The Southern Strategy involved selling long held Republican positions to the South. It seems to me that the accusation is that neither party should have tried to win these voters at all. Yet not too far in the distant past, Bill Clinton, seeking reelection, boasted in ads run in 15 states that he had signed DOMA. So I’m not sure what ground Democrats have to play holier than thou. Unlike Republicans, Democrats abandoned their principles to pander, and still abandon their principles to pander in red districts. Republicans stuck to their principles, and found a way to sell those principles to southern voters.
Okay. If that’s what the Democrats did then it works. Are the Republicans going to come up with a plan or are they going to let it happen to them again? Are the Republicans going to try to convince those single-issue Democratic voters to switch parties by adopting a more pro-choice stand? Are the Republicans going to convert those low-information Democrats by a voter information campaign? What’s the plan?
That’s kinda the point, when you control academia, you can twist the truth and get away with it. That’s why fascism is supposedly “right-wing”, because we just couldn’t have the left be solely responsible for the terrors of the 20th century. As if Hitler and Mussolini were small government, free market advocates.
Since the academic left tried to deny the horrors of Communism but failed, the fallback was to act as if the right and left extremes were equally responsible for totalitarianism. And of course, the right-wing version was worse, when in the real world they were pretty darn equivalent.
As for the Southern Strategy, the sin is that the South went GOP. If the South had stayed Democrat, we’d be hearing about how the South has been redeemed, and the real racists are now in Utah.
So once again, what’s the plan? Should the Republicans pander like the Democrats? If so, on what issues? Should the Republicans work on selling their principles to voters outside the South? If so, what’s the program?
eta: Based on your last post, should the Republicans work on getting more conservatives in academic positions?
My point is it’s not enough to claim “This is why the Democrats won.” You need to shake it off and figure out a way to come back.
Black voters are the only voters that are probably unreachable due to the history. The GOP is a federalist party and black voters trust the federal government more than state governments.
However, all other voters, women, gays, Asians, Hispanics, Arabs, Jews, those are all groups the GOP can win or at least do better among. And they can also do better among white male voters. That’s a group they are currently winning by 25 points, they can get that margin up to 40 and at this point it’s probably the easiest path to 51%.
Don’t go there, I already know plenty about precious discussions to tell you that this is indeed another example of your rotten sources keeping you in a bubble of information that once it is breached it only makes the ones repeating their trash to sound foolish.
In a nutshell the big flaw is that the revisionists (and yes they are) that claim that Hitler and Mussolini were not the right wing is that the proponents of that unfounded say so never explain what happened to the extreme right wingers and plain right wingers. They reduce it to magical thinking to avoid the fact that Hitler and Mussolini were the extreme right that they send the liberals and leftists to concentration camps.
More certifiable nonsense, this is indeed more of the sorry effort from the right to convince others that Democrats and liberals are like them.
Nope, it required the Democrats to admit that they “lost the south” And no, it was not a perfect change of course, but what many minorities can notice is that the Republican party nowadays does need to make a big effort to tell their current racist elements that the leadership will risk to “lose the south” by telling them that they are not welcomed in the modern Republican party in more direct ways.
You know who else sent social democrats and liberals to the camps? Stalin.
The Democrats lost the South due to civil rights. It does not follow that the Republicans won the South due to abandoning civil rights. Because they never did.
As a general rule, any demographic the Democrats tend to lose is hateful and/or ignorant. It can never be that the Democrats lost due to corruption, incompetence, or liberalism.
What’s interesting about that is that knowing why you lose isn’t always necessary in politics. Due to the pendulum nature of political fortunes, parties can delude themselves and still eventually find themselves back on top. If you listen to Democrats, they haven’t lost an election in our lifetimes unless it was due to lies or ignorant voters.
And you know that that makes your point look more ridiculous? That is why Stalin is also dismissed by Democrats and Liberals. Your sources are rotten.
Even the Realclear politics cite from OMGABC reports in the end that race is still a factor. So it is really silly to claim “never”
The demonstrated ignorance on your part, here and particularly in the immigration thread, is ready made evidence of the reason why a good number of a demographic is lost. It is better for the Democrats** and the Republicans **not to have it.
Stalin’s right-wing too now?
Is your strategy essentially “hope more people vote for us this time” or is there something more to it?
Are the Republicans going to do something different in 2016? Or are they just going to repeat what they’ve been doing for the last couple of decades and hope that it somehow works this time?
Fifteen pages in and we’re still working on the question from the title line.
I can tell you what i HOPE will happen. Then maybe I can tell you what will probably happen.
I hope that Republicans get on the gay marriage bandwagon. That’s where the wind is blowing, it’s the right thing to do, and sexual orientation should not influence voting in an ideal world. As has been pointed out, the reason Republicans don’t just clean up the white vote by like 50 points is because of single women, and also white gays. So take gay rights off the table as an issue.
