No idea what you’re saying here. Are you disagreeing that in most recent elections the Democratic candidate gets around 90% of the black vote?
Is astorian statement correct? Is he talking about all black candidates, some black candidates, a few black candidates, one black candidate?
Are you confirming his statement?
Astorian’s not talking about black candidates – he/she’s talking about black voters and Democratic candidates.
Well, nothing in the article contradicts anything you’re saying.
According to the Statesman, Greg Abbott won 72% of white voters in Texas (cite). I don’t know if anyone further broke it down by age, but it looked like Davis and Abbott split the under-40 vote pretty evenly, so that means that Abbott may have pushed close to 90% among older white voters.
This is just my opinion, but at least around here (Texas) there appears to have been a deliberate effort to redistrict away white Democrats wherever possible and make all Democratic districts in minority areas, and thereby make it seem that the Democratic party is a party for minorities, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t know what sort of “message” can counteract this.
I’m wondering who the ‘democratic operative’ is.
Are you confirming astorian’s statement that roughly 90% of the black vote goes to the Democrat, ANY Democrat, in any election?
In most recent elections (when a Democrat is running against a Republican), yes. There are probably some exceptions, especially for smaller local races. But in general, then I think astorian is correct.
Since Beware of Doug didn’t provide a name -
*Bill Burton, a Democratic operative close to President Obama who served as deputy press secretary during the president’s first term, said the takeaway from the midterms is that Democrats don’t know how to “talk to white voters.”
“Democrats are never going to win in midterms if we don’t figure out how to talk to white voters,” Burton told Megyn Kelly of Fox News. “I don’t think that the message that we have has been able to really translate to the coalition of voters that helped bring Republicans into even more power*.”
There’s even a video of Burton making this statement.
Then you should have no problems proving that astorian statement is correct. 90% of the black vote to ANY Democrat candidate.
Barack Obama, in 2008 and 2012. Kerry in 2004 and Gore in 2000 were also around 90% for the black vote.
Am I missing something? I thought this was pretty common knowledge.
For those who don’t believe me, who think “90% of the black vote always goes to the Democrat” is a gross exaggeration or a made-up number I pulled out of a hat or copied from Rush Limbaugh, some “cites.”
In 1984, Ronald Reagan won by a landslide. What was the ethnic breakdown?
91% of blacks went for Mondale, while 62% of whites went for Reagan.
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_88.html
In 1988:
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_88.html
Dukakis got 89% of the black vote. Bush got only 60% of the white vote.
In 1992:
83% of black voters went for Bill Clinton, and 7% went for Ross Perot. 41% of white voters went for Bush, 39% went for Clinton, and the rest largely went to Perot.
In 1996:
84% of black voters went for Clinton. Just 46% of white voters went for Bob Dole.
In 2000:
90% of black voters went for Gore. 60% of white voters went for Dubya.
In 2004:
88% of the black vote went to John Kerry. 58% of the white vote went to Dubya.
In 2008:
95% of the black vote went to Obama. 55% of the white vote went to John McCain.
In 2012:
93% of the black vote went to Obama. 59% of the white vote went to Mitt Romney
Anyone see a trend here?
Now remind me which ethnic group supposedly votes as a monolithic “tribe”?
Beware of Doug brought up an interesting topic though. I think Democrats have a weird view of white voters. They seem to expect white voters to behave differently from minority voters. Sure, as the majority, some of their incentives are different, but generally people are people and a white person is generally going to react the same way to a politician showing a lack of respect as a black or Latino voter will. And Democrats aren’t really trying to reach white voters and almost acting as if it’s a distasteful thing to try to appeal to white voters. And if white voters were as bad as Beware of Doug claims, it would be a little distasteful.
But the reality is that white voters are a declining portion of the population, and because of that are starting to take on more of the aspects of a minority that votes in a bloc. It doesn’t matter how well Democrats do with other ethnic groups, if the white vote goes the way of the black vote, but towards Republicans, Democrats will be quite screwed. So competing for the white vote is as important for Democrats as competing for the Latino and Asian vote is for Republicans.
