Democrat Barack Obama ’s historic win to become the nation’s first black president provides obvious encouragement to Democratic Rep. Artur Davis — Alabama’s only African-American member of Congress — as he ponders a 2010 campaign he hopes would make him the state’s first black governor.

If elected, Davis would not only be the first black governor anywhere in the Deep South, he would only be the second in any Southern state, following Democrat L. Douglas Wilder, whose 1989 election in Virginia made him the first in the nation. And Davis would be doing so in a state where racial voting patterns have persisted, even though the strong resistance to the civil rights movement exhibited by many white Alabamans a couple of generations ago has faded. The tendency of the mainly conservative white electorate to vote Republican for major federal and state offices typically overwhelms the strongly Democratic voting habits of the black constituency that makes up about a quarter of Alabama’s population.

This was clearly evident in this year’s voting. While the 28 states that Obama won included nine that were carried for the Republicans in 2004 by President George W. Bush , Alabama was unmoved. The 60 percent vote taken in Alabama by Republican nominee John McCain was just slightly less than the 62 percent claimed by Bush four years earlier. Exit polling showed Obama received less than 20 percent of the white vote in the state. The 7th Congressional District, where Davis easily won a fourth House term on Nov. 4, is also the only one among the state’s seven districts with a black population majority. [MORE]