It's kind of underrated that,
relative to white turnout, 1988/1992 both had strangely poor black turnout rates, before 1996 went back to normal. LA and MS, two of the blackest states, therefore had weird anomalous left-wing trends in 1996, but while this didn't cause anything
too weird in MS, this together with some sort of regional bonus for Clinton and a Democratic landslide nationally resulted in a fluke double-digit Democratic victory in Louisiana in 1996. (Also, Louisiana elected a Republican Governor in Mike Foster in 1995, and he might've initially been very unpopular; while he was easily reelected in 1999, he came in with many pretty radical changes, like abolishing affirmative action in the state, and I can see the 1996 election being timed at a trough of his unpopularity.) Here's Louisiana relative to the US at elections from 1988-2000:
Louisiana/US/Louisiana-lean:
1988: R+11/R+7/R+4
1992: D+5/D+5/R+0 (LA was actually a little right of the US)
1996: D+12/D+8/D+4
2000: R+8/D+0/R+8
...1996 does look kind of weird. (The 1996/2000 trend looks very large, but it's mostly in line with Arkansas's. Louisiana tends to behave like Mississippi when black turnout is doing something weird, and behave like Arkansas when it isn't -- and those are actually already both pretty weird states).
~~
For something different but related, here's, as measured by Statista,
black voter turnout and
non-Hispanic white voter turnout compared to each other at elections from 1976 to the present. (For 1976, "white" includes Hispanic whites, but this hopefully shouldn't affect the numbers
too much.)
I start at 1976 because it is a trough -- during the voter registration runs of the 1960s and 1970s, the number of registered black voters grew, but many didn't initially have a habit of
voting, even though they were registered. From 1976 until the 2010s black turnout as a percentage of white turnout tends to rise --
except at the elections of 1988 and 1992.
Black voter turnout/(except 1976 non-Hispanic) white voter turnout/Black voter turnout as fraction of white voter turnout:
1976: 48.7%/60.9%/0.80
1980: 50.5%/62.8%/0.80
1984: 55.8%/63.3%/0.88 -- Mondale was very good at getting out the black vote!
1988: 51.5%/61.8%/0.83 -- Dukakis less so
1992: 54.1%/66.9%/0.81 -- black turnout rises, but less so than white turnout
1996: 50.6%/59.6%/0.85 -- white turnout crashes; black turnout much less so
2000: 53.5%/60.4%/0.89 -- black turnout keeps rising in the 2000s, but outweighed by white conservative trend
2004: 56.3%/65.8%/0.86
2008: 60.8%/64.8%/0.94 -- OBAMA
2012: 62.0%/63.0%/0.98 -- !!!!; higher black than "white" turnout, slightly lower than NHW though
2016: 55.9%/64.1%/0.87 -- the Trump electorate is a different world from the Obama electorate!
2020: 58.7%/69.8%/0.84 -- and it doesn't look like Obama's coming back
Anyway, fun bonus conclusion: non-Hispanic white turnout
outright fell between 2004 and 2008. The whole surge in turnout was entirely a minority phenomenon (in addition to black turnout Asian and Hispanic turnout also surged). Also, "ratio of black turnout to white turnout" is a number that changes quite a bit between cycles and whose importance to American politics is underrated. (Though it might be more meaningful if I included a multiplier for 'fraction of the population' -- the NHW fraction of the population is falling faster than the black one, so 0.84 today actually reflects somewhat greater black influence than 0.84 would've in the 1990s.)
