Posted on 09/17/2017 7:17:27 AM PDT by BeadCounter
If any force on Earth could be powerful enough to unite the Democratic Party, you’d have thought the words “President Donald Trump” would do the trick. Instead, Hillary Clinton’s defeat last November only served to intensify the split within the party. Nine months in, two warring camps continue to offer seemingly irreconcilable versions of what went awry and how to fix it. On one side, populists like Bernie Sanders and Rust Belt Democrats like Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio argue that the party lost by neglecting working-class voters while catering primarily to “identity politics.” On the other side, an equally vocal contingent makes the opposite case: that the Democrats will blow it in 2018 and 2020 if they take voters of color for granted and focus their energy on wooing the white voters who backed Trump.
Steve Phillips of the Center for American Progress, a leading proponent of the latter view, argues that the Democrats doomed themselves in 2016 with “a strategic error: prioritizing the pursuit of wavering whites over investing in and inspiring African American voters.” In the wake of the election, Phillips wrote in The Nation that “the single greatest force shaping American politics today is the demographic revolution that is transforming the racial composition of the U.S. population.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newrepublic.com ...
I read that Donald Trump got about 20% of the votes of black men. That’s a huge swing from the norm.
Black women voted very heavily for Hillary. But we saw some inroads among black men with Trump.
I’ve never understood why blacks vote so heavily Democrat. Is it because they want to reward President Johnson and Democrats for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act?
What have Democrat policies done for blacks, especially the big numbers of blacks who are grappling with poverty?
I had a discussion recently with someone who was liberal. She was saying how Republicans are racist and all that. She said, well, how many minority or women Republicans are there, seeking to prove a point.
I listed off the top of my head, many minority or women Republicans, such as:
Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Ted Cruz, Alan West, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Sarah Palin, Condoleeza Rice.
She shut up and then moved on to how these people somehow were not really representative of minority rights or women’s rights. She changed the subject of her assertion that there just aren’t any women or minority Republican politicians.
“There is no need for Democrats to choose between appealing to white workers and courting people of color.”
Really? How?
How do you “court people of color” AND “appeal to white workers”.
Don’t you have to offer “special” benefits to “people of color” to “appeal” to them? benefits NOT offered to “working whites”? And does “courting” “people of color” agoing to resonate with “working whites”> How “appealing” is that?
And worst of all, the above sentence implies that “whites” WORK and “people of color” do not!
How racists is that!
That sentence from the article is the very embodiment of identity politics, and is the very antithesis of the stated thesis of the article, namely, that Dems need to abandon identity politics or keep on losing.
“Steve Phillips is wrong. I didn’t see Democrats pursue wavering whites at all. “
indeed. instead, they focused on the 98% of blacks who were supposedly going to vote for them anyway. which is odd on the surface of things. but it’s my belief that the Dems were petrified that the blacks were not going to come out to vote for a rich, corrupt, lying, white, elderly white woman with zero accomplishments like they did for one of their own in the two previous elections, and therefore Hillary was FORCED to pander to the blacks with a large proportion of her time and energy and money, leaving very little left over for pandering to anyone else.
Interesting. I hadn’t given much thought to intermarriage (even though my wife is from the other side of the world), but yes, Hispanics outside of California (and New York City) VOTED HEAVILY REPUBLICAN in 2014, roughly 40-45% Republican throughout the South, and that was when we had candidates, like Dan Patrick in Texas, sounding like Trump (did) when it came to the border. Intermarriage probably played a major role in that.
Whites, on the other handed, voted as a block, 75-89% Republican, in part because of people like Dan Patrick. So, even with the worst-case numbers for the Republicans (40% Hispanic and 75% white), the Dems are DESTROYED. In fact, it’s only the black vote that keeps them viable in the South.
So, yea, with the Dems going HARD-LEFT, the obvious thing for the Republicans to do is send a message to the what was the Democrat white, working class base, and reel them in. Of course the Left and the Media know this (even if Republican leaders are clueless to it), so they continue to call ANY Republican who sends messages to the working class Alt-Right extremists...because they know that the Democrats cannot win if the Republicans are able to nail down white voters. Republicans must continue to be stupid and not try to reach those white voters...or the Dems are dead politically.
This is huge on a number of levels. First, he repudiates the “demographics is destiny” view by noting people don’t CONTINUE to identify as “Latinos” or “Asians”-—just as many surveys show and just as all of American history has shown.
I’m not Pollyanna and don’t think “Press one for English” has ANY place in our society, but if incentives are properly structured, yes, immigrants of all sorts (except perhaps Jihadists) will Americanize over time.
He asks it’s “whether Democrats, without abandoning their commitment to racial justice and to America’s immigrants, can succeed in crafting a message and an agenda that steers clear of the liberal version of racial stereotyping.”
No. You cannot simultaneously try to make people into victims and victors.
Second, he notes that the “minorities only” approach killed D chances with even white progressives. Gee, imagine that-—even white “progressives” finally get tired of being poor and being called racists.
Correct: how can you “celebrate” every race, victimize every race, then NOT include whites? It becomes impossible.
Ds have committed suicide. Now all we have to do is either fumigate the R Party or start a new one.
Yes. Of course, more than half the GOP swamp opposes every one of those things.
Bottom line, If you are not black or queer you are not welcome in the Democrat party
Many Republicans don’t only think that bring Democrat Lite is a way to victory but they ARE Democrat Lites (or maybe Democrat Stouts pretending to be Lites like old Jumpin’Jim Jeffords was).
“Muslims” have moved to the front of the DNC bus.
Yes, which is why I’m not at all bothered if (like Jeffords or Chafee or Weicker or Anderson) they leave the damn party.
Hispanics when forced to chose, pick white over black as a racial designation. What the Dems are overlooking is that white is a culture. I live where their are many Indians (India) and they absolutely resent being decribed as black. They consider themselves as white. It’s almost comical.
Jews, Irish, Italians were not white either for many generations.
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