Hey, Obama, maybe if you’d actively done more than polish your frickin’ brand and send out waves of drone death robots, we’d not be where we are now. You had 8 years, and you began with a supermajority. What do we have to show for it? Even your “signature legislative achievement” was thought up by the Right, and permanently installs for-profit insurance at the heart of US health-care policy.
Yes. It sure seems like the Democrats have been banking on Black and Latino voters delivering 80-90% of their votes every election, while, just confining ourselves to 2016 onward, big majorities of white voters continue to vote cheerfully and lopsidedly for a man who is now actually (and very fairly) described by his opponent as a FASCIST. And this lopsided majority offers as a defense anything from "By gum, I had no idea Trump believed X or did Y!" to "My 401k looks great something something" to a flat-out "Heil You-Know-Who!" and/or "Come, Orange Lord Jesus!" FFS, America and its allies once fought a great and terrible war to defeat some other people known (again accurately) as fascists. Now we're supporting similarly-minded candidates for high office here? And blaming black men for our anxiety about the possibility that the fascists might actually win?
Trump received a larger percentage of the White Women vote (the LARGEST voting Block) than Clinton or Biden in 2016 & 2020. Look that up. Even when they bug, facts are still facts.
So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and agree that if Harris loses it isn’t the fault of Black Men.
FDR managed to be the first Democrat to win over a majority of the black vote (and Dem candidates for POTUS have not since lost the black vote) despite being absolutely shitty on civil rights (he basically let Southern Democrats dictate that the New Deal programs would leave out black Americans). How did this happen? Even though the New Deal was skewed towards whites, it did have some positive effects for black people, and the relative improvement of the economy during that period was felt even among blacks. (FDR also had excellent PR, never underestimate that!).
Ike saw some improvement among the black vote, enough in 1956 (though not a majority) that it helped lock in northern swing states (they still basically couldn't vote in the South), and scared Democrats into pushing for civil rights legislation. Nixon hit about 40% of the black vote in 1960, a high water mark that Republicans haven't come close to (Goldwater in '64 got something like 5%, probably from people who hated Social Security more than they liked being able to sit wherever they wanted on the bus). Nixon in '68 and '72 did a lot worse than his '60 showing, thanks in part to Democrats embracing civil rights and Nixon employing the Southern Strategy, then Ford hit about 17% which is a lot higher than Republicans can get today.
Since then, black voters became a constituency Democrats absolutely need to win, and Republicans (thanks to their big margins among white voters) can mostly ignore. However, if Democrats could increase their margins among white voters enough to make victory impossible for the GOP, the GOP might find itself in the position of having to actually win a lot more than 10 or 15% of the black vote.
If the Black vote became more competitive, it would benefit Black voters, as the GOP would be less likely to target our voting access. Currently, they argue that gerrymandering is less racially motivated and simply about maximizing political advantage. Unfortunately, that claim can appear reasonable when Black people are a solid Democratic voting bloc.
Yep--I think they're in a way telling the truth--they're targeting Dem voters, and certainly in those precincts "Dem voters" means "almost all black voters". If the black vote was closer to 50/50, they'd still try to suppress Democrats but the effect would probably have less racial impact. You'll notice we don't hear about "suppressing the Catholic vote".
Of course, right now they see no need to make a serious play for black votes because they have enough white votes to win anyway, so the minute THAT becomes something they cannot rely on, they'll have to seriously figure out how to win the black vote as well.
If anything it's notable that so many POC voters break towards the Democrats when you consider that they're no less likely to be conservative on a lot of key issues. (It's also one reason a lot of liberals don't seem to get that appealing to POC Democrats in primaries usually requires being more moderate on such issues). A key reason why POC voters--even the more conservative ones--still tend to vote for Dems are a suspicion that Republicans don't give a shot about non-whites, but that still may cause a tension between a somewhat conservative POC voter and a Democratic party they see as out of step with their preferences. It's not crazy to see a lot of them drifting towards the Republicans (this happened with a lot of other once-solid Dem constituencies, like Catholics, even Jews to a smaller extent). Democrats can't take those voters for granted, and certainly shouldn't limit their appeal to those voters--white voters are still way too big a constituency to ignore. And appealing to one group does not mean selling out the other, either.
