If Black Americans lived as long as White ones, Al Gore and Hilary Clinton would both have been elected president.

 

For all the reasons you might expect Black life expectancy is age 76 for White Americans and 71 years for Black ones. This is about 2% of the male population and 3.2% of the female population. By this rough estimate, setting them both at 2% there are about 5,241,660 missing Black votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, who would have voted had they still be alive.

 

The Republican Party in several states where they have a legislative majority suppress the black vote in many ways.  Felony disenfranchisement, sentences for drug-related crimes, partisan redrawing of electoral boundaries, stringent voter ID laws (including the requirement for more than one form of identification, abbreviated voting hours, the distribution of voting machines (fewer in majority minority areas and an ample number in the White suburbs) and excess mortality of Black Americans compared with White ones.  Look at the impact of the systemic disenfranchisement of Black America as a result.

 

But there is a study with a better estimate.  It is worth quoting at length from a National Library of Medicine article published in Soc Sci Med in 2015 titled Black Lives Matter: Differential Mortality and the Racial Composition of the U.S. Electorate, 1970–2004.  Authors J. Rodriguez, A. Geronimus, J. Bound and D. Dorling “estimate 2.7M excess black deaths between 1970 and 2004.  Of those, 1.9M would have survived until 2004, of which over 1.7 M would have been of voting age.  We estimate that 1M black votes were lost in 2004; of these, 900,000 votes were lost by the defeated Democratic presidential nominee.”  Numerous states-level elections would “likely have had different outcomes if voting age Blacks had the mortality profiles of Whites.  As the authors conclude gently, “Systematic disenfranchisement by population group yields and electorate that is unrepresentative of the full interests of the citizens.”