Can’t speak to gender, but “white’s - no college” made up 39% of the electorate in '08. Looking at the exit polls for '08, they do appear to be the core GOP group for McCain. Whites with college voted for McCain, but only by a few points. Pretty much every other group supported Obama by a large margin or contained “whites - no college” as a subgroup.
exit polls here.
Well, it’s like Atwater said, most social welfare programs are heavily supported by the black population. Once you take away the Democrats being extremely hostile to all Civil Rights (which did not happen until the movement was essentially over in favor of greater Civil Rights and an end to Jim Crow regimes) their base line economic and social policies are more in line with the black electorate.
Any other points I could make will be at least somewhat objected to as “racism”, but there’s also an inherent truth that blacks are much more clannish. This isn’t necessarily a dig at the black population, as a historically oppressed minority I imagine their community leaders feel they need to at least all be generally on the same side or their electoral power is too diluted to have an impact. Mind a few censuses ago black were 13% of the population and that is no longer the case, they are actually a “shrinking” minority because they aren’t reproducing at any particularly high rate and their natural growth rate simply can’t compare with the immigration rates for Hispanics and Asian-Americans (the fastest growing minority group now.)
We won the White House five times without it (Reagan x 2, Bush x 3) not to mention the House, the Senate and etc. So yes, we can. Especially for two key reasons:
As you point out, many of the States with the largest black populations also have extremely high GOP support among the majority white population in those states. For that reason much of the black population is “effectively disenfranchised” when it comes to Presidential elections. States where they are important are basically the battle ground states where they have significant populations. Pennsylvania and Ohio don’t have particularly huge black populations, but they have enough to matter, and those states are more in contention than say Alabama or Mississippi come Presidential election time.
The black population as a share of the country isn’t really growing, and since we’ve won elections without them in the past there is little reason to think we can’t win future elections without them especially since they are a little less of the electorate now.
You’ve made this argument probably 100+ times now on these forums, but that just isn’t a big deal. Unless you assume the current generation of seniors and rural voters dies off and everyone who lives in the cities and becomes old all agree with one another.
No, what actually happens when older and more rural people die off and we have a generally less socially conservative population and less religious population is you have a lot of people who still disagree with one another. American history suggests that they tend to coalesce into two large opposing camps. The GOP in 2050 won’t be the GOP of today, but they’ll still be viable because they’ll be made up of voters who couldn’t agree with the Democrats on everything.
I’ve said for awhile the deal we made to get the big fundie vote turnout would result in a “wilderness” period due to demographic shifts, but it won’t be permanent or anything. The Democrats started a Civil War and pissed off virtually the entire country, but 20 years later they were winning states in the North again. As long as there are collections of groups that don’t agree on how to run the country you have parties form, the issues the respective parties represent change over time.
Most likely kids of today aren’t going to be part of an anti-gay culture war as old people, but kids of today could definitely disagree on how to finance things, foreign policy, how programs should be run, how we should structure our regulatory systems and etc. Basically until disagreements stop happening our FPTP system means we’ll always have two parties.
So divide by two and you get (approximately) the male portion, which gives you the “less than 20%” that I mentioned.
But that is not the same as being “the bulk of” the Republican support.
I’d be interested in hearing them.
Well, “bulk of” doesn’t really have a percise definition, but they’re the demographic most in favour of McCain, they appeared to be the only demographic heavily in favour of McCain and they made up the majority of his voters in raw numbers.
Well, yeah. Sorry, but I need a better reason than “he’s Black” to vote for Obama this time around.
His mother was white, will that suffice?
I was going to claim ProteanView or Thomas Sowell, but they’ll probably end up voting Libertarian.
For black voters, maybe not. I just don’t find this figure surprising. Obama got around 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2008, and even though the economy is not doing that well, I don’t see what the Republicans have to offer this time. And of course the racial tinge to some of the attacks on Obama probably aren’t helping.
In the long term, no, they can’t succeed as a party of primarily old white men when white people are becoming a smaller proportion of the electorate. Basic demographics make it pretty obvious, I think.
