My suspicion is that about 5%- 10% of the black males who say they won't vote for Hillary - will, (but as I keep coming back to, the big question is Hillary against who?). It's an ego thing, as they couldn't possibly be seen to enodrse her. The black female vote for her will be appreciably stronger.
In truth though the black vote isn't the lobby that it used to be in the Democrat party, and increasingly the most sought after group is the Hispanic vote. This has only really mushroomed and started to change in the last decade. I'm not convinced that the analysts have really got a handle on how it's maturing yet, but it was certainly a noticable factor in which way New Mexico went Red last time round, as there's a Republican inclined middle class starting to figure.
Giuliani is on record as saying that he's the only candidate who could beat Hillary (well he would say that), I for one think he could. But he's got skeletons galore all over teh Big Apple when he seemingly used the NYPD as his private army (shades of feudalism) and it wouldn't too difficult to dig out a few excesses where the victims were black (48 warning shots etc).
The term 'liberal' means something totally different in the US, (indeed to be branded one is tantamount to an electoral kiss of death). It's similar to Japan where the Liberal Democrats have been an almost permanent post war government fixture, even though they bear no resemblence to what we'd classify as a Liberal.
The black vote wouldn't be liberal therefore, but you might think of it instead as predominantly 'blue collar'. There's long been a tradition of small c conservatism in such areas, in much the same way as there is in most rank and file trade unions for instance, and historically the black vote has exclusively fallen behind the Democrats, tiem and time again. All of the Democrats candidates would get this support from the traditional industrial heartlands of the North (though Hillary would be the least palatable to them). But the demographic changes means that these states are increasingly given less votes in the college as the population moves South and West, and the days when the democrats could carry the college on the strength of their industrial base in places like Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Pensylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Ohio have largely evapourated. (well they went about 25 years ago in honesty). It's largely been the mobile middle classes who've been moving though, and so all this has done is reinforce the strength of the Republicans (the irony of it) in the South as their growth has translated into a larger share of the college.
Hillary is probably going to pick up amongst the 'black professional' classes, but again, I wouldn't have thought she'd be anymore inclined to inherit that vote than Edwards, in the event of Barrack being first out.
