High black turnout could shape US polls: Experts

African-Americans are fired up and ready to vote in the upcoming mid-term elections, and a large black voter turnout could upend predictions of a drubbing for the Democratic Party, experts said Friday.
"If there's a big black turnout, which would not surprise me at all, I do not think there would be as much damage to the Democrats as is being forecast right now," David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies (JCPES), told AFP.
Many pundits have predicted that the November 2 elections will see the Democratic Party lose its majority in the House of Representatives to the Republicans, who need to gain just 39 seats to take control of Congress.
"In 20 of the House districts where the election is competitive, there are a significant number of African-Americans, and they can make a big difference there," said Bositis, who on Thursday released a JCPES report about how African-American turnout could shape the election.
African Americans comprise about 12 percent of the US population and are a reliably Democratic voting bloc.
"Overall, what black voters can certainly help the Democrats do is minimize their losses, and if the Democrats minimize their losses, they could conceivably hold onto the House of Representatives," Bositis told AFP.

"Every Democratic pickup will make the Republicans' goal more difficult to obtain."
Ralph Everett, chief executive officer of the JCPES, said if African American voters turn out to vote in the same high numbers as they did in 2008, when they helped Barack Obama to become the first black US president, they "could end up being the authors of events" in the upcoming polls.
Black turnout in 2008 was practically the same as turnout among white voters, at around 66 percent, even though African Americans are historically less enthusiastic about voting than whites.
The Republican Party has launched its own charm offensive to woo the black vote, fielding 14 African American candidates in the midterms.
But that tactic is unlikely to win over many blacks, who traditionally vote along party, not race lines, said Bositis.
On the other hand, courting the black vote has worked in the past for the Democrats, Bositis says in his report.
In 1986, a massive program to register and mobilize black voters for the midterms resulted in African American turnout being only 3.8 percentage points lower than for whites. The Democratic Party regained a majority in the Senate in that election.
This year, the Democratic National Committee is spending a record three million dollars on advertisements in African American media to ensure that blacks turn out to vote.
African Americans also turned out in their droves for the mid-term elections in 1998, when then president Bill Clinton was under attack from Republicans in Congress.
Black turnout was just 3.7 percentage points lower than for whites and, according to Bositis, that helped the Democrats win five additional seats in the House.
Obama, who is still hugely popular with black Americans, is under attack from Republicans over everything from the health care reforms he has championed to the economy to taxes.
"African Americans are charged up and it would be foolhardy for Obama and the Democratic Party to not go all out to woo the black vote," said Bositis.
"I wouldn't be surprised if there is a substantial black vote and if turnout rates for blacks and whites are fairly similar," he said.
But whether that would be enough to keep Congress in Democratic hands was another question, because high black turnout "would occur in a context of a likely exceptionally high turnout of conservative whites," said demographer Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress.
Eighty percent of black Democrats said they were as interested or more interested in the upcoming elections as they were in the 2008 vote that put Obama in the White House, according to a poll published in the Washington Post.
Ninety percent of all Republicans said the same.