Thing is, this is a feature, not a bug.
Every knows that, between 1968 and 1972, the Republicans (led by Richard Nixon and Kevin Phillips) followed the so-called “Southern Strategy” to strip away the working class white voters from the Democrats’ long-standing New Deal Coalition, and create a winning coalition for the GOP.
What’s less well-known is that, at the very same time, the leading liberal strategists of the Democratic party were working to push the white working class out of the coalition anyway, and build a whole new coalition built around racial minorities, feminists and intellectuals. Fred Dutton and George McGovern re-shaped the Democratic Party into what it is today: a party LED by an elite group of highly educated urban whites, built on the votes of women, blacks and Latins.
Nixon didn’t have to work very hard to attract the white working class (the so-called “Reagan Democrats”) because McGovern and Dutton had already concluded that the white working class was a bunch of unreliable, stupid racists anyway, and were in the process of pushing those voters out the door anyway. It’s NOT a coincidence that, in the early 70s, Hollywood started putting out movies like*** Joe ***and TV shows like All in the Family. Liberals had already concluded that working class white males were dangerous and stupid, if not outright evil.
This is just one reason Obama is pushing so hard to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. If the working class won’t vote Democrat, well, Obama needs to create a vast NEW working class that will.
So are white, rural hunters going to start acting like white, urban hipsters? Or vice versa? Because I need to get my wardrobe sorted out before we all start voting together.
What a typically dickish comment. Democrats just got their asses handed to them in an election. Obviously they will try to figure out what went wrong and how to do better in the future. What else could they do?
Of course they did. As did Democratic candidates. Have you ever SEEN a political ad?
That’s a little less meaningful in a 60/40 blowout, as the Texas Gov race was, than in a typical 52/48.
You are correct in noticing the effect, but have the causation a little off. Democrats led the charge to create majority-minority districts in the 60s and 70s, Pubs only later got on board. Generally speaking, both parties favor creating as many safe seats as possible, and racial gerrymandering does that.
It is dickish, but the sentiment expressed in the OP is petulant, so the response isn’t entirely unjustified. There are always some who will attribute their party’s loss to “stupid voters”.
But in this case, the problem wasn’t stupid voters, or more accurately, uninformed voters, it was not ENOUGH uninformed voters. The Democrats only won among voters who hadn’t been following the election closely, according to CNN’s exit polls.
http://www.cnn.com/election/2014/results/race/house#exit-polls
Someone like you was saying that 50 years ago.
A lot of the issues that have gotten young people fired up relate to social justice (mostly as it relates to homosexuals) and a lot of that is going to be removed from any real political concern by the courts in the next 10 years. After that the split of younger voters on other issues isn’t so cut and dry, especially as they transition to people with mortgages and 401ks.
Plus non-white doesn’t = Republicans. The blacks are the only non-white group that have a slavish servitude to one party, based on a strange decision to make themselves essentially irrelevant politically and/or to promote policies which encourage blacks to remain poorer and less educated than whites. Asians had a 9% swing in this election and went 50% for the GOP. Hispanics are loyal primarily to the Hispanic community (many polls have shown this), not to either party. Right now the Democrats are doing more for that community. If some form of acceptable immigration reform is worked out I wouldn’t count on the Hispanic vote being locked up, especially not considering many Hispanics literally are people who desperately wanted to come to America to work hard and make money for their families–that’s anathema to everything your party stands for, but as long as they’re choosing between you guys and the Minutemen it’s not much of a choice at all.
There’s a fine line between “we need to do a better job communicating our message to (group X)” and “geez, those people in (group X) didn’t vote for us. I just don’t get it. I mean, we’re just so clearly BETTER…”
Nothing in the Democrats losing reactions have struck me as any different than any other party’s reactions after losing any election in the past several decades.