In regards to women, I agree earlier in the thread with the guy who said that the gaffes aren’t mistakes in that the speakers really are that insensitive and chauvanistic. It’s not the pro-life stance that’s the problem, it’s the archaic view of womens’ role in society. So respect women better. It’s not like Republicans have always lost female voters, Reagan used to win them.
In regards to minorities, the easiest short term solution is to continue to heavily promote minority candidates. Democrats have a weakness when it comes to minorities: Barack Obama excepted, they don’t run minorities in white districts. They tend to prefer minorities to only represent minority districts. Republicans not only run minority candidates in heavily white districts, they often win with them. They win with them statewide as well, and in the South of all places. A racist party wouldn’t run minority candidates in the South. The Democrats sure don’t except in minority districts. Long term, just continue to promote small government and federalism, and most importantly, color blind policies.
What will actually happen, I believe, is that Republicans will continue to shift to the right and just try to be more careful about what they say. Meanwhile, the reformist wing of the party, which overlaps heavily with the Tea Party, is being handed a gift by Barack Obama’s machine approach to politics. Pushing reforms to the way government operates is always popular(it was a big part of the 1994 GOP landslide), and Obama pretty much failed or didn’t even try to live up to his promises on that count.
:rolleyes:
I think the best reply to this nonsense is the reply that cartoonist and editor William Gaines of Mad Magazine fame told Joe McCarthy that the cartoon magazines that he published would be closed immediately and he sent to a gulag, point being that even then extremism from the left did exit and no, even liberals in the past did not saw him as a friend, not even Einstein, that choose not to go to Russia for similar reasons when he left Germany. No democrat nor leftist that I know thinks Stalin would be a role model.
And I would like a pony too.
Well, you can’t. The liberals won’t let you.
For shits and giggles, let’s say I grant you that the premise in your study is absolutely correct. It does not, nor does it, prove the assertion that racist Democrats left the Democratic party in favor of the Republican party. If this were true, then you would see a subsequent change in voting patterns-- something you do not see until the 1990’s.
But going back to what you posted, there’s a bit of irony in the fact that you would post it. The statement “If blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites” is not “anti-Black”. In fact, these are the four statements used to determine whether or not one was “racist” towards Blacks.
1.) Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors (agree).
2.) Over the past few years, Blacks have gotten less than they deserve (disagree).
3.) It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if Blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as Whites (agree).
4.) Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class (disagree).
Essentially, answering these questions with the aforementioned agree or disagree would have you labeled as a racist, which is just absurd. Even you would have a hard time arguing otherwise.
False, as can be seen by presidential election results (and presidential politics were the focus of the Southern Strategy).
LOL- let’s just say that since the 2012 election I’m not particularly confident in your analysis skills and judgment of what’s true and what’s not.
If this is true, then you keep demanding proof of something that cannot be proven. It’s not controversial, though. And I’ll stick with the statements of Atwater and Mehlman- for years, the Republican party tried to appeal to white racists and get their votes. This was smart politics at the time- there were lots and lots of white racists, but now the strategy seems to turn off more people than it attracts.
I don’t get why this is so hard to accept- Democrats don’t deny that in the past the Democratic party made efforts to get white racists to vote for them. But in the 60s the party leadership made a conscious choice (politically speaking) to walk away from racism and reach out to black people. So with the rather numerous white racists suddenly up for grabs (at least in national elections, as the data shows pretty clearly), it’s not surprising that the other major party reached out to them.
“A gaffe occurs not when a politician lies but when he tells the truth” – Michael Kinsley
No, it is not hard when one takes history into account, the basic problem I see is one that I pointed many times before and I thought it was a joke before, but it is true, many right wingers just have a blind spot for timelines or the march of time itself. It is a like a magical property that causes some right wingers to think that all the left is the same as was in the past or the same as the fascists. Or that Parties can never change their bases or character.
Remembering how bad it was for the Irish at in the 19th and 20th centuries one should never forget that anti discrimination legislation in the workplace and housing banned discrimination in employment on the basis of race, creed, color, or national origin special favors are part of what we are ever since the bill of rights. Of course it was not perfect early on, but that is why even 200 years after the birth of the nation there was the need to make rules to tell the ones going against change to back off.
Let’s start here because the answer to this can take in all the other issues.
The critical fact to understand is that the Republican and Democratic Parties are far more vertical than horizontal. Estimates are that more than 100,000 separate voting areas exist, heavily overlapping, in the U.S. The few hundred national-level seats are less than half a percent of the total. Most votes are intensely local. They are the village, town, and city councils, the school boards, the county legislatures, the courts, the DAs and sheriffs, the dogcatchers if they still have those, and the myriad of other unique or idiosyncratic lines on your local ballot. These positions are part of the fabric of an area. They decide the laws, but much more importantly and cynically they control the money. They hand out the contracts for building, or maintaining, or servicing. They steer you to the businesses you should work with and the banks that will lend you money and the unions you will have to hire. Fabric is the right metaphor; you can’t shred these ties without leaving yourself naked.
