Hey, I’m a renter. Doing OK. Do you lecture your “gay & African American neighbors” about economics? Do you know any Mexicans or Mexican-Americans? How about Muslims? Be sure to explain to all of them how they ought to vote.
In what way is Hillary better for minority communities than Sanders. What issues do you think draws them to Hillary over Sanders?
In what way is Hilary better for these voters than Sanders?
The fact that she’s winning.
I’ve posted on the subject of why-Clinton-does-better-among-African-American-voters before. Here’s a summary. I’ll be happy to link you to a couple of other posts if you want more information about what I think.
You ask about issues. I think it’s not about issues; I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. For one thing, I don’t think there are many differences in policy between the two candidates (I know that many Sanders fans completely disagree with this statement). I *think *Clinton’s position on guns is generally better received in the black community. But fundamentally it’s less about issues than it is about other stuff.
Such as background. Vermont is really, really white. My little city in NY State, which is more than twenty times smaller than Vermont, has more than twice as many African Americans as Sanders’s entire state. Democratic politicians who deal with significant numbers of African Americans quickly come to realize that the interests and concerns of African Americans are not exactly the same as those of white Americans of the same socioeconomic status. My impression, backed by some of the African Americans I’ve talked to in my community, is that Clinton understands this very well, and Sanders, partly because he has represented almost no racial minorities during his political career, does not. I believe that this inability/unwillingness to acknowledge and address the specific issues faced by African Americans, more than anything else, puts Sanders at a disadvantage here.
It’s also about style. Others have said this better on these boards, but: Sanders’s M.O. is usually to say to people “This is what you need.” In some places he’s done quite well with that strategy. Clinton’s M.O. leans more toward asking “What do you need?” That focus helped her a lot in states with high minority populations. Black people have been told for many years, “This is what you need,” by well-meaning white people. Repeating it doesn’t seem like a strategy designed to win the hearts and minds of voters who are tired of hearing it.
Then there’s stance. I saw several clips of the two candidates early in the campaign interacting with African American voters in settings such as black churches. It was my impression (and I’ll admit this is more my personal observation than something I’ve talked about much with other people, black or white) that Sanders, when in a roomful of African Americans, looked uncomfortable; his voice seemed more strident than usual, his movements more stiff. He looked like he didn’t really want to be there. I didn’t get this sense with Clinton. If a candidate seems uncomfortable around people like me, it’s going to be a hard sell to get me to vote their way.
Now, you might say that those things shouldn’t matter, and you might be right. You might argue that Clinton’s ability to listen is overrated, or that Sanders is not either uncomfortable around black people, and you might be right too. But here’s the thing–if those are the things that motivate AAs to vote for Clinton, then those things are indeed what matter, and you ignore them at your peril. You might be right, but insisting that you’re right is only going to lose you an election.
It really does boil down to what JohnT says: “she’s better for them because they like her better.” If African Americans think that Clinton’s superior because she “gets” them and Sanders doesn’t, or for any other reason, then that’s legitimate–even if Sanders would be objectively superior for other reasons (and I don’t accept that he is better “on the issues”). If you are losing a large group of people that you think you should be winning, you might consider tweaking your message, or your delivery, or your focus, before concluding that “they don’t know what’s best for them.” Sanders didn’t do that. And it cost him. Badly.
I disagree slightly. I think the fact that Clinton seems willing to talk about the issue of racism in more contexts than jobs and prison is important.
I agree with your larger point that on issues where they both speak, there’s less distance than some tend to believe.
Because she will win the nomination. And she is strong enough to beat the Republican Presumptive Candidate who has pandered to the racism & xenophobia of the worst of his fans.
And most of these voters (that *I *know) are not poor & badly educated, as Sanders seems to assume.
Cite that Sanders assumes that minorities are poor and badly educated.
Educated or not, they’re damned fools anyway, if they think Trump can deliver the goods.
She is better for all communities because she would have less risky economic policies. See:
Of course, he wouldn’t really succeed in getting his program of political revolution through Congress. But in as much as you would have a President who believes in bad economic ideas, I think it would harm the real incomes of Americans (and people in countries we trade with!) generally.
By the way, for the same reason, I’m even more against Gary Johnson, who has opposite, but equally extreme economic ideas (balance the budget while cutting it by 43 percent). By wielding the veto pen, Johnson could achieve a lot more of his aims than Bernie could. But they are both advocates of highly disruptive economic proposals that would, more likely than not, hurt almost everyone.
This is tricky.
I think it has to do with the GOP having largely become a white people’s party. So you have an entire community mostly voting for one party. My guess is that the percentage of African Americans, and other minorities, who are, by fundamental personality, conservative is little (or not at all) different from that in the general population. So the same people who might have been Republicans if they were white will instead be Democrats who vote for moderates.
