It’s now official: Republicans really do hate brown people. When Hispanic (14.5% of population) and African-American (12.1% of the population) groups felt the need to hold debates among the would-be Presidents, the Democrats were all over themselves to participate. You’d think that the Republicans, following Karl Rove‘s plan for a Permanent Republican Majority would’ve followed suit. But alas for the brothers and mis amigos — only Señor McCain agreed to attend Univision’s event, and none of the Republican candidates agreed to attend the event at Morgan State. They cited “scheduling conflicts.” And if you believe that, I have a wonderful bridge to sell you… it’s in Brooklyn, I believe. What it comes down to is that the Republican candidates only care about the votes of white people and are willing to drop a full quarter of the electorate in the “D” column come the next presidential election. Given the rates of population increase among minorities (45% of children under five are minorities) it appears that the Republican party intends to rush headlong lemming-style into political oblivion. Let’s pause for a moment and see what what states are going to be switching columns.
- Texas – Texas is already 35.1% Hispanic and 11.2% African-American . According to the Dallas Fed, Texas will be minority-dominated by 2020. Hello Blue Texas and 34 Democratic electors.
- Florida – The F State is already 19.5% Hispanic and 15.7% African-American. If every one of them voted Democratic, the Republicans would have to capture 77.2% of the Anglo vote to win the state. Drop 27 more votes into the “D” Column.
Combine this with the fact that California (55), New York (31), New Jersey (15), Connecticut (7), DC (3), Illinois (21), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (12), Michigan(17), Vermont (3), and Rhode Island are already quite blue, and you have 259 electoral votes solidly in the “D” Column. Former Congressman Jack Kemp (R-NY) notes, “We sound like we don’t want immigration; we sound like we don’t want black people to vote for us.” That’s right, Representative Kemp, it really sounds like your party doesn’t. Which I imagine, makes the Democrats, very, very happy.
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
September 26, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Southern Strategy….
For instance, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign kickoff in Philadelphia, Mississippi—site of the 1964 Civil Rights murders—was not Reagan’s moral high water mark. The Party of Lincoln, in a short twenty years, abandoned its historic civil rights moorings.
Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips, popularizer of the phrase, is now kicking himself for it.
I’m not a bona fide expert in American political history (though am fairly well-read), but this article is and interesting read (as Wikipedia articles go):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
Where this is all going, of course, is not easy to say…. One general point is that social movements tend to last about 30-40 years. Nixon was elected 39 years ago and Reagan 27 years ago. You do the math.
However, political parties can and do regenerate themselves, and the good of the system really does require competition. So the GOP may well alter its direction, but it seems like it is stuck between pleasing “the base” and a general electorate that’s moving away from the base. We’ll see, there’s a lot of potential variation out there.
September 26, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Of course, the barely-stated premise of this article is that huge majorities of Hispanic and African-American voters will always vote Democratic. That may be true on the black side, but it’s much less likely for latinos. Say what you will, many Hispanics are socially conservative while being fiscally liberal. The increasingly shrill identity politics of the Dems probably aren’t going to play well with Juan Sixpack once he gets to witness the ugly reality of relativistic claptrap up close at his daughter’s school.
And it’s especially not likely in Florida, where many of the Hispanics are, how to say this, not precisely liberal. (Indeed a sizable number remain nearly single issue voters, with that single issue being anti-Communism—which makes it tricky for the increasingly socialist Democratic leadership to woo them effectively.)
But, of course, it is true that the Republicans do themselves no favors by continuing to reinforce their image as the party of white privilege. If the choice of Democratic candidates weren’t often between barking moonbats (Pelosi) and the walking dead (Kerry), this might already have been telling.
Oh well, at least some Republicans are worrying about this:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/nadler200412080811.asp
Only time will tell if the Republicans as a party understand that regularly dissing an ever increasing portion of the population is a Bad Idea ™…
September 26, 2007 at 6:52 pm
The changing demographics are significant but as a politician you only need to pay attention to people that DO vote.
September 26, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Let’s not forget what the Democrats real message is for this campaign:
“Vote for us because none of us are named George W. Bush and he stupidly sent us to Iraq and screwed up our economy”
Just like in 2006 my friend, but with the added stalwart issue of the declining American economy. The acute impact of the shift to blue that you cite will not be an issue this cycle, but definitely for future election cycles.
