Chris Pappas has gently chastised the DA on its communication strategy recently. In News24 yesterday, the celebrated mayor got a touch preachy with his party leadership, suggesting they need to be more pro-black, and even suggested a return to the Maimane era, just with more competent people in charge of the nuts and bolts:

“I think this particular election was about consolidating to a point where we could show South Africa that the DA had stabilised beyond Mmusi Maimane's term, which was largely characterised by inconsistencies and poor management. Mmusi was a great speaker, but not a very good manager. The DA became really inconsistent internally. Those structures, the messaging and party apparatus, and the blue machine are being rebuilt. But you do then have to start asking the questions: When does the DA start to sound more appealing to people? We have the right policies, we have really capable people within the organisation, but it's about what we sound like to South Africans in general."

This doesn’t sound like strong language, but it is about as strongly worded as a politician can be in suggesting the party pivot its electoral strategy without seeming openly hostile to his own colleagues. In the wake of the recent hissy fit over Steenhuisen's new office manager, some in the DA appear to have forgotten that our country votes according to race, and believes they can break out of the 4% ceiling on their voter representation among the black population. Black people just don't like voting for minorities, on the whole, and the DA cannot reliably keep control of their minority base by pivoting to black leadership either.

Let us take note of Pappas's electoral target here - 30%.

And Pappas is not alone - Geordin Hill-Lewis and Leon Schreiber have proven to be rather left-wing in their instinctive approaches too, and while GHL’s PR agent (a rather serious EFF supporter herself, but otherwise rather sharp) has pushed an image of an efficient technocrat, much of his public statements have tended to be in the direction of boasting of the vest quantity of free services he can give the black population, while Schreiber has a long history of rather serious socialist leanings, some of which are alarmingly cavalier.

This group of young men are poised to take over the party leadership after the departure of Helen Zille, and have an enormous amount of influence. Whatever one may think of Zille, she is much more pragmatic, having lived through the debacle of Mmusi Maimane’s leadership and been responsible for the post-Maimane pivot to the centre.

Pappas gained wide acclaim for his attainment of a major voting margin in a majority black constituency in the heart of KwaZulu Natal. His public presentation is as a hyper-progressive, Zulu-speaking gay man with a fluent knowledge of African cultural forms, which is part of what earned him his spot on the TIME100 feature last year. He is a real advertisement for a progressive liberal’s notion of the rainbow nation.

The district actually has an unusually high percentage of white residents for KZ (22.9%), but it is low enough a proportion to make the DA’s 2021 results (47% of the vote) look superficially impressive. But when one takes into account the relative rates of voter participation between races, it looks a bit less so.

A quick glance at the map below, where I overlaid a racial census dotmap from Adrian Frith’s delightful interactive resource gives us a hint here (though you may have to zoom in to see the colour of the dots).

According to Gareth van Onselen’s polling research, white voters are 12.2% of the voters’ roll despite being 7.3% of the census population.

“With regard to the core 2024 election indicators, all three minority groups (White voters, 74.6%, Coloured voters, 57.9% and Indian voters, 61.5%) turned out to a higher degree than their Black counterparts (55.2%) and, being the majority of all voters, Black voters were thus primarily responsible for the low general turnout figure, of 58.6%.”

This is a change from the last general election, but only for the white population, who voted well above their usual rate, likely out of fear of an ANC reunion coalition. From the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in 2019:

“Approximately 58% of black South African and Indian/Asian respondents reported having voted, while 60% of Coloured and 61% of white South Africans reported doing so”

So what are Umngeni’s demographics? According to the 2022 census, 66.7% black, 2.3% coloured, 7,6% Indian, and 22,9% white.

We don’t know the voting registration rates for any group except whites, so we are forced to assume nonwhites register at the same rate. Given that the turnout rates are comparable across these groups in both general elections, this is a reasonable assumption.

This gives us a white overrepresentation factor of 1.67. This means that white people in Umngeni account for 38.3% of the voters roll in Umngeni. Using this and the voter turnout rate, we can calculate the rough turnout at the voters booth - 44.2% white, 47.9% black, 6% Indian and 1,7% coloured.

Now at the national level, according to van Onselen’s research, only 4% of the black population vote for the DA, which moves two percentage points in Umngeni from the 47.9% of the population which is black, onto the DA’s column. Other minorities vote in the majority for the DA too, which makes explaining Pappas’s victory possible by simply appealing to small changes in racial voter participation.

Merely taking the known support rates from the 2019 report on DA electoral performance, one gets 42,47%. This is almost exactly what they got in 2016, before Pappas showed up - 41%. Pappas benefitted a great deal from the chaos of the ANC’s relative decline, and got about the upper limit of what can be expected, at 47%.

But the recent national elections indicate this might be a somewhat fickle lead. While the municipal level voting statistics are not readily available from the IEC website, the recent 2024 election saw a visible loss on the electoral map from the DA to the MK party, meaning that the 5% increase from 2016 to 2021 was almost certainly a protest vote, and not hard support.

The idea that the left-wing cohort of young white men in the DA are the best source of electoral strategy advice is dubious at best, since the party’s performance among non-whites remains negligible.

Moving 5% in a 22% white constituency is one thing, even if it is flimsy. But moving 10% in a 7,3% white constituency is a much steeper challenge than Pappas's strategy has any empirical right to hope for, and the DA going any further left would make them indistinguishable from the ANC, whom they are already beginning to resemble in their policies.

That would make them entirely unworthy of support by anyone.

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