Republicans and Democrats contest these positions in the overwhelming majority of cases, even when the positions are nominally non-partisan. Because of that the parties are huge and reach down into the block level in every community. They are organized and active. They recruit volunteers to do the everyday work of gathering signatures and working election days and sending out literature and making phone calls and again a myriad of other duties. This is what third party advocates never seem to understand, BTW. Each of the two major parties has more activists than third parties get in total votes. You can’t compete against that.
With that in mind, go back and look at party history. It starts as we know it in 1860. The Whigs broke into the Republicans and Constitutional Union parties. The Democrats ran two candidates as well, Stephen Douglas Under the National Democratic ticket, representing the North, and John Breckenridge as a Southern Democrat. After the war the Republicans took over one side and the northern and southern Democrats worked together in a loose coalition. Presidential politics was less important than local politics, as seen in 1876 when the Democrats threw the Presidency to Hayes in the Corrupt Bargain that ensured them domination of the southern states without federal interference.
Industry and immigration created political machines in the north. We think of machines as being Democratic, but that’s selection bias. The Democrats held New York and that dominates history. Pennsylvania was under the control of Republican boss Boies Penrose and that meant Philadelphia and Pittsburgh had Republican machines as well. But the northern state Democratic machines were a party separate from the southern state machines. (The western silver Democrats under Byran were almost a third separate party.)
Immigration was virtually stopped in 1924 and the Depression damaged the Republicans in an unprecedented way. Even Pennsylvania started moving Democratic. But local politics remained dominant. FDR cut deals with Southern Democrats in a way reminiscent of 1876. He wouldn’t press civil rights issues in return for their support. Blacks were not a large enough voting block yet.
That changed after WWII. Without 30 years of immigration swamping their growth, they demanded equality and for the first time had the numbers to make that meaningful. White flight into the suburbs turned urban cores into majority black districts. They started building their own organizations up from the block level. This took time. Decades, in fact. The success is much more visible on the local level than nationally but that is to be expected in a country where concentrations of race exist so often.
With that background, the answer to OMGABC’s question becomes obvious. The Democrats were the South. Republicans barely existed. The Democratic network was essentially equivalent to the South. As blacks did in the North, southern Republicans had to build their local organizations from virtually nothing in order to provide alternatives to entrenched interests who had little to gain by embracing the Republican name.
Presidential elections attract a different body of voters than local ones. The voting population expands greatly. Local elections notoriously garner small turnouts. If a mayoral election gets 20% of registered voters it causes concern in the papers but nowhere else. Presidential elections get 60% of registered voters. Congressional elections move in a cycle from matching the Presidential percentage to dipping to about half in off-years. Trying to predict state- and local-level races from Presidential demographics is risky.
You’ll notice that I left out the labels of conservative and liberal attitudes and policies. These matter but in the past they seldom lined up neatly with party affiliation. New York had a number of Republican governors but always had liberal policies. The Southern Democrats were usually extremely conservative on social issues and foreign but were willing to vote against Republicans. (Though not always and not for ideological reasons.) Roosevelt had Republicans in his cabinet because Progressive Republicans were more liberal than most Democrats.
Since the Civil Rights era, the Republicans have driven their liberal wing out of the party and have mostly done so for moderates. Democrats continue to allow a wider spread of stances (yes, I know what I did there) although Blue Dog Democrats are a distinct minority. Even so, one study I remember showed that every Democratic Senator voted left of any Republican Senator and vice versa. That also was a very slow change. The one-state politics of the South meant that members of Congress could get re-elected essentially forever. This gave them enormous power that even the nominal relaxation of seniority rules in the 1970s didn’t affect. My memory also tells me that there were times when every committee chair in the Senate was a Southern Democrat. Voting them out of office because of race issues just wasn’t going to happen universally. People in power tend to stay in power because they can use that power.
Change still happens. Every state legislature in the south has both houses controlled by Republicans. Even so, most major cities in that same south vote Democratic and are run by black mayors. When Tip O’Neill kept saying all politics is local this is exactly what he meant.
The Republican Party choose this outcome. They worked hard over decades to achieve it. And they did it in part by conveying a message that all sides correctly heard. If you try to limit the discussion to presidential politics you will fail to understand this. If you try to limit the discussion to black/white politics you will fail to understand this. The Southern Strategy appealed to white voters at the expense of black voters, but that was 40 years ago when the size of voting blocks was very different. Today blacks and Hispanics and Asians, and Jews and Muslims and atheists, and gays, and single women, and apologies to whoever I’m leaving out, all get the message. It would be beyond belief that they all are voting Democratic in such majorities unless they all are hearing and understanding the same message, that they are Different and that the Republicans don’t want them. These groups are not uniformly distributed and not all of them band together to do the small daily work of politics. But some do and that shows up in results wherever they do.
You do see a change in voting patterns. It is a gigantic change and it is visible at all levels. The only thing that is missing is the notion that these changes could take place overnight or in any time span less than decades. That cannot happen and I would find it astoundingly suspicious if you pointed to it in anything other than a rare anomaly.