March would have been a more interesting month in St. Petersburg if Omali Yeshitela had survived the mayoral primary. Tuesday's results were still instructive.
Nobody votes in a bloc more than whites do, at least when it comes to voting for a black candidate.
In the city's white precincts, Yeshitela's votes came in handfuls. The results also showed how black people often don't vote in a bloc, despite what white people apparently think. Black voters in Tampa had more faith in Freedman than whites ever did, and certainly more than black voters in St. Petersburg have in Yeshitela. He scares a lot of them, too. I point these things out to try to put a dent in the myth of the black monolith, that holds that all black people think the same, behave the same, vote the same.