally not held in high regard by Americans in recent years and they are held in still lower regard now than ever.  Republicans all over the country are looking for candidates who will be more serious about ruling the country constitutionally.  What are Democrats doing?  We have an interesting datum in the Democrat primary in South Carolina in the race for the Democrat nomination for the Senate as candidate to face the Republican incumbent Jim DeMint.  Now, Jim DeMint is someone the Democrats find pretty annoying, so one would think they would be eager to replace him in the Senate.

The Democrat primary decision was between Vic Rawl, a white American who was a former state representative and a circuit judge and Alvin Greene, a black American with no job, living with his parents, no campaign organization and no campaign website.  Mr. Greene does have a felony arrest for showing a pornographic picture to a young college woman.  It also appears that Mr. Greene may have less than average intelligence.  Of course, nothing says a man with no job and with less than average intelligence can run for the Senate.  It is not, in fact, clear that he would be entirely out of place in the Senate.

424,893 Republicans voted in the South Carolina primary, while only 197,380 Democrats voted in the primary.  Of the Republican voters, 97.1% voted for a Senate candidate, but among the Democrats only 86.2% did.  Of the 170,221 Democrats who voted for the Senate race candidate, Greene won 59% of the vote or about 100,430 votes.  In the 2008 Democrat primary between Obama, Clinton, and Edwards, 530,000 votes were cast and 55% of these, or about 291,500 votes, went to Obama.  In that vote, 55% of the Democrat voters were black, which again is about 291,500 voters.  The 100,430 votes Greene needed was only about a third of this number.

No Senator from South Carolina has ever been black.  Alvin Greene very likely could count on the majority of black votes because he was black and might become the first black Senator ever from South Carolina.   In addition, this novel chance to vote for a black man for the Senate, may have drawn more black Democrats to the polls than usually would appear for a non-presidential year vote.  It is also said that being listed first on the ballot is commonly worth about 5% of the vote, which is where Greene was listed.  So, if Greene received all the votes of black Democrats and they were the same 55% of the Democrat voters they were in the 2008 primary and he got a 5% boost for being listed first, then Greene would have 60% of the votes.  Perhaps a few black voters did not vote for him, because he only got 59% of the vote.

Despite this plausible explanation of Greene's victory over Rawl, there was much speculation, entirely without evidence, that Republicans had somehow manipulated Greene's win.  Yet, the Republican primary to choose a gubernatorial candidate was the big draw and the Republican turnout was twice the Democrat turnout.  There was no evidence for significant Republican cross-over to vote in the uninteresting Democrat primary.  There was speculation that the Republicans paid the $10,400 registration fee to be put on the ballot for Greene, but no one can offer a good reason why they would do that.  Greene says he paid the fee with money he saved while in the Army.

It appears clear that the Democrats were simply reluctant to allow that their voters would pick such an unqualified man for the Senate.  But they did and the Rawl attempt to have a re-do on the primary has been rejected.  The effort to get Mr. Greene to resign his candidacy has failed.  Alvin Greene will be the Democrat standard bearer against Jim DeMint in the 2010 election.  The Democrat elitists will just have to be embarrassed by this equal opportunity candidate, who appears to have won the primary election fair and square.  This does not say much positive about the seriousness and responsibility of South Carolina Democrats, but that is no surprise.  How do you think we got a House and a Senate which are so little respected?