As for Trump, if he wins, it's the fault of the dipshits who voted for him--women, men, whites, nonwhites, each of whom will have some stupid and awful reason to back that brain-souped monster--and peeling off any of them will help prevent that from happening.
Yes, and I think going directly to “these Black male voters have an issue with a woman POTUS” is a bit reductive. Trans issues have become more prominent since 2020 and many Dems expressed concerns that student loan debt relief wouldn’t appeal to working class, non college minorities.
Heck, Obama himself was wary of coming out in full support of marriage equality in 2008 and hesitated a bit before 2012 bc he worried about alienating very religious Black voters. He knew these voters weren’t in the pocket and “Republicans are worse” wouldn’t be sufficient if he veered too far left on certain issues.
Yeah--liberals cannot just assume "everyone knows Republicans are racist, so we get every black voter, and any black voter we don't get is just a stupid race traitor"--it's certainly not clear to everyone that Republicans are racist, and in any case even if black voters believed Republicans weren't looking out for them, it doesn't mean they can't conclude that Republicans would be better for them on the whole (just like black voters swung towards the Jim Crow-tolerant FDR because of the economy). This is a demo that can be lost for Democrats if they take it for granted.
In 2016, in DC's predominantly Black Ward 8, Trump got 1.6 percent of the vote. Hilary got 95.7 percent. In 2020, he doubled it to 3.3 percent. Media elites would argue this is an ominous trend.
If she wins, I think women of all shades and ages will be the reason.
If she loses, I’m blaming the media for fluffing this toad for the last 20 years.
I’m not falling for the whole downtrodden economics story that gets trotted out about rural white people. I’m going with Gene Wilder’s assessment in “Blazing Saddles”… salt of the earth. You know. Morons.
“After Trump’s upset victory in 2016, CNN claimed ‘African-American, Latino and younger voters failed to show up at the polls in sufficient numbers Tuesday to propel Clinton into the White House,’ and she ‘just couldn’t hold on to the Obama coalition.’ But coalition included white men! Clinton overwhelmingly won Black, Latino, and voters under 44. The Blue Wall shattered because white male union voters flipped to Trump.“
Not to mention that she won the popular vote by 3 million. And a white male put his thumb on the scale to tip the flip and negate those votes.
Thanks for all the numbers. David Broder might have been bored by facts, but the numbers are where the truth lives. I hope this gets wider distribution.
This nonsense from the degenerate gamblers of the political press are now making me agree with Bloody Bill Kristol (which is like twisting a knife in my gut, that I agree with thet warmonger) https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-one-thing-obama-got-wrong
It's like my brother the MAGA. He's just unreachable on this. He's personally done really well since 2020...got a major promotion, a big raise, and he still claims that the economy is horrible. Immigrants are flooding the country by the millions, etc etc.
Even is we beat trump back this time...some demagogue is going to capture a large percentage of his supporters, because a huge proportion of whites in this country are mats-shittingly terrified that the inexorable march of demographics to majority-minority status in the US means they're going to be treated like we treated all the non-whites for hundreds of years.
Couldn't agree more! A. White people attend his rallies, know they don't know a damn thing and if poor, kinda poor, middle of the road, hell, middle class or better, they have the most to lose because most are from red states or true Hillbilly, not Silicon "Yarvin/Theil/Musk" Ville. B. See A. I say this as I rarely see rallies, with the exception of Latinos, which are at great risk, attended by purple people/dog eating aliens, which everyone is to Trump. EVERYONE. C. White people whitewash, sane wash, pro-fetus wash, fake Christian wash, this dumpster fire into normalcy. How ever anyone votes, no one can say "I don't know who Trump is, at a most basic level", and I think Trump stated Jews are his ruin. I hope I didn't offend anyone because I've read so much about this very issue and one piece, of humble advice, for Harris, to attract any voter, is to engage head-on with him in a way, so frightful to him, he will not know what to do. Tell the people who gave inflation to Biden, who is the felon and exactly why, declassify documents Smith has, challenge the Heritage, the Federalists, and bear down. This isn't up to one culture, color, gender, but all of us who do not want our children and grandchildren to read the pages of an untruthful history, written by a pathological Petri dish of BS, and somehow get a copy of the truth and think why didn't they, everyone, do more, as Navalny says in his memoir "Patriot" which he wasn't always said patriot. Peace.
