By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 8, 2006

Ike Leggett's victory party looked like a Hollywood version of the American political dream. Whites, blacks, Chinese, Koreans and Hispanics all turned out to celebrate the first black man elected Montgomery County executive.

Only 10 percent of the county is black.

"Ike's been in the county for so long, I guess race isn't an issue for him anymore," said county resident Robert Ford, a 35-year-old black firefighter.

Leggett's victory, coupled with other racial milestone elections, would seem to raise the question: When will it be time to retire the phrase "the first black to . . . " from electoral politics?

Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to make a bid for the presidency, did that 30-something years ago. Can we think of something else to say now?

The issue won't be passe "until we have the first black president, then it's over," noted David A. Bositis, senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

In the meantime, Democrat Deval Patrick has become the first black governor of Massachusetts (and only second in the nation elected after Reconstruction, after Virginia's Doug Wilder). Patrick, it seems, is so over that.

"I don't think [race] has been an issue in the campaign because I'm not offering to be just the first black governor," he told Reuters.

Michael Steele in Maryland and Harold Ford in Tennessee ran formidable Senate campaigns -- Ford in a former Confederate state. Each took a centrist stand on most issues. Neither emphasized race, and tried to transcend it in their general campaigns (except, of course, when they were talking with black voters). They each drew white votes.

But there's the inexorable tide of history: The number of black elected officials in the nation has grown every single year since 1970 , according to the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

There are 42 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, one black senator, 613 blacks in statewide office, and about 9,000 more at local levels.

Throw in Colin Powell and the two most recent African Americans touted as presidential timber, Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, and really, race seems to be moving into the rearview mirror.

But race is never that simple in America. Blacks, along with Native Americans, were assigned the lowest status in a nation that billed itself as an unfettered democracy. Black citizens became, in Albert Murray's famous phrase, the "omni Americans," the uniquely American population that was most vehemently denied participation in the body politic.

So to consider the full range of the electoral issue, let's take up a couple of theories.

First, the Geography Corollary. This holds that the vestiges of slavery and segregation are with us still, and therefore racial milestones matter more in the former Confederacy than in the North.

To wit: Black man elected governor in Massachusetts: Nice. Black man elected governor in Mississippi: HOLY COW.

Which is also why Ford's bid to become the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction took on such significance.

"It's sad we're even having this discussion six years into the 21st century, but the fact is it's still a big deal when former states of the Confederacy elect a black person to statewide office," says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, assistant professor of political science at Princeton University and author or "Barbershops, Bibles and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought."

Elsewhere, though, it's not much of a headline anymore.

To illustrate: Colorado, which is 4 percent black, has twice elected blacks as lieutenant governor, and Denver, the majority-white biggest city in the state, elected a black mayor. Like Leggett, it just wasn't a big deal.

Geography is a good theory, but maybe not quite all of it. This brings up the How Many Black People Does It Take to Make White Voters Nervous hypothesis.

This theory, which overlaps to some extent with the above, holds that race tends to matter in direct proportion to the percentage of black people present in the jurisdiction. The more black people present, the less likely they are to draw white voters. The fewer black people in the population, the less race is an issue in the election.

"The states with significant black populations -- Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina -- is where you see race matters most, where you have few or no blacks elected to statewide office," says Bositis, of the Joint Center. The states with black populations that are sort of modest, that's when it tends to matter least."

This is where you get into ironies.

Mississippi, the state with the highest proportion of black residents, at about 36 percent, is also the state with the highest number of black elected officials -- 892.

How many are in statewide office?

Democrat Barbara Blackmon, a black legislator, ran for lieutenant governor in 2003 against white Republican Amy Tuck. It said something that two women were competing for the office, but Blackmon got creamed.

Also, you might think Mississippi Republican Trent Lott might be vulnerable to a black challenger after that racial gaffe with Strom Thurmond, loss of power in Senate, etc., etc.

You would be wrong.

Yesterday he clobbered Erik R. Fleming, a Democrat in the state House of Representatives.

"A black official elected to statewide office would be a huge milestone for Mississippi . . . but it's just not going to happen soon," says Richard Forgette, chairman of the political science department at the University of Mississippi. "In counties where there are high percentages of African Americans, that's where black officials win. It's as simple as that."

Meanwhile, back at Leggett's party, people milled about sipping wine, munching crackers and cheese cubes.

"I don't know that we ever really thought race," said campaign manager Fran Brenneman, who is white. "Ike went to churches, mosques, temples and synagogues. It just didn't come up."

Leggett, working the room late last night, said the answer to his easy election was Montgomery County voters. "You have to give credit to citizens who were prepared to vote across racial lines. They began voting for me in 1985 and have known me ever since."

Geography, diversity, black candidates: America on election night, in search of a new theory.