Commentary By Ron Beasley
As I noted here the Republicans seem to be be digging the demographic hole they find themselves in deeper and deeper. Yglesias reports that they have some high powered encouragement from Pat Buchanan.
A provocative article by Pat Buchanan argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Republicans shouldn�t worry about alienating Hispanic voters, they should just focus on getting white people to like them more:
In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate�s Hispanic vote.
If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.
Now Matt seems to think he's onto something:
I do think this is something conservatives are going to want to think about. Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We�re talking about a guy who�s too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it�s not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.
Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it�s not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority.
The problem with this is that while it might work in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi it won't work in many other states. The white demographic, outside the south anyway, is also changing - it's younger and more tolerant. Independents are turned off by blatant bigotry and that strategy won't even work in the south for that many more election cycles.
James Wolcott has a great post on Sarah and the Republicans, ( Go read the entire thing) where he quotes Daniel Finkelstein of The Times UK.
There is no more eloquent statement of modern Republicanism than resigning office with time still on the clock. Mrs Palin has chosen to talk about power, rather than exercise it. She would rather write a book and give lectures about being a governor than actually be a governor. And her party has made the same choice.
......
The maths of politics aren�t very complicated. If you want to win and you don�t have enough votes from people who agree with you, you have to win support from people who don�t by accommodating their views. You cannot win elections by getting the same people to vote for you by pulling the lever harder. This, however, is the strategy the Republicans seem to be embarking upon.
Push out people like Mr Huntsman, greet the defection of the moderate senator Arlen Specter with a shrug or even a cheer, ramp up the partisan rhetoric, handing leadership over to talk show big mouths. It all makes for the gaiety of life, sells books, builds radio audiences. But win elections? Forget it.
The great irony of the Republican appeal to its base, is that the people it is appealing to aren�t historically its base at all. The educated middle class, the business community, Republican voters for generations. What about them? The experience of the British Conservative Party is that trying to sack your voters � effete chattering-class liberals � and replace them with a new set � hard-working strivers � doesn�t work very well.
White people are an actual minority in California. But California whites are far less Republican than their counterparts in Alabama or Louisiana. So the culture-war and southern strategy approach isn't terribly effective with younger voters or white voters outside the south.
ReplyDeleteThat is because southerners tend to be conservative (at least on social issues) and more religious than the rest of the country. While the whole country has a pretty unpleasant racial history, everyone knows that slavery and Jim Crow were centered in the deep south- so it makes sense that voting patterns in the south are more racially polarized than elsewhere.
As for younger white voters, they are more comfortable with racial/ethnic diversity and less hostile to gays than older folks are. So the Buchanan strategy will backfire.
I agree. In fact, the Southern strategy backfired in the last election. And it wasn't just in the South. I recall Carville's description of Pennsylvania as a state with Philadelphia at one end, Pittsburgh at the other and Alabama in between.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite anecdotes (I love little stories) is about the canvasser who was told by a rural voter "We're voting for the N***er."