Posted on 11/19/2014 8:59:35 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democrats were predicting the end of the Republican Party.
With the rise of Obama, James Carville began peddling a new book “40 More Years” promising that the Dems would rule for generations.
Just this year Carville predicted that the Republican Party would become extinct if it lost to Hillary Clinton. But it was the Democratic Party that was going extinct in Carville’s own backyard.
Republicans began winning Senate seats in Louisiana for the first time in a century in just the last ten years. If Landrieu loses, then both of the Louisiana’s Senate seats will be unprecedentedly held by Republicans.
And Louisiana isn’t an outlier. Bill Clinton couldn’t stop Arkansas from going full Republican with two Republican senators and a full suite of Republican representatives for the first time in history. That’s all the more amazing in a state that only had two Republican senators before that for over a century.
The Democratic Party is going extinct in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s vanishing because the working class White Democrat is becoming extinct.
Even Carville hedged his bets while predicting the end of the Republican Party by joining FOX News.
A generation ago, white Democrats outnumbered white Republicans. Today it’s the other way around. Under Obama, barely a quarter of white people still identify as Democrats.
Republicans didn’t just win a few elections. They swept across entire legislatures in western and southern states. They took state senates and governorships in places like New York and Illinois. It’s not that Republicans had a particularly compelling message, some did and some didn’t, but that Democrats had assumed that enough white voters would continue showing up to prop up their rainbow coalition.
They were wrong.
The latest Pew poll shows that 74 percent of Democrats support ObamaCare, but only 29 percent of white respondents do. The Democratic Party is becoming a party without white people. Under Obama, the Democratic disadvantage among white voters doubled without any corresponding gains among minority voters.
Meanwhile Republicans increased their share of white voters. And that’s only telling part of the story.
The nation’s largest party is “none of the above”. Independents began to decisively outnumber both parties under Obama. Hispanic voters are increasingly identifying as independents. So are white men.
And though the independents come from both parties, they increasingly swing Republican in key races.
The Democratic model depended on the combination of an overwhelming minority vote combined with a second place showing in the white vote. That model may no longer be feasible, especially in states with a shortage of unemployed white hipsters with PhDs and protest signs who know all the latest social warrior mumbo jumbo but can’t change a flat tire.
The Democrats had to bet on turnout and changing demographics to salvage the situation. They played up racial tensions to increase turnout and championed open borders to shift demographics and those tactics only deepened their problems with white voters.
Tribalism helped Obama win a second term, but it didn’t fix the underlying flaw in the Democratic model. And it actually worsened the situation. The more the Democrats sounded racially divisive notes, the more they alienated white voters, not just by abusing them, but by ignoring their concerns.
ObamaCare became emblematic of a party that tuned out what used to be its base. And so its base left forcing the Democrats to discover that they couldn’t actually win without white voters.
Republican congressional candidates won 64 percent of white working class voters. Landrieu won just 18 percent of the white vote; 22 percent among white women and 15 percent among white men. That’s less than the amount taken by a second Republican candidate in the race, Rob Maness.
Those numbers alone indicate why the Democrats won’t put any real money behind her. If Landrieu can’t even compete for the white vote, then there’s no reason to waste good money on her.
Mark Pryor won only 31 percent of white voters. Nunn won 23 percent of white voters. The Dems didn’t do this badly everywhere, but where they lost it was usually because the white vote sharply tilted away from them enough to offset their overwhelming minority percentages.
The Democrats have a white voter problem. The party is betting that it won’t outlast Obama because it confused its own propaganda with reality and decided that white voters hate Obama because he’s black.
It was never Obama’s race that was the problem. It was the Democratic Party’s embrace of leftist radicalism at the national level while waging identity politics wars along the lines of race and gender.
Republicans don’t have a problem with black people. Democrats do have a problem with white people.
The party is now under the sway of an elitist class of white leftists for whom “white people” is an insult, not a group of voters. And by “white people” they mean the sort of voters who conclusively tossed them out in West Virginia, Nevada and Arkansas.
The elitists of the new Democratic Party envision themselves as the white protectors and organizers of a minority country whose property and rights they will redistribute as they see fit in a new Socialist order. There is absolutely nothing in this creepy little vision that appeals to anyone except the grubby Grubers frustrated at having to work so hard to dupe the insufficiently stupid American voters who won’t just let them play with their health care toys without insisting on tediously voting against higher taxes.
It’s this elite that steadily began alienating white voters with its policies. The situation became critical under Obama not because of his race, but because he fully endorsed their insane power grab.