For the life of me I can’t get over the media or any white person thinking that black people aren’t stepping up their game. FFS, it’s us white folks that got Trump into office much to my shame. White folks (autocorrect keeps changing folks to fools, which is actually on point) bought into the lie that Trump was a smart business guru, that he would build a wall to keep out the riff-raff, that we would complain about so much winning. I cried angry tears when he was elected, how could people be so stupid? I finally realized it wasn’t just stupidity, but the joy of being openly racist. WTF.
Yup. We keep hearing the phrase "permission structure," lately in connection with some prominent Republicans saying, "It's okay to vote for the Dems." Well, Trump gives a whole lot of already inclined racists and fascists a whopping permission slip to be who they really are: racists and fascists. Over many decades, we "damn lib'ruls" had kind of got them to feel a wee bit sheepish about such propensities, but Donald swept our efforts right off the table with a wave of his little hands and some blowhard-talk about "very fine people." Half of modern civilization depends on keeping the loonies and extremists marginalized in our political discourse, but we've failed pretty spectacularly at it, and are now paying the price in waves of dread and anxiety.
Hey, Obama, maybe if you’d actively done more than polish your frickin’ brand and send out waves of drone death robots, we’d not be where we are now. You had 8 years, and you began with a supermajority. What do we have to show for it? Even your “signature legislative achievement” was thought up by the Right, and permanently installs for-profit insurance at the heart of US health-care policy.
Yes. It sure seems like the Democrats have been banking on Black and Latino voters delivering 80-90% of their votes every election, while, just confining ourselves to 2016 onward, big majorities of white voters continue to vote cheerfully and lopsidedly for a man who is now actually (and very fairly) described by his opponent as a FASCIST. And this lopsided majority offers as a defense anything from "By gum, I had no idea Trump believed X or did Y!" to "My 401k looks great something something" to a flat-out "Heil You-Know-Who!" and/or "Come, Orange Lord Jesus!" FFS, America and its allies once fought a great and terrible war to defeat some other people known (again accurately) as fascists. Now we're supporting similarly-minded candidates for high office here? And blaming black men for our anxiety about the possibility that the fascists might actually win?
Trump received a larger percentage of the White Women vote (the LARGEST voting Block) than Clinton or Biden in 2016 & 2020. Look that up. Even when they bug, facts are still facts.
So yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and agree that if Harris loses it isn’t the fault of Black Men.
FDR managed to be the first Democrat to win over a majority of the black vote (and Dem candidates for POTUS have not since lost the black vote) despite being absolutely shitty on civil rights (he basically let Southern Democrats dictate that the New Deal programs would leave out black Americans). How did this happen? Even though the New Deal was skewed towards whites, it did have some positive effects for black people, and the relative improvement of the economy during that period was felt even among blacks. (FDR also had excellent PR, never underestimate that!).
Ike saw some improvement among the black vote, enough in 1956 (though not a majority) that it helped lock in northern swing states (they still basically couldn't vote in the South), and scared Democrats into pushing for civil rights legislation. Nixon hit about 40% of the black vote in 1960, a high water mark that Republicans haven't come close to (Goldwater in '64 got something like 5%, probably from people who hated Social Security more than they liked being able to sit wherever they wanted on the bus). Nixon in '68 and '72 did a lot worse than his '60 showing, thanks in part to Democrats embracing civil rights and Nixon employing the Southern Strategy, then Ford hit about 17% which is a lot higher than Republicans can get today.
