Shayla Davis Counted 603,000 Missing Black Voters. We Fought on Air Over Who Has to Go Get Them.

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The Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation counted 603,000 missing Black voters. Shayla Davis and Kenn Dowell went at it on The RealPower Radio Show over who has to go get them. The election is over. The question isn’t.

Shayla Davis's son was born into this.

He grew up on the campaign trail. He worked his own mother's races. He's 28 now, college educated, self-employed, doing well. And in 2024 he told her he was done. Performative, he said. Rhetoric.

She told that story on national television. Then, two weeks before the election, she came into our studio and told it again.

"I don't even know what allowed me to be that vulnerable on national TV," she said. But it isn't just her house. "It's a whole lot of them."

How many is a whole lot? Her foundation counted.

The Number

Davis is President and CEO of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation. On Juneteenth, the foundation put out the State of Black Civic Power in Ohio. It found 603,000 missing Black voters statewide. 162,000 of them in Cuyahoga County.

MS NOW saw that report and sent Eugene Daniels to Cleveland for a piece called The Deciding Vote. The cameras went looking for young Black men who'd stopped voting. They found them.

So you'd think this is a story about Black men.

It isn't. Not the way you think.

The Head Fake

The 603,000 are registered. They've voted before. They just didn't show up for the 2022 midterm. And by the report, they split 51% men and 49% women. Ohio, Davis said, doesn't have a registration problem. It has a turnout problem.

Somebody already did the hard part once. Somebody signed these folks up. Then we lost them.

But the faces in that MS NOW piece were young men, and I watched it twice.

One grew up with a mother who works in government. Her paycheck depends on who wins. He went to the polls with her. Filling up the truck his business runs on, asked who's to blame for gas prices, he said Trump, I guess. What finally moved him was a coworker who compared voting to calling the city about the tree hanging over his mother's house.

Another said nobody ever showed him how to vote.

It hurt to watch. So I said something about it on the air.

The Line

Davis asked me straight. As a Black man, what's your answer?

I gave it to her. "Black men have to get off their lazy behind and do what they need to do to step up as Black men in our community. Period."

I didn't say all Black men are lazy. I said that's what it's going to take to fix this. And I'm standing on it.

The room went hot. Dr. Burton had to tell both of us to take a breath.

Davis came right back at me. She warned that the word hands an argument to the people who have always called us lazy. When it sounds like blame, she said, it turns into us against them, and we lose the very people we're trying to win. Knocking on a door and telling somebody to vote isn't voter education. Civic groups get funded. Candidates have money. Both keep talking to the same guaranteed voters.

Dr. Heather E. Burton backed her. If you've never walked into a polling place, it's intimidating. When you've got ten dollars and hungry babies, the ballot is the last thing on your mind.

Then Davis brought up Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has said crime can fall on paper and people still won't believe it, because they walk outside and the block looks the same. A number doesn't change what people see on their corner. Neither does a campaign promise.

So who was right?

Here's what nobody in that room expected. We both were.

Who Goes and Gets Them

Listen to how that young man finally got it. Not from a flyer. Not from a candidate. From another brother at work.

Peer to peer. That's the whole answer, and that's what I meant.

On air I put it plainer. Instead of sitting at home cracking a Bud Light and watching the game, get out here and talk to these young brothers. Every older man who figured something out owes somebody younger that conversation.

Get off the couch. Get to the barbershop, the cigar lounge, the block. Older brothers, talk to the young men before an election, not just during one. Pastors and deacons included.

And the organizations collecting grant money for community forums: stop building new programs for problems other people are already working on. Fund the groups on the street doing the work.

I learned this one the hard way. When we ran Boots on the Ground as all men, the room was full of men. The minute we brought the women in, a lot of the men let the women carry the work. Then they stopped coming.

Davis put it best. "I'm tired of talking to us. We're the wrong people to be talking to. The people we're missing aren't in the room."

We agree on that. We fought over how to get them in it.

The Next One

The election is over. 4.6 million Ohioans showed up. The foundation’s first count since the election says tens of thousands of the 603,000 came back. Most of them did not.

Davis wants candidates, elected officials and civic groups to put money into the research, so the data keeps telling Black Ohio's story and somebody can be held to it. I want the brothers to stop waiting on the organizations.

The next midterm is 2030. Her son is still out there. So are the young men on that tape.

Who's going to go get them?