Going by registered party affiliation there has never been a time in the history of the Democratic or Republican parties in which there were more registered Republicans than there were Democrats. The Democrats have always had the edge, throughout the first half of the 20th century the GOP was known as the smaller party that catered to the upper middle class and above.
How this relates to the GOP always being competitive despite always having less voters has a lot to do with the fact that not everyone is that loyal to the party they are registered with and the fact that traditionally the Democrats were highly concentrated in some states but not as much so across the rest of the country. Lack of party loyalty should not be surprising if one realizes how you register to vote in this country. For a lot of people what will happen is you register when you’re a young adult, quite possibly/probably before you have established any firm political beliefs of your own. This means you’ll probably register with whichever party your parents supported, but if you end up developing a contrary political ideology you’re probably not very likely to switch party registration because of the same reasons people are lazy about registering in the first place.
Party registration is a deceptive thing for other reasons as well. In heavily Democratic states all the action (as far as local offices are concerned) is in the party primaries. So a lot of people register as Democrats just to have a voice in local elections.
You used to see this all the time back in the days when the South was solidly Democratic. In the Democratic primary, you might have a conservative Democrat running against a more liberal Democrat for a given office. Since it was a foregone conclusion that the Democratic nominee would win the general election, even voters with Republican sympathies would participate in the Democratic primary, so as to have a voice in deciding which Democrat would win.
Party registration may be no predictor at all of how one will vote in a presidential election.
I don’t really buy that the flag of Alabama is directly intended to bring up memories of the confederate battle flag either, the design is a fairly common one that many states and countries also use.
Because that wouldn’t be racism, it would be “accentism”. If you want to call me an accentist, go ahead. Actually, if you want to call me racist I wouldn’t care much, either, you’d just be using the wrong term.
Now that’s a grand failure of pointless hair-splitting, even for the internet. If your “accentism” is based on race, then why would skipping ahead to racism be incorrect? There’s no one black American accent, so you’re saying that if Obama’s accent was in any way especially black (i.e., you could tell that he was black on the phone), that would be an egregious enough offense to lose your vote? How is that not racist?
I never said that if I could tell someone was black by their voice alone I wouldn’t vote for them. The accent we’re talking about is basically nonexistant among educated people with a good vocabulary, no matter what their race is. Plenty of people “sound black” who don’t sound like fucking idiots, like Bill Cosby, Will Smith, and the guy on the Allstate commercials.
Maybe it’s not me that’s the racist after all. Maybe the real racists are the ones insisting that black people are supposed to sound like Flava Flav and that I’m a bad person for not wanting to elect such an ignorant stereotype.
Bah, this is getting too close to pit territory. I’ll just end by saying that I’m not splitting hairs, and I don’t really care what you think about who I choose to vote for and why. I’m voting for Obama, and if he wins I think that our whole country should pat ourselves on the back not for electing a black guy (who barely even fits a definition of “black” genetically or culturally anyway) but because we finally chose a good person to be our leader for the first time since Carter.
When did we decide that that was the accent we were talking about? Why should we have assumed you meant an uneducated black accent when you said “black American accent”?
Well who was the one in this thread who used black American accent to indicate Flava Flav rather than Cosby, Will Smith, or the Allstate guy?
I honestly don’t have an opinion on Obama other than I like him better than the Republicans who are running and would vote for him if he received the D nomination (I can’t vote Republican and I won’t vote for a 3rd party throwaway).
However, he needs a brilliant campaign team. Even if he received 90% of the votes from all black voters, the electoral college would still be difficult to sway as the states with the highest black populations are all historically Republican and blacks only account for about a quarter of the vote (highest percentage is Mississippi with 36%, but usually much less). He’s going to have to “pray without offending the devil” to get enough white liberal/Dem votes in those states to add to the black votes in order to swing even one state. (Southern states usually go about 70-30 in recent years.)
I think the Electoral College is the greatest enemy Democracy has in the U.S. today (or will be once Bush is out) and one of the major reason most minorities (whether racial or political minorities) just dont’ much give a damn about presidential elections. My greatest hope for the 2008 election is that the Rep candidate will win the popular vote and lose the election just to hear the backpedalling and screaming.
Besides which, that flag was made state flag in 1895. At that time if they wanted to honor the Confederacy they wouldn’t have had to be subtle- they’d have just added a Confederate flag.
If a person seemed like they were trying to affect an accent but failing, it would hurt them in my eyes moreso than if they just spoke in their normal accent, cause not only are they artificial, but even worse, they are bad at it. For instance, the guy in the telephone commercial that begins in SAE Announcerspeak “my normal phone company cut me off because I got a little bit behind on the BEEEL,” although I can’t tell if he is trying to affect the SAE or the AAVE accent by himself or at the directors request.)
But the main person I think of in politics who displays this is not black.