September 26, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Let’s not forget what the Democrats real message is for this campaign:
Have to disagree there. Each Democrat has their own message for this campaign.
Hillary: “I’ll eat your young, and sacrifice your neighbors to Blag’har Goddess of Strife.”
Richardson: “I’ll do anything, ANYTHING for a vote, even sell my state’s budget down the river.”
Biden: “I make inappropriate racial slurs, that’s how you know I’d be a good White Guy With Power”
Dodd: “Who the hell is Christopher Dodd!”
Gravel: “I was voted into office by drunks without GEDs, so I figure I’m at least as qualified as the last guy!”
Kucinich: “Can I toe the party line any closer? No seriously, can I?”
Edwards: “I love to take advantage of sorrow and misery for big bucks!”
Obama: “I actually care about this country, its people, and our future. I’m not corrupt, I have a vision, and I’m actually a trustworthy, upstanding, and religious guy.”
September 26, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Mr. AM, I see your point, but I guess I should have amended my statement to mean the Democratic Party, not to bundle each candidate in this primary stage.
September 27, 2007 at 2:20 am
I’m truly amazed at the way politicians can ignore large groups of people. It’s all about numbers and percentages and what “blocks” they think they can swing.
And they wonder why we feel like our votes don’t count.
September 27, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Jayne wrote:
###I’m truly amazed at the way politicians can ignore large groups of people. It’s all about numbers and percentages and what “blocks” they think they can swing.
And they wonder why we feel like our votes don’t count.###
It’s simply a matter of the institution. Single member districts lead this kind of thing because you tend to leave large groups within the population unrepresented. For example, let’s say that a given electoral district with three parties A, B and C had preference percentages A = 20%, B = 40% and C = 40%. You can bet that a candidate from party A will not win. Of course, the incentives might lead party B or C to court party A and try to make a 60/40 split, but there will inevitably be big chunks of party A’s supporters left out in the cold.
Of course, multimember districts have their own… peculiarities.
September 27, 2007 at 12:34 pm
AOC wrote:
###Of course, the barely-stated premise of this article is that huge majorities of Hispanic and African-American voters will always vote Democratic. That may be true on the black side, but it’s much less likely for latinos. Say what you will, many Hispanics are socially conservative while being fiscally liberal.###
All I can say is, so far at least, pocketbook issues prove to much more salient for these populations than the social ones you mention, or so sayeth the survey data. The usual way that this sort of thing is examined is to ask subjects to rank-order policies in terms of most to least, or ask them to nominate their top three, etc. Latinos and Blacks are often quite socially conservative but put the social issues like gay marriage, etc., pretty low on the queue. In a sense, these are seen as “luxury” issues for them. (If you do not require people to make tradeoffs between issues, they often say everything is desirable, so the ranking is necessary.)
However—as previous waves of immigration have proved—over the course of a generation things like this do change as these groups move up into the middle class. The Republicans have benefited a great deal from the movement of the children of the immigrants of the first half of the 19th Century becoming middle class and, I would suspect, will benefit from the children of the 1980- wave becoming middle class.
September 27, 2007 at 12:46 pm
AOC wrote: ###But, of course, it is true that the Republicans do themselves no favors by continuing to reinforce their image as the party of white privilege. … Only time will tell if the Republicans as a party understand that regularly dissing an ever increasing portion of the population is a Bad Idea ™.###
This, I think, is the reason why the Southern Strategy was so damaging. It won a lot of short-term victories but has (I suppose like most other successful strategies), sown the seeds of its own destruction. My brother (who is quite the liberal, but definitely tempered by a decade of big city life in, until recently, not so nice neighborhoods) and I were talking about this the other day. I mentioned the famous quote of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
One of the things we both agreed on was that over the time from the 1950s to the 1980s, the culture really went through some major league shocks—civil rights and the end of Jim Crow being, I think, one of the absolute biggest—and, in a sense, lost its moorings. Much of the “Southern Strategy” was explicitly tapping the anxieties of that age. However, when you make a bargain with the devil, you will have to pay the bill eventually…. As messed up as a lot of things seem to be these days, many social indicators are moving in the right direction: divorce is becoming less common (at least among the middle and upper classes), teen pregnancy is down, a lot of crime is down, etc. There are upticks, of course, but overall things ARE moving away from the bad place we were in twenty years ago. Causality is very hard to impute here. (I am a firm believer that the term “cause” and observational data have very little to do with each other. :)) But nonetheless, I do think that Moynihan was onto something important and that a new culture is emerging that can accommodate many of the changes that happened in the immediate post-World War II era. Such changes, however, are usually the work of years and decades, not instant results.
