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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > March > 07
Friday, March 7, 2008
Our divided city
Take a look at the map at the top of this page. It’s a precinct-by-precinct representation of the Clinton-Obama primary results from Tuesday for all of Montgomery County.
Focus on the center-right portion of the map, where there is a big blotch of dark red across from a wide spread of light and dark blue. That’s the city of Dayton, and that pattern should look familiar.
It is the same pattern we saw on the precinct map the DDN ran last year on the results of Dayton’s school levy. And that underscores, once again, the racial divide in this city.
Four precinct maps from recent elections follow this same pattern — the Rhine McLin-Mike Turner mayoral race of 2001, the McLin-David Bohardt mayoral race of 2005, the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton primary election earlier this week and the 2007 Dayton school levy.
In all these races, heavily black west Dayton voted strongly one way while heavily white east Dayton voted the other way.
In the case of three of those races — McLin-Turner, McLin-Bohardt and now Clinton-Obama — you had black voters primarily voting for a black candidate and white voters primarily voting for a white candidate.
That’s what makes the school levy results so curious. In that race, mostly black west Dayton voters favored the levy while mostly white voters in east Dayton were opposed.
That’s not something you expect to see in a school levy race. You would not expect voters to identify racially when choosing whether to vote yes or no on school levies. It is a rare electoral pattern.
That was the basis of a controversial story we wrote last year about the influence of race on the levy vote.
The Obama-Clinton results only reiterate the questions we raised.
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