There Are Now Two African-American US Senators

African-Americans make up about 13% of the US population and with today's election of Cory Booker as the new US Senator from New Jersey, their number and percentage in the US Senate has doubled from one to two.


 On this apparently final day of the current round of budget and debt crisis brinkmanship, engineered by, it would seem, the likes of the Koch brothers, their fellow plotters, and their followers (witting or unwitting), it would seem that the election should tell us something about voters' reaction to the Congressional bullying. 

Here are the results:

Overall Result*			99.3% Reporting
Candidate	Party	% of Vote	Vote Count
Winner C. Booker	Dem	54.6%	713,594
S Lonegan	GOP	44.3%	579,388

*Data from Politico as of 1:41am ET

Here, based on the New Jersey State website data on voter registration as of September 2013 are the numbers and percentage of registered voters of the main groups.  (There are a number of small parties that have less than 1% of the population and I've left them out.)

Una	Dem	Rep	Total
2,570,260	1,825,751	1,093,836	5,494,230
47%	32%	20%

So, with 99.3% of the voters counted (I'll round that up to 100%) there werre 1,292,982 votes in this race or 23.5% of registered voters.

Almost half (47%) the registered voters in New Jersey are unaffiliated.
32% are Democrats and 20% are registered as Republicans.


We don't know (at least I haven't found it) what percent of each party voted.  Democrats may have stayed home thinking their candidate had it locked.  Tea Party Republicans would likely have tried to get a larger percentage of their members  But these are just  assumptions.

There's too much missing data about who voted to make any generalizations about whether this election was affected by the Congressional nonsense or whether this can tell us what to expect in the 2014 elections.  My guess is that too much can happen between now and November 2014 to prognosticate how the budget/debt ceiling chicken game will affect them or whether this election can tell us anything.

The only thing I can say is that there doesn't seem to be a backlash against the Democrats or against a statewide Black candidate.