Penna Dexter

The midterms brought an interesting lesson in racial politics. Columnist and black conservative activist Star Parker says voting data reveals what she describes as “a fateful anomaly in racial voting in the governor’s race between Democrat Andrew Gillum and Republican Ron DeSantis, now Florida’s governor-elect.”

Mr. Gillum is the former mayor of Tallahassee and was running to become the first black governor of Florida. Star Parker points out that the black enthusiasm we might have expected for him didn’t exactly pan out.

“Racial politics,” she writes, “played a high-profile and nasty role in the Gillum-DeSantis contest.” Gillum lobbed strong and unfair allegations of racism against DeSantis. Yet black young adults posted a significant increase in votes for Republicans over Democrats in this election. In the 2014 midterms, blacks in the 18 to 29 age group voted 88 percent for Democrats. In this election, only 82 percent of blacks in this group voted Democrat.

It’s actually African-American women who made the difference for Ron DeSantis. William Mattox writes in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL that 100,000 of the 650,000 black women who voted in Florida “unexpectedly chose him over the black Democratic candidate, Andrew Gillum.” This is 18 percent of black women supporting the governor-elect. Only 9 percent of this group voted for Republican Senator-elect Rick Scott.

What was the issue that prompted these women’s support for a Republican? School Choice.

Mr. Mattox is Director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute. He points out that four years ago, Florida’s “Gov. Scott narrowly won re-election thanks to a spike in support from school-choice moms.”

Ron DeSantis campaigned on parental choice in education. He voiced his staunch support for retaining and even expanding Florida’s tax-credit funded scholarship program that enables more than 100,000 low-income students to attend private school. Andrew Gillum opposes school choice.

The lesson is: boldly support the conservative policies blacks care about.