Since then, black voters became a constituency Democrats absolutely need to win, and Republicans (thanks to their big margins among white voters) can mostly ignore. However, if Democrats could increase their margins among white voters enough to make victory impossible for the GOP, the GOP might find itself in the position of having to actually win a lot more than 10 or 15% of the black vote.
If the Black vote became more competitive, it would benefit Black voters, as the GOP would be less likely to target our voting access. Currently, they argue that gerrymandering is less racially motivated and simply about maximizing political advantage. Unfortunately, that claim can appear reasonable when Black people are a solid Democratic voting bloc.
Yep--I think they're in a way telling the truth--they're targeting Dem voters, and certainly in those precincts "Dem voters" means "almost all black voters". If the black vote was closer to 50/50, they'd still try to suppress Democrats but the effect would probably have less racial impact. You'll notice we don't hear about "suppressing the Catholic vote".
Of course, right now they see no need to make a serious play for black votes because they have enough white votes to win anyway, so the minute THAT becomes something they cannot rely on, they'll have to seriously figure out how to win the black vote as well.
If anything it's notable that so many POC voters break towards the Democrats when you consider that they're no less likely to be conservative on a lot of key issues. (It's also one reason a lot of liberals don't seem to get that appealing to POC Democrats in primaries usually requires being more moderate on such issues). A key reason why POC voters--even the more conservative ones--still tend to vote for Dems are a suspicion that Republicans don't give a shot about non-whites, but that still may cause a tension between a somewhat conservative POC voter and a Democratic party they see as out of step with their preferences. It's not crazy to see a lot of them drifting towards the Republicans (this happened with a lot of other once-solid Dem constituencies, like Catholics, even Jews to a smaller extent). Democrats can't take those voters for granted, and certainly shouldn't limit their appeal to those voters--white voters are still way too big a constituency to ignore. And appealing to one group does not mean selling out the other, either.
As for Trump, if he wins, it's the fault of the dipshits who voted for him--women, men, whites, nonwhites, each of whom will have some stupid and awful reason to back that brain-souped monster--and peeling off any of them will help prevent that from happening.
Yes, and I think going directly to “these Black male voters have an issue with a woman POTUS” is a bit reductive. Trans issues have become more prominent since 2020 and many Dems expressed concerns that student loan debt relief wouldn’t appeal to working class, non college minorities.
Heck, Obama himself was wary of coming out in full support of marriage equality in 2008 and hesitated a bit before 2012 bc he worried about alienating very religious Black voters. He knew these voters weren’t in the pocket and “Republicans are worse” wouldn’t be sufficient if he veered too far left on certain issues.
Yeah--liberals cannot just assume "everyone knows Republicans are racist, so we get every black voter, and any black voter we don't get is just a stupid race traitor"--it's certainly not clear to everyone that Republicans are racist, and in any case even if black voters believed Republicans weren't looking out for them, it doesn't mean they can't conclude that Republicans would be better for them on the whole (just like black voters swung towards the Jim Crow-tolerant FDR because of the economy). This is a demo that can be lost for Democrats if they take it for granted.
In 2016, in DC's predominantly Black Ward 8, Trump got 1.6 percent of the vote. Hilary got 95.7 percent. In 2020, he doubled it to 3.3 percent. Media elites would argue this is an ominous trend.
If she wins, I think women of all shades and ages will be the reason.
If she loses, I’m blaming the media for fluffing this toad for the last 20 years.
I’m not falling for the whole downtrodden economics story that gets trotted out about rural white people. I’m going with Gene Wilder’s assessment in “Blazing Saddles”… salt of the earth. You know. Morons.
It’s true; honkies be frail!
Thank you Stephen for another insightful post 🙏
"It’s white men who’ll burn the world because a woman laughed at them once."
BOOM
ta, as always, Stephen
Support is great, but we all have to actually get out and vote!!!
