Posted on 10/19/2012 8:20:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For all the attention paid to women in this race, there's another gender gap — with white men.
The Republican ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned in northeastern Florida on Friday, where thousands of men had descended on Daytona Beach for the annual motorcycle festival Biketoberfest.
A bunch of them were at Willie's Tropical Tattoo smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and listening to music.
Gary Biser goes by the name "Moose." Stickers on his bike helmet say, "Life's too short to ride with ugly women," "No bar too far," and other things that can't be printed. He says he is resigned to voting for Mitt Romney.
"I don't have anybody else to choose for, but he's gonna be my man," Biser says.
Biser works in the coal mines of rural Maryland. He says these past four years have been a disaster.
"Well, they've dropped our wages down, they've dropped our medical, everything else. Price of gas and everything's up. Shouldn't be that way," Biser says.
In this crowd, which is largely white men, there's a lot of enthusiasm for Republican ideas. People are less excited about the Republican nominee.
"I wish the Republican Party would quit finding multibillionaires to run just so they could get their message across," says Jerry Willard, who recently retired here in Florida.
Whatever his feelings about Romney, Willard says he hates that Democrats are trying to cut more deeply into wealthy people's incomes.
"Have you ever been hired by somebody that was broke? Have you ever been hired by somebody that was poor? Have you ever been hired by someone that was on welfare or food stamps?" he asks. "I don't think I ever have. I don't think I'm ever gonna get there. So the question is: Who the heck hires us? People with money."
There's no question who's going to win the votes in this crowd. In the last election, Barack Obama carried only 41 percent of white men, according to exit polls. And that was a high water mark for Democrats. John Kerry got 37 percent of the white male vote; Al Gore took only 36 percent.
So the important question is how big a margin among white men Romney will get this year. There's a lot of pressure to do better than Republicans have done before, since minority groups are booming.
"We do spend a lot of time in Florida talking about the growing Hispanic population and the growing black population of voters, but as a practical matter, there still are more white voters in Florida than there are other groups," says Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
Neither presidential candidate is a natural fit with this crowd, but they try. Obama welcomed NASCAR drivers to the White House back in April.
"These are some outstanding men. And it's true about the whole NASCAR organization," Obama said.
Romney made two rained-out attempts to see a race. Eventually he campaigned at the NASCAR Technical Institute in North Carolina.
"I only dreamed of cars like that. To have my name on a car like that is just too much," Romney said.
Perhaps it's no coincidence then that both men at the bottom of the ticket, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan, specialize in relating to working-class guys.
Even at Biketoberfest, this group is not a monolith. In the sea of sleeveless black T-shirts, tattoos and bandanas, one Obama supporter popped his head up.
"I like when they went after him for his birth certificate while he was going after bin Laden," says Ormond Beach, Fla., resident Bobby Sayward. "It's like this guy went right behind everybody's back and he got the job done. Why people don't vote for him is going to be an amazing thing to me."
In this sea of white men, the Obama voter is a true minority.
Actually I’m pretty sure they believe that it’s a woman’s issue and the role of the man is to pay for the abortion and to otherwise not care. That’s ‘responsible’.
I’ll take any of the bikers in this article over the current resident in the White House. These guys make more sense than most Harvard graduates and would probably do a bang-up job in the Defense Department.
The writer would have done better to explore the depths, the nuances, the veils and swirls and shadings, of Obama's appeal to gay men.
Mittens is a super-RiNO Mandarin milquetoast and Professional Master of the Universe. Guys like him have been out of fashion in the United States since John Quincy Adams lost to Andy Jackson.
Shapiro's the NPR puke who was the other half of that embarrassing open-mike incident recently that recorded him and Jan Crawford of CBS precooking a pitch-and-catch play to run on Romney at his press conference, that would steer Romney ineluctably into their "narrative" that they'd cooked up for him as the "story of the day".
He's a certified JournoLister, journalistic cheat and Playa, and a fraud as a reporter.
I’m in the minority in not voting for Mittens.
Sorry - I find him as disagreeable as you do - its just too bad we’ll have to put up with another liberal for four more years!
No thanks to the GOP establishment.
Ditto a Palestinean acquaintance of mine who prefers Midland TX to his previous homes of NYC and San Francisco.
He isn’t going to get a majority of the white male vote. He has no chance of getting re-elected without it.
You're partly right and mostly wrong. Of course Obama won't win the white male vote. Democrats never do these days in national elections - McCain won white men and lost the election by a sizeable margin. Obama will get large majorities among Hispanics and non whites and will win white women. It's the margins that matter: if Romney gets 70% of white men he wins. 60% and it's close. 55% and we have four more years of Obama.
You’re spot on. Unfortunately our guy, Willard, went to Harvard Law and Harvard Business. Why do I think we’re going from the frying pan to the fire?
We know what we are getting with Romney if he is elected — a chastened RINO. However, compared to what we have now, that would be a vast improvement. Seriously, I am amazed at how Mitt Romney has gone from persona non grata around here to post debate one hero. I am not convinced that Mitt’s current reinvention will stick. But, even if he goes full-blow rino, that’s is better than the full libtard country destruction we are witnessing now. Americans need some semblance of normalcy so we can restore our balance. If Romney can stop our national economic arterial bleeding, we can recover to fight the social wars another day. First thing, we need to apply the tourniquet, then we can do some stitching later. Maybe, Romney the conflicted Rino that he is, will go down in history as a great President, or maybe he will be just be another in a long-line of tepid Republicans. Who knows? But, if he reverses or stops our slide into 3rd World status, he will forever have our gratitude.
We’ve always had biker friends, even though we don’t ride. These are the working class and many of them rise to become successful small business owners in construction, trucking and event catering. Ever priced those big motorcycles? For that matter, tattoos are not cheap, either.
I’ve always said any of them could do a better job as POTUS than any Ivy League graduate.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I ride everyday. In fact, I don’t have a car, just a motorcycle. She’s a beaut too. So, I know bikers of all types pretty well. I agree that just about any biker I have met would do a better job in government than the long and lustrous list of Ivy Leaguers we’ve had for the last several years messing up our country.
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