Here is my reaction to a similiar article which was published in yesterday's Times and was probaobly based on the same study:
How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait
Posted by nathanbedford to neverdem
On News/Activism 11/07/2004 4:37:41 AM EST · 27 of 30
Black voters, regardless of religion, continue to support the Democratic candidate overwhelmingly, giving almost 9 in 10 of their votes to Mr. Kerry. Jewish voters also remained firmly in the Democratic column, though Mr. Bush expanded his share to 25 percent this year from 19 percent in 2000.
In fact, a majority of Hispanics in general backed Mr. Kerry. Still, Mr. Bush won a greater share of the Hispanic vote than any other Republican candidate for president since the advent of exit polls in 1972.
These two paragraphs portend very grim prospects for Democrats because, contrary to the shibboleth, all politics in America are not local but racial/ethnic. The future success in national elections is virtually dependent on sucess with the Hispanic vote. In this election the Democrats lost 9 points while the Republicans gained 12 with this group which will decide future elections for at least a generation.
As for Afro-Americans, one can see the glass as half full or half empty for the Democrats who held their relative position with this group. I choose to see the glass half empty. This means the influence of this group within the party and the commensurate dependence of the Democrat party on Afro-Americans will only deepen. That in turn means that the inherent irrationality, conspiracy mania, and radicalism of the Afro-American "community" will increasingly infect and distort any rational efforts toward reform by moderates within the party. Without reform, and without the capture of the Hispanic block as they have captured the Black vote, the Democrat party is doomed to second place status.
This election has demonstrated that the Hispanic vote is not so easily seduced by demagoguery as has been the Afro-American vote and upon the good sense of newly minted Hispanic-Americans hangs the salvation of the Republic. I must admit I was not nearly so sanguine before the election.
Finally, the Republicans made modest but real gains among Jews. It remains if this is a phenomenon limited to Bush's aggressive lead in the war on terror and his solid support of Israel. I suspect the motives are mixed but it is clear that it is becoming intellectually respectable among Jews to vote Republican. This, of course, has profound implications which extend well beyond the absolute numbers represented by Jews because of their clout in shaping opinion and in fund raising.
So, all of this comes down to the issue of immigration and how sensitively it is handled by Bush who, despite his ill-conceived amnesty trial balloon, has really not handled the issue at all. The current level is clearly unsustainable but the Hispanic vote is the prize beyond all measure and it is not clear how they will react to any attempt to rationalize the chaos on the borders.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1273327/posts
BINGO for you! You have an economy of prose on two of my threads. Unfortunately, few in Washington seem to grasp the problem of porous borders as well as unsustainable population growth. The US has more than doubled its population in 70 years. At this rate, when today's great-grand children who are born finally die, we'll have a population rapidly approaching, or possibly exceeding, one billion.