September 28, 2007 at 8:36 am
AOC wrote: ###The increasingly shrill identity politics of the Dems probably aren’t going to play well with Juan Sixpack….###
Hey, that’s “Jose Seis Paquetes” to you, bub!
February 18, 2008 at 1:09 am
So the republicans supposedly “don’t care” about the 25% hispanic and black voters? Is this any better or more intelligent than the democrats not caring about the 75% white voters? If you think so, you’d better get your head out of your ass and look again! If blacks and hispanics made up 75% of the population, do you think the democrats would then care about the 25% white vote???
February 18, 2008 at 1:13 am
By the way, white democrats, if Obama is elected, who do you think he’s going to favor most if not all of the time? And if Hitlery Clinton is elected, how many white heterosexual males do you think SHE’S going to appoint to cabinet posts? Be careful what you vote for, White democrats; you might get it!
February 18, 2008 at 8:45 pm
And if Hitlery Clinton is elected, how many white heterosexual males do you think SHE’S going to appoint to cabinet posts?
Tons. After all, the vast majority of people qualified for those jobs are white heterosexual males.
Now in a Republican presidency, we might have a few more white homosexual males…. cough Larry Craig… cough.
February 19, 2008 at 12:29 am
Ralph DiMattia wrote:
By the way, white democrats, if Obama is elected, who do you think he’s going to favor most if not all of the time? And if Hitlery Clinton is elected, how many white heterosexual males do you think SHE’S going to appoint to cabinet posts?
Um, what kind of odd bit of the identity politics world do you live in, exactly?
February 20, 2008 at 10:44 pm
The one question I have is, over the next few years how low will the GOP representation in the House and Senate go?
The previous low-water point for the Republicans in the House during the last fifty years was 1976, where they lost 4 more seats from the previous election to drop to 145 against the Democrat’s 290.
In the Senate, the most recent low point was the 32 seats the GOP held in 1964 in the aftermath of the Goldwater debacle.
The various articles that I’ve read show that the Republicans will have more seats to defend this year and in 2010. Led by a charismatic President Obama, much (although not all) of the mainstream press, Charles Barkley, and virtually all of the entertainment industry, can the Democrats get to a point where they are fielding close to 300 representatives and a filibuster-proof 70 senators? And if so, at what point does one-party hubris become a factor (ala Roosevelt’s attempt to neuter the Supreme Court by expanding it)? Or does the majority become almost permanent, like Mexico’s PRI in the 20th century or California’s Democratic legislature? And finally, if a supermajority comes into play in 2008, will it hold together and allow for national health care, swift withdrawals from Iraq and possibly Afghanistan, a comprehensive energy and global warming policy, hate crimes legislations, and the reinstatment and removal of right-wing commentators from the radio? Or will conservative elements within the Democractic party combine with the few remaining Republicans to thwart the Obama Administration’s legislation, as southern Democrats did to Roosevelt during his second term?
November 29, 2008 at 11:33 am
[…] like D are incapable of original thought. GOP Declares War On Brown People | PEEK | AlterNet Republicans Really Do Hate Brown People: The Beginnings of the Permanent Democratic Majority The 1… Wonkette : Big Afterparty at Rudys; No Brown People Allowed How Dare Brown People Participate In […]
October 16, 2010 at 10:07 pm
a permanent Dem country steeped in identity politics will not be a prosperous democracy. It will be a corrupt, incompetent, impoverished semi-totalitarian one party state like Mexico under the PRI.
September 18, 2011 at 8:33 am
[…] They tell illegal aliens that xenophobic Republicans want to enforce America’s immigration laws only because they hate brown people. […]