Why black voters trust the DA but won’t cast their ballots: Katzenellenbogen

Key topics:DA must win more Black voters to challenge ANC dominanceTrust high, but Black voter support for DA remains lowRace politics seen as key barrier to DA growth.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Jonathan Katzenellenbogen*.How the DA can attract many more black voters to grow has been a key question for the party for a long time.If the party is to take a big leap beyond its nearly 22 percent of the total vote obtained in the 2024 elections and mount a decisive challenge against the ANC, it needs many more votes from black people. The black voter registration rate is presently below that of other racial groups. But the declining share of racial minorities in the total population means that if the DA is to grow over the long-term, it needs to attract many more black voters. A big test for the future of the DA is whether it can, at a stretch, achieve an outright majority that might make it easier for Helen Zille to turn Johannesburg around. This is key to Zille being secure as Mayor and not dependent on the fickle support of other parties, who might thwart her getting on with the job of turning Johannesburg around. If Zille can turn around the city, the DA could establish its credentials to turn around the country. .Read more:.TCS: ANC, DA face-off in metros as voter turnout hits new lows.While the DA is almost certain to become the largest party in the Council, achieving an outright majority is looking uncertain. A poll commissioned by the Social Research Foundation, SRF, conducted last month, shows that the DA will only obtain roughly 39 percent of the vote. This is although 84 percent of voters polled believe that service delivery would improve if the party won. That 39 percent is 15 percentage points above what the party achieved in Johannesburg in the national vote last year. In electoral terms that amounts to a very large gain between elections, but perhaps achievable given the feeling of desperation among Johannesburg voters.Among Johannesburg Black voters, the SRF poll shows that 80 percent believe conditions where they live will improve under the DA, but only 25 percent intend to vote for the party. Among Coloured voters, 43 percent say the DA will do a good job, and 55 percent say they will vote for the party. For the Indian voters polled, 64 percent trust the party and would vote for the party. And for Whites, trust is at 97 percent, and 82 percent of those polled say they would vote for the party. The main proviso to the poll is that its relatively small sample size translates into a wide margin of error of 4.4 percent. Further, the election date has not been announced, and the poll date could be as far off as early next year.Why do 55 percent of the black voters polled trust that the DA will deliver, but are not prepared to vote for the party?This sounds bizarre. Here we have voters, in effect, saying that the DA will do a great job in improving their lives, but they are not prepared to vote for it. Some would rather vote for the ANC, or other comrade parties like the EFF and MK, or not vote at all rather than dare to vote for the DA. This is a familiar pattern in DA polling, and the closer we are to the election, the greater the percentage of black people who will actually vote for the party drops off. Gareth van Onselen, a pollster at Victory Research, who oversaw the SRF poll, says this occurred in the run-up to the 2024 election. The overriding reason for the yawning gap between faith that the DA can deliver and being prepared to vote for the DA is the effectiveness of the race card that is drawn out on the eve of elections. It is not necessarily front and centre of an ANC campaign, but it emerges as a major threat. Never mind that the DA is by far the most multiracial of SA parties; the ANC, and much of the media and academic elite repeatedly call it a “White party.” Black DA leaders are assumed to do the bidding of their White masters. If a Black DA leader has problems, many in the media know that they can go big on a story based on the White party trope.And come election time, the claims that the DA wants to bring back apartheid and end social grants are often added to reinforce the message. These are all the equivalent of the “swart gevaar” used by the National Party years ago.With the ANC crumbling and with its record one of massive unemployment and corruption, it does not have much to campaign on, apart from the race card. And as the other comrade parties, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) and uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) cannot present a successful policy record, they resort to populist racial nationalism. This is all powerful stuff that the DA needs to confront. Its best bet is to show that it does govern better wherever it is in power. Over time voters will see race-baiting by the comrade parties for what it is: an attempt to defend against evidence of failure. And over time there will be a lot more prominent Black leaders in the DA. Black voter support for the DA is rising gradually, but this is restricted because of the party’s failure to pick up the many votes that are being shed from the ANC.Calculating the ways in which the vote goes by race is painstaking. The Electoral Commission of SA does not identify voters by race, but using census data allows the racial make-up of the 23,000-voting district to be identified with some accuracy. While the DA may be keen to show its very mixed racial make-up to counter claims that it is a White party, the figure which shows its penetration among Black voters is closely held back, perhaps because it is so low. For years it has been in the region of five to ten percent. Based on the figures provided in Gareth van Onselen’s paper on support by race of the major political parties in the 2024 national election, the DA share of the black vote was around nine percent. A DA insider says the level of 25 percent support among Black voters for the DA in Johannesburg in the SRF poll would be “fantastic”, as it is far above that in the 2024 polls. And the figure of 80 percent of black voters polled who think their lives would be improved by the DA shows that a lot of people think highly of the DA. The share of Black voters supporting the DA has grown from a little more than 9 percent at the 2004 national elections to 14 percent in 2024. .Read more:.Using the DA’s economic reform agenda to challenge ANC policy: Katzenellenbogen.All the DA can do is persist and show its successes where it governs. As the situation in ANC-controlled areas deteriorates, and as frustration grows at the collapse of service delivery, voters will increasingly give the DA a good hearing, even in a crowded arena..*Jonathan Katzenellenbogen is a Johannesburg-based freelance journalist. His articles have appeared on DefenceWeb, Politicsweb, as well as in a number of overseas publications. Katzenellenbogen has also worked on Business Day and as a TV and radio reporter and newsreader. He has a Master's degree in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

Why black voters trust the DA but won’t cast their ballots: Katzenellenbogen

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