Of course not–which is why they will be voting for the Democratic Nominee. Haven’t you been following the thread?
Someone else:
Well, he did make some remark about how white folks don’t know what it’s like to be poor and deal with racism. Which is wrong because plenty of white folks are poor–and even non-poor blacks have to deal with racism. That’s just fuzzy language.
Some of Bernie’s fans have lectured non-whites in a rather condescending way. Or posted opinions that indicated contempt for them–I doubt they know any.
I thought you were talking about Trump voters. There has been some disagreement over whether is base is mostly poorly-educated working-class whites or college-educated middle-class whites.
If you are losing an even larger group of people that you think you should be winning, you might consider changing your focus, or your policies, rather than concluding that “they don’t know what’s best for them.” The Clinton New Democrats didn’t seem to notice that working class white people abandoned them for Ross Perot, and then for someone who offered a “Contract with America.” And it has cost the Democrats Congress, for twenty years.
And this time, the Democrats don’t even expect to get the House back for even two years! Maybe Clintonism isn’t really that popular.
Bernie doesn’t seem to do well with upscale blacks. It’s not clear he understands upscale blacks exist. But he gets young white people who feel screwed over by the status quo, and if he’s been repeatedly elected by somewhat more downscale whites, maybe that’s worth more.
I’m not anti-immigration myself. I’m not a knee-jerk protectionist. But a lot of people I know are. Are they going to vote for a free-trader who sneers at their concerns and accuse them of being merely racist, “privileged,” white people? No, I expect not. I think they’re going to vote for Donald Trump. And they’re going to vote for the party that offers to wall them off and protect them from scary foreigners. It’s silly, but it’s how it is now. And someone who could peel off some of that vote by being a bit more protectionist, not a free-trader, might have had a real shot.
If I am proven wrong, that would be nice. Maybe Clinton can get in just on the votes of women who want to defy patriarchy, maybe Trump will prove to offensive and stupid to win, and maybe Congress will swing Democratic.
But I think those “racist” white voters are going to keep voting Republican for a long time to come, and do a lot of damage in the process. I don’t know how you fix it.
I do think that disregarding the major motivating issues of 1) anti-Bush-War voters & 2) labor in general, is a great way for a Democrat to lose. But hey! You have black people. Good for you.
“too offensive”–I can spell, really!
Anyway, turns out I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary. Maybe I should be black, or maybe a Yale Man?
And I think Trump is sounding more and more like an ignorant disaster. A disaster who is likely to win, even if I do change my mind by November & vote for Hillary. Then again, the difference between Trump and the median politician is that Trump keeps opening his mouth to reveal how big a fool he is. At least he’s bringing up positions to be debunked?
Since you are locked into the classic quasi marxist frame of thinking (I recall your boosterism for the disaster of the Chavism…) it must be puzzling to see a movement that is not in fact based on the economic classes but on the identity resentment politics. It is the typical quasi-marxian analytical error from its blinders.
Strange, the class / racial resentment statements… but what Trump is doing is normalizing in your political discourse a discourse of neo-fascism that is primarily a resentment model against any ethnic-religious minority that has in many other contexts in the Europe and elsewhere lead to the very unpleasant result for those of us not in the ethnico-racial-religious majority.
The focus on the mere distributional preferences and the magical thinking that it must be the items that you have the concern for that is driving the other voters does not convince.
the comparative history shows that this normalization is very dangerous.
Then you’re helping Trump.
Yes, it really is that simple.
No, you are helping Trump. Do you really think Hillary is the one who has the most to gain from the lie that a vote for an alternative candidate is a vote for the enemy? If you don’t want Trump to be President, pushing for loyalty to the party candidate above all else is the last thing you should be doing, because there are more Republicans who hate Trump than Democrats who hate Hillary.
“A vote for an alternative candidate is a vote for the enemy” is trivially, obviously true for both sides. In our current system, at it currently stands, a write-in vote for Bernie Sanders is effectively a vote for Donald Trump, and a write-in vote for Ted Cruz will be effectively a vote for Hilary Clinton.
Given this, which is a plain fact regardless of how hard some folks will squirm to avoid it, no one is pushing for “loyalty to a party candidate above all else.” I don’t think Sanders supporters should vote for Clinton out of loyalty to the Democratic party, about which I don’t give two craps; I think they should vote for her because she is a strong candidate and - more importantly - the only one of the two viable candidates who will help anyone left of center move toward any of their goals.
A few points.
First off, I don’t know what you mean by “upscale blacks.” It should be abundantly clear by now that Sanders doesn’t do well with blacks at all, “upscale” or otherwise.