Now the Democrats are hoping that Hillary Clinton can save their party, but first she has to decide who she is. Hillary has tried to play up racial appeals to white voters before overcorrecting and going the other way. At times she sounds like she wants to appeal to working class voters and at other times she returns to her native element pushing the policy toys of the technocracy.
Instead of the Democratic Party’s Great White Hope, Hillary more closely resembles Mary Landrieu veering between accusations of racism and support for the Keystone pipeline. The left’s attacks on Landrieu for supporting the pipeline only highlight the impossible dilemma of any Democrat trying to run to the right of Obama and Nancy Pelosi. They have to either abandon their voters or their party.
Unlike European parties, American politicians were supposed to put loyalty to their constituents ahead of loyalty to their party. The Democratic Party put its own politicians in the impossible position of being defined by a centralized party seeking to eliminate anything reeking of conservatism while expecting them to win in conservative parts of the country. The Dems didn’t lose. They committed suicide.
The Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that it has alienated all white voters who aren’t on the left and its botched programs like ObamaCare are even beginning to alienate minority voters. Minority support for ObamaCare has hit a new low. Finding white support for ObamaCare requires a microscope.
But the Democratic Party can’t change. It has become dependent on a small donor class of men like Bloomberg, Soros and Steyer whose ad buys and think tanks dictate their agenda. To win, Hillary, Biden and any other candidate must first win over billionaires whose priorities of gun control, no pipeline and lots of big government are exactly the things that have pushed the Democratic Party to the edge.
James Carville was half-right about the 2016 election. If Hillary doesn’t win it, one of the big two parties may go extinct. But it won’t be the Republicans.
LOL - good one rightway...
bttt
One of Greenfield’s best, imo.
-PJ
RIP
Also directed “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, “Primary Colors”, “The Birdcage”.
Yes. He may have tilted left, but I’ll make an acception. He was a major talent.
“The Birdcage” was on cable when I was a kid and my brothers and I were watching it and my dad came in and saw Robin Williams swishing around and immediately turned off the tv. LOL.
Dad knows what’s what! :)
There are a select few leftists whose work I can appreciate, Mike Nichols is one of them. Don Henley’s another. Robert DeNiro - are you gonna say he’s a crap actor because he’s a RAT? Same with Jack Nicholson.
If the HoJo/Old Country crowds read this, they’re saying: “ANOTHER F*****G YANKEE RINO!!!” Yep, that’s me.
RE The Graduate:
“Mrs. Robinson... are you trying to seduce me...”
Captain Obvious moment...
Great flick. Catch-22... another great flick...
Yes, yes. Classic flicks.
Those shoes are killers!
I have to laugh whenever I see these idiots sit there CLAPPING when the girl gets up.
“Look! She can WALK!!!!”
Like she just earned a PhD or something...
Just ... amazing, ain’t it..
” Of the 140 Southern states election districts........110 went Republican. “
Maybe Gruber was wrong....
Maybe Gruber was wrong...
LOL - yep - seems a lot of Americans weren't as stupid as Gruber thought...
The 17th Amendment killed states rights. The 19th killed sane electoral politics.
Many white seniors living off pensions won by their unions think it is 1950 and that Harry Truman is still President. I'll take you to towns in Ohio where these geezers are the only ones who still have money in their pockets because their unions killed the town's industries. They will vote Democrat until they die, their widows will vote Democrat until they die, and their sketchily employed descendants will vote Democrat because they think that without government programs to support their lifestyles, they will die.
Did you know that the Christian-killer Odinga was an honored guest at the Inauguration? That's because after Odinga lost and began a civil war, Obama campaigned in the UN and with the DoS to have him put in a power-sharing arrangement as Prime Minister, while the SOB was killing Christians and by driving Christian farmers from their lands causing a famine in Kenya.
This all happened in 2006. Do you think Juan McAnus' Campaign acted on the info? Or GW? This Obama, my fellow Americans, is your POTUS today. This story was never covered in the American MSM.
Is Cokie Roberts still a regular with Stephanopoulos and George Will on that ABC Sunday morning show? (Haven't watched that in a long time.)
As far as Cokie is concerned, I'm sure she considers herself white and still votes 'Rat, the party of her late father congressman and the MSM. So how does she reconcile her being both white and a 'Rat with her statement that seems to indicate that 'Rats are poison to the whites? (Of course, hypocrisy and duplicity on the left is to be taken as a given.)
That’s correct.
According to exit polls, Clinton lost the White vote 41%-39% in 1992 and 46%-44% in 1996. Carter lost it 52%-48%
And Obama lost it both times of course, 55%-43% in 2008, 59%-39%! in 2012.
Exit polling data from
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/elections/how_groups_voted/voted_12.html
Good article. Thanks for the ping
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.