Courting the Black vote in the rural South

Kevin Sack reports in today's New York Times on the importance of Black voter turnout in the mid-term election. The story focuses primarily on the South, including a number of counties and electoral districts in the so-called Black Belt. Sack uses the situation in North Carolina's Eighth Congressional District to illustrate the phenomenon. There, Democrat Larry Kissell, a white man, unseated the Republican incumbent in 2008. But Kissell voted against health care reform, which has turned many of the Black electorate against him.

Here's an excerpt from the story that mentions the rural nature of various districts where Democrats are in trouble:

Without Mr. Obama atop the ticket this year, Mr. Kissell and a number of other vulnerable Democrats, mostly in the rural South, face the challenge of reviving the spirit of 2008 for black voters without alienating right-leaning white majorities in their districts.

That is the only use of the word "rural" in the story, and Sack does not explain or analyze any apparent relevance of the rural-urban axis to this political phenomenon. But the story's dateline is Laurinburg, North Carolina, population 15,874, county seat of Scotland County. On the South Carolina line, nonmetropolitan Scotland County is part of the district that Mr. Kissell represents. Scotland County's population is 37.3% Black, 51.5% white, and nearly 9% American Indian/Alaska Native. It is a high-poverty county where 20.6% of individuals and 17.4% of families are living below the poverty line. It is not a persistent poverty county, but it is contiguous to a cluster of three such counties. (See more detail on poverty among North Carolina's counties here).

Other districts where Democratic representatives are in trouble include these six districts, where Blacks comprise more than 10% of voters: Alabama's 2d; South Carolina's 5th; Georgia's 8th; Mississippi's 1st; Florida's 2d; and Maryland's 1st. See an accompanying NYT graphic here.