Tribal voters, i.e., monolithic voting blocs who vote Democratic because, well… There is no reason.
The Democratic party has some of the most reliable voting blocs, they could run a position which is completely anathema to that group’s interests and still win. You see this among the young and minorities, especially, where Democrats pick up roughly the same percentage of each year in and year out, even as the party platform changes, and even as these groups struggle. It’s quite interesting and has interested me since my college days.
Whoa, now here we have a prime case of psychological projection.
And it’s not the fault of those “tribal blocs” (aka “people with dark skin”) that you can’t see any reason why they’d vote against what is for all practical purposes the White Racist Party.
Meh. You’ll have to be more specific there. Are you sure it’s not that they’re prioritizing their beliefs and end up with more pro than con when they vote Democratic? Besides, it’s hardly unique.
[ul]
[li]Log Cabin Republicans - LBGT members of a party that opposes both equal marriage and sexual orientation as a protected class[/li][li]Republicans for Choice - a pro-choice faction in a party that wants to ban all abortions[/li][li]The Wish List - Now mostly out of office, but a group of GOP Congresswomen that tries to elect more pro-choice GOP candidates to office, again in a party that wants to ban abortion[/li][li]ConservAmerica - Republican Enviromentalists, somehow they exist in a party that has trouble even accepting global warming[/li][li]Basically anyone outside the top 2%-3% income in the US who supported The Path to Prosperity budget plan, aka the Ryan Budget[/li][/ul]
After seeing my family follow a similar path, from supporting Bush a little bit to supporting Democrats, I have to say that your ignorance shows OMGABC; there are many reasons why Republicans are losing a block that it was not really a reliable Democratic block until recently. Back in the Bush days Hispanics supported Bush by 40% or more, now the numbers are indeed a disaster for the Republicans and as I found in the last election, the racist propaganda that was there coming from extreme conservatives and tea partiers played a part on it.
Seeing that the Republicans will not do much to reign on the extremists, I do not think that this will change soon.
That’s too bad it’s occupied your thoughts for so long, when the reasons are patently obvious. The only other major political party actively works against the interest of those voting blocs. That would tend to make them favor a party that merely does a poor job of addressing those interests.
No projection here. Those voting blocs do so because Democrats have created an entire generation of people who vote Democrat for no other reason than they’re expected to, on the basis that Republicans “hate” them. I can’t go a day without reading some line about who Republicans hate.
I pointed this out to you once before and you ignored me, so I’ll do it again. Take Blacks, for example. You claim that they vote Democratic as a group because Republicans are racist, yet you ignored the fact that they’ve been overwhelmingly voting Democratic since the 1930’s-- even when the Democratic party was trying to prevent them from voting. You gave me no response to that then, and you won’t now, because there is none.
It’s quite fascinating, really. I’ve always loved the “you shouldn’t vote Republican because they hate you!” line, especially since that usually ends with the otherwise tolerant liberal using some kind of racial epithet (which, oddly enough, is virtually the experience of any minority, woman or gay person who dares vote Republican :P).
First of all, thank you for just writing “overwhelming.” This shows more honesty than many of the right-wingers on this board who make up fake statistics out of whole cloth. (Or cite garbage from sites like forbes.com, which is almost the same thing.)
As the above-cited webpage points out, Harry Truman’s order to desegregate the military turned blacks toward the Demo Party. Even so, 39% voted for Eisenhower in 1956. It is GOP’s recent lurch into blatant racism that has solidified the Democrat black identity.
So – although again kudos are in order for not just inventing fake numbers – “overwhelming since the 1930’s” seems … [checks forum] exaggerated.
Because rabid hatred is one of the distinguishing features of the Republican party. It’s one of the main things they stand for. The Democrats didn’t “create” those voting blocs, the Republicans did by their own blatant bigotry.
And no amount of denial and handwaving on your part is going to change that.
Citing black voting statistics before the 60s isn’t particularly informative, because state and local governments (most often southern, racist, conservative Democrats) actively tried to prevent black people from voting. It’s like citing crime statistics about black people in 1820s Georgia. If those millions of southern blacks actually had the right to vote, it’s reasonable to presume that many or most of them would have voted against the southern racist Democrats (who later became Republicans) who wanted to prevent them from voting.
And somewhere in your head you must know this- but the main reason black people have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic party since the 60s is because the racist Democrats (like Thurmond) changed to Republicans when the Democratic party supported and pushed through Civil Rights reforms. The Southern Strategy continued these feelings.