“After Trump’s upset victory in 2016, CNN claimed ‘African-American, Latino and younger voters failed to show up at the polls in sufficient numbers Tuesday to propel Clinton into the White House,’ and she ‘just couldn’t hold on to the Obama coalition.’ But coalition included white men! Clinton overwhelmingly won Black, Latino, and voters under 44. The Blue Wall shattered because white male union voters flipped to Trump.“
Not to mention that she won the popular vote by 3 million. And a white male put his thumb on the scale to tip the flip and negate those votes.
I remember worrying that Trump would do relatively well among Black voters in 2020 then laughing with relief when I saw the actual vote numbers.
Another thing: I'm not sure many Black voters are paying attention to what the Beltway media is saying about them.
Thanks for all the numbers. David Broder might have been bored by facts, but the numbers are where the truth lives. I hope this gets wider distribution.
This nonsense from the degenerate gamblers of the political press are now making me agree with Bloody Bill Kristol (which is like twisting a knife in my gut, that I agree with thet warmonger) https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-one-thing-obama-got-wrong
"𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴: 𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘛𝘳𝘶𝘮𝘱, 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘖𝘣𝘢𝘮𝘢’𝘴 “𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴” 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮. 𝘐𝘵’𝘴 𝘮𝘺 “𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴” 𝘸𝘩𝘰 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘮: 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘷𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴."
It's like my brother the MAGA. He's just unreachable on this. He's personally done really well since 2020...got a major promotion, a big raise, and he still claims that the economy is horrible. Immigrants are flooding the country by the millions, etc etc.
Even is we beat trump back this time...some demagogue is going to capture a large percentage of his supporters, because a huge proportion of whites in this country are mats-shittingly terrified that the inexorable march of demographics to majority-minority status in the US means they're going to be treated like we treated all the non-whites for hundreds of years.
Couldn't agree more! A. White people attend his rallies, know they don't know a damn thing and if poor, kinda poor, middle of the road, hell, middle class or better, they have the most to lose because most are from red states or true Hillbilly, not Silicon "Yarvin/Theil/Musk" Ville. B. See A. I say this as I rarely see rallies, with the exception of Latinos, which are at great risk, attended by purple people/dog eating aliens, which everyone is to Trump. EVERYONE. C. White people whitewash, sane wash, pro-fetus wash, fake Christian wash, this dumpster fire into normalcy. How ever anyone votes, no one can say "I don't know who Trump is, at a most basic level", and I think Trump stated Jews are his ruin. I hope I didn't offend anyone because I've read so much about this very issue and one piece, of humble advice, for Harris, to attract any voter, is to engage head-on with him in a way, so frightful to him, he will not know what to do. Tell the people who gave inflation to Biden, who is the felon and exactly why, declassify documents Smith has, challenge the Heritage, the Federalists, and bear down. This isn't up to one culture, color, gender, but all of us who do not want our children and grandchildren to read the pages of an untruthful history, written by a pathological Petri dish of BS, and somehow get a copy of the truth and think why didn't they, everyone, do more, as Navalny says in his memoir "Patriot" which he wasn't always said patriot. Peace.
For the life of me I can’t get over the media or any white person thinking that black people aren’t stepping up their game. FFS, it’s us white folks that got Trump into office much to my shame. White folks (autocorrect keeps changing folks to fools, which is actually on point) bought into the lie that Trump was a smart business guru, that he would build a wall to keep out the riff-raff, that we would complain about so much winning. I cried angry tears when he was elected, how could people be so stupid? I finally realized it wasn’t just stupidity, but the joy of being openly racist. WTF.
Yup. We keep hearing the phrase "permission structure," lately in connection with some prominent Republicans saying, "It's okay to vote for the Dems." Well, Trump gives a whole lot of already inclined racists and fascists a whopping permission slip to be who they really are: racists and fascists. Over many decades, we "damn lib'ruls" had kind of got them to feel a wee bit sheepish about such propensities, but Donald swept our efforts right off the table with a wave of his little hands and some blowhard-talk about "very fine people." Half of modern civilization depends on keeping the loonies and extremists marginalized in our political discourse, but we've failed pretty spectacularly at it, and are now paying the price in waves of dread and anxiety.
Spot on. 🎯