Because the GOP is seen as generally hostile to minorities and all the anti-immigrant rhetoric is hurting them with Hispanic voters in particular. Romney’s campaign has never thought it would even come close to winning the Hispanic vote. They were hoping to get a little over a third to cut into his support, and right now they’re failing.
Would “He’s not going to go back to the policies that started the whole mess in the first place” suffice?
Did you vote for him last time around?
Well, then, these figures bode ill, if not for the GOP as an institution/organization, then for conservatism as such, which is more important. Because if and when social-religious conservatism fades, then economic conservatism has to go it alone, without that highly energized emotional-cultural support – and then its political prospects grow significantly dimmer.
If politics is going to be vied between the haves and have-nots, then the haves absolutely must hitch up something else to their platform, because it’s an inherent mathematical fact that the have-nots outnumber the haves. If the current crop of social conservatives become disillusioned with the party or diminish in numbers, they’ll have to find something else.
The Republican party pre-Reagan wasn’t really hitched to any populist ideals. It didn’t appeal to labor (a historically big populist support base for the Democrats) and it didn’t appeal to the impoverished (another historically populist support base for the Democrats), it didn’t explicitly appeal to minorities (they were much less relevant then, and even though blacks voted Republican in theory during the Jim Crow era functionally they were usually not allowed to vote and when they did were vastly outnumbered in their States and heavily racially gerrymandered districts), they also didn’t appeal to the religious right. Mainly because “religious right” is a modernish concept, there have always been religious fundamentalists but it took a big movement culminating at the end of the 70s for them to emerge as a unified political block that was going to mostly vote the same way on the issues. Prior to that the deeply religious might vote for either party based on various other factors.
I left that thought half-finished, the Republicans won elections prior to that because their overall positions, while right of the Democrats, were moderate enough to appeal to a lot of people that they didn’t need a huge portion of low income voters in ideological permanent lock step.
Today’s GOP realistically has put the interests of the top 1% before everyone else (I am basically stealing populist rhetoric with that top 1%, it might really be the top 2-5%) and they get other people to vote for them with various forms of ideological rhetoric mostly relating to extreme Christian fundamentalism but also things to appeal to people that fear big government.
In age past the GOP definitely aligned closer with the upper class, but more like if you were in the top 30% of AGI you probably were going to benefit directly from GOP ideas. The bottom 70% might or might not benefit, but GOP policies were more moderate relative to society such that they offered more genuine benefits to all than the some of the current policy positions of the GOP.
Or not at all. Before the 1970s, many deeply religious American Christians (an essentially other-worldly faith, in a way that Judaism and Islam are not) tended to avoid politics entirely, as an occasion of sin.
It bodes ill for social conservatism as we know it now. I will be surprised if there isn’t another set of social issues to face in thirty years time. Conservatives of the future will latch onto whatever it is. I can’t guess at what it’ll be, but I’m pretty sure it will exist.
Sarah Silverman is a comedian.
Specifically, a comedienne who’s known for her shock humor. I’m sure that won’t stop some pundits from taking offense at what she said and insist that she represents all of liberaldom.
Duplicate, deleted.
Just to clarify this, the margin of error is a little less firm than that. In polling, you are 95% certain that the number you found is within the margin of error in either direction. (The 95% is traditional — in other applications, the researchers might look for 99% certainty or 90% certainty or 99.9% or whatever). That means that 1/20 of the time, the actual number falls outside your margin of error. So actually, Romney could have almost universal support among the black community — maybe the pollsters just happened to call every single black Obama supporter in the country without knowing. Stupidly unlikely, but still possible.
Also, as an earlier poster pointed out, the poll of black voters is a subset of the total poll, so the margin of error will be larger. (Which makes intuitive sense — if you ask a smaller group of people, your results are more likely to be farther from the truth, right?)
This also has been pointed out by now, but the margin of error is purely a result of the sample size (i.e. how many people you polled) — it doesn’t measure the representativeness of your sample or how well you wrote your poll or anything like that. If you poll 1000 people, you always get the same margin of error, no matter how you conduct the poll.