One thing (in my opinion, of course) that seems to separate Republican and Democratic officials is that most Democrats understand that the United States was a pretty barbaric country for many minorities (chiefly but not only black people) before the 1960s, while few Republican officials will admit this.
Yes, there were some problems, and mistakes were made until Ronald Reagan dissolved them all with his sunny smile and all-American optimism. And just like the so-called “labor movement”, these problems and misunderstandings were wildly exaggerated by people who simply hate America. Both parties are to blame, of course, but Republicans are willing to forgive and forget. Mostly forget.
We should remember that God, in His wisdom, has placed money and authority in the hands of the rich and powerful for a good reason, so that they might carefully and conservatively protect our resources, both natural and unnatural. Who is better qualified and best motivated to protect the country they own? It stands to reason that someone who owns something will take better care of it than someone who does not!
But Democrats want to upset this God-given order and redistribute wealth and power with false promises of “equality” and “food”. These days, with so many black Americans like Alan West and E.W. Jackson leading the way both backwards and forward, so many black Americans have embraced the conservative values of a wildly popular center-right nation! So many that, indeed, being both black and conservative is pretty much the norm (25%, 46%, or 79%, depending) that being both black and conservative is the New Normal, and so unremarkable as to be hardly worth mentioning.
It is once again Morning in America, about 3 a.m., that magical time when even the darkness holds the promise of a bright new dawn! Someday! Just not right now. But soon! Pretty soon. We’ll see.
That’s actually not true. YOu say “like Thurmond”, but really you should say only Thurmond. And Thurmond’s voting record changed drastically on civil rights when he became a Republican, while all the other Southern Dems, who stayed Dems, continued to vote as bigots well into the 80s.
That’s a bit of revisionist history that is commonly accepted, but it’s one of the biggest lies ever told by the Democratic Party. The vast majority of segregationist Dems remained segregationist Dems until retirement, death, or the 80s. And the ones who became Republican immediately became anti-segregationists, while the Democrats continued to tolerate bigots for 20 years after.
You should read more. You apparently read nothing but conservative tracts that “explain” history to the gullible.
Plenty of black people voted for Republicans in the thirties. That was an era when there were still Republicans who offered something to black voters. But as the Republican party abandoned black interests (and the Democratic party shook off its racist wing) black voters abandoned the Republican party. Black voters now overwhelmingly support the Democratic party because it’s in their self-interest to do so.
Black people aren’t stupid - something I shouldn’t have to explain to a supposedly black person. They’re as capable of seeing where their interests lie as white voters are and voting rationally on that basis.
If the Republican party wants to get back black voters, it needs to stop thinking about how black voters could benefit the Republican party and start thinking about what the Republican party could do to benefit black voters.
Here’s an article on National Review Online by a vice president of the American Enterprise Institute explaining why real-world Republican voters don’t inhabit the fantasy Libertarian world of online posters. As the comments there show.
He uses the Pew Typology surveys to contrast Post-Moderns (the center group) with Libertarians.
This, he claims, is the reason that Republicans can win governorships in solidly blue states. They have much higher concentrations of Post-Moderns than in red states, and they can be convinced to vote for fiscal conservatives.
I think it’s somewhere between unlikely and highly unlikely for Post-Moderns to swing to voting Republican in a presidential election. It’s outright impossible as long as Republicans keep making the inflammatory statements that the base eats up.
And we loop back to the rhetoric here that repeats over and over the 2012 statements that they’ll win because Democrats won’t bother to vote just like in 2010. All they need are more white people. In short, Republicans have figured out why they lost. They just can’t bring themselves to take any steps to change that. They’ve branded themselves the Party of Intolerance (*pace *Adaher) and insist on going down with that ship.
I agree that black voters aren’t stupid. Once you start assuming voters are stupid, then you know you’re doomed to a long time in the wilderness.
However, I don’t see any way for Republicans to appeal to black voters, and since black voters, like white voters, are a declining portion of the populace, I’m not sure why they should bother. Hispanic and Asian voters are a lot easier to win and matter more in terms of growth.
You are incorrect. Thurmond was the most prominent (and the only sitting Senator at the time), but numerous other Democrats that supported segregation and other racist policies (like Jesse Helms) switched parties in the years after Civil Rights. And it wasn’t prominent Democrats who opposed honoring MLK Jr. with a holiday (as an example) in the 70s and 80s- it was prominent Republicans (though not all, obviously).
What’s your explanation for the huge majorities of black voters that have supported the Democratic party since the 60s?