Seeking Votes and Clout

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he plans to travel to the Soviet Union to meet with leaders there and to West Germany to talk to American soldiers about the racism they encounter abroad. He will also urge them to register and cast absentee ballots.

One serious qualm for Jackson is the stress that a campaign would put on Jacqueline and their three sons and two daughters, who range in age from seven to 20. Although he has a $52,000 salary from Operation PUSH and is paid up to $2,000 for some of his speeches, Jackson has no real financial security. His three-story stucco house in a black middle-class section of Chicago needs painting. He owns only three suits and two pairs of dress shoes. His car is a black Buick station wagon. Despite his showy public style, he leads a rather simple private life: his favorite recreation being a game of basketball on his backyard court. His frenetic pace on the road is occasionally slowed slightly by a mild case of sickle-cell anemia, a hereditary blood disease that affects blacks.

A Jackson campaign would initially concentrate on nine Southern states with a high proportion of black voters. A July survey of those states by Atlanta Pollster Claibourne Darden indicated that Jackson had the support of 42% of black Democrats and independents, and less than 1% support among whites. Because the party's rules generally require a candidate to win 20% of the vote in a district in order to collect any delegates, analysts say that unless Jackson picks up significant white support he will probably win no more than 250 out of the 3,931 total. That would afford him very little bargaining power at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco. Says Darden: "For Jackson to stay in and get 8% of the vote, and that's optimistic, what has he done? He'll have given John Glenn the nomination, and Glenn won't owe him anything."

Such conventional electoral calculus does not seem uppermost in Jackson's mind as he weighs running. His crusade would have other goals: stimulating as many new voters as possible to register; inspiring other blacks to follow his lead and seek offices on their own; forcing white candidates as well as blacks to raise and consider issues that are important to minorities. "My running will stimulate thousands to run; it would make millions register," he says. "If you can get your share of legislators, mayors, sheriffs, school-board members, tax assessors and dogcatchers, you can live with whoever is in the White House." His goal, he says, is "parity," a fair share of elected offices for blacks.

He is attempting to pressure the other candidates into confronting the issue of voting-rights enforcement. He has sought a commitment from the Democratic Party and its top leaders to work to erase the requirement in some localities that residents sign up on two separate registration rolls, sometimes in different towns, before they are eligible to vote. More controversial is his desire to eliminate second primaries, which pit an election's two top finishers in a runoff, a system that makes it more difficult for blacks to win where they are not in the majority. In Chicago, for example, which does not have a runoff in its Democratic mayoral primary, Washington was able to win with less than a majority because his two opponents split the white vote.

Most blacks find these goals laudable. Yet Jackson's