Second, I’m not at all sure that Sanders has been elected in Vermont largely by “downscale whites.” Do you have data that says that his voters have consisted mainly of poorer, blue-collar Vermonters, rather than the wealthier, better educated ones that make up, for example, much of his home city of Burlington? Vermont’s not a poor state or a poorly educated one, in any case—top ten in the nation in people with college degrees, top ten in advanced degrees, top 20 in per capita income. I’d like to see your data, if you’ve got it.
More seriously: You seem to think that the Democrats’ difficulties with white working class voters began with Bill Clinton (when working class whites abandoned him to vote for Perot and Gingrich). That’s simply not the case. The Democrats’ trouble with the white working class goes back 20 years earlier at least, and some would say before that. Certainly George McGovern, back in ’72, got clobbered among lower-income white voters. Jimmy Carter in ’76 did somewhat better, but he had more trouble again in ’80, as did Mondale in ’84 and Dukakis in ’88. I agree Bill Clinton was not wildly popular among working class whites. (And yet, of course, he won both times he ran…) Then again, nether were Gore, Kerry, or Obama. This is not a “Clintons” problem or a “New Democrats” problem, whatever that phrase may mean. It goes way deeper than that.
It would also be easier to accept your line of argument if there were evidence that Sanders is doing extremely well among this group during his primary season. But it’s hard to conclude that this is true. Even in states where there aren’t many black voters, there’s not a lot of correlation between Sanders support and low income, or Sanders support and low educational levels. Take Wisconsin, where Sanders actually did slightly *better *among college graduates than among those who don’t have a college degree, and slightly better among those earning upwards of $50k a year than those earning less. It certainly isn’t obvious from stats like these that Sanders is hugely popular among poorer, less educated white people. Better than Clinton? In the long run, yeah, probably. But not to the degree that some people like to say it is. Put it this way: Clinton’s hold on black voters is far, far stronger than Sanders’s hold on working class whites, even among Democratic candidates alone.
Moreover, if Sanders were attractive to working class whites in a way that previous Democratic candidates haven’t been, you’d expect to see a rise in the number of Dem primary and caucus voters as blue collar white workers stream in to give Sanders their vote. That’s not happening. The number of voters in Democratic primaries and caucuses is not up from 2008; it’s down. Go back to WI: The total Dem vote in Wisconsin was about 1 million this year. In 2008, with two candidates who had little appeal to the white working class, the vote was 1.1 million. Obama won almost a hundred thousand more votes in '08 than Sanders did this time around. A drop of a hundred thousand votes really isn’t consistent with the notion that Sanders is bringing in disaffected white workers.
So Sanders doesn’t seem to be pulling in white working class voters. As for your larger point, maybe some other Democrat can—but I have my doubts. There are a bunch of political scientists out there who think it may not possible to appeal to both non-white voters and white working class voters. You put “racist” in scare quotes, but there’s reason to think that the racism shown by some white voters is real and not a figment of the imagination of some “New Democrat.”
From a Salon article, which mentions a lot of different research by various scholars (http://www.salon.com/2016/04/04/the_democratic_partys_great_white_flight_how_racism_spurred_a_demographic_reckoning/): “A vast political science literature shows that racism is indeed what is causing whites to leave the Democratic party. Explanations that obscure the importance of race simply cannot explain the voting patterns of white Americans.”
Viewed in this way, the motivating factor for many white voters IS race. And if that’s true, then as long as the GOP provides a “safe haven” for white Americans who are resentful of and distrustful of African Americans (and hey, we’ll throw in Hispanics and other racial minorities for the hell of it), there is little chance that these voters, as a group, are going to come over to the Democrats. I don’t like it, and I don’t know how we fix that either–but I do know that it’s not going to be fixed this election cycle.
In the meantime, I am certainly not going to ignore the interests—and the votes—of racial minorities in an attempt to go after people whose hearts and minds I probably am not going to be able to capture this time around, no matter who is at the top of the ticket.
Oh, I can see clearly enough that Trump’s appeal is all about identity resentment politics. But another reason he has gotten this far appears to be his appeal to the economic frustration of a white working class with declining opportunities and prospects. Identity resentment is an aspect of that, in that the effects of globalization, offshoring and automation harm the prospects of working Americans of all ethnicities, but to whites in particular it forms the disappointment of the white privilege and entitlement they grew up to expect. I recommend Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel. His thesis is that AWM do indeed have real grievances, but “they are sending their mail to the wrong address,” their problems are not the fault of liberals or women or minorities or immigrants as they seem to think.
Weelll . . . fascism is about more than just demonization of the Other, it is also about exaltation of the State, and I’m not hearing that from Trump except in the vaguest way.