Ferguson's voting precincts in St. Louis County. These precincts went 83 percent for Obama in 2008. A consistent subplot to the horrors in Ferguson over the past week has been a consistent sense of wonder at how a city that has, over the past two decades, become a majority-black community could have a white mayor, a majority-white city council, and an almost universally white police force. That wonder emanates from two simple facts: the city's population is more than two-thirds African American, and the voting precincts that make up the greater Ferguson area are overwhelmingly black and Democratic.