Here’s Nate Silver’s analysis of the possibility that Democrats like Reid outperformed the polls because Latinos who prefer to speak Spanish weren’t called.
Pew’s overall analysis of the Hispanic vote shows a 64/34 break in favor of Democrats, but that includes states like Florida, which has a big conservative Cuban population.
Napoleon
To add to what you said, I read or heard somewhere in the day or two before the election that Reid’s people were saying they were leading in something like the 6 point range (which is what he won by) in the 3 weeks prior to that date. They of course said that other pollsters had it wrong and one reason offered was that a lot of his supporters work in the gaming industry which means they have highly unusual hours that disproportionately do not match up with hours that pollsters will call.
mai naem
I am sure that the Latinos are breaking for the Dems but I am pretty sure the Repubs are going to be using Marco Rubio and Susanna Martinze and the other Latino Texas Repubs to show that they are a Latino friendly party and ofcourse there’s the social issues like abortion and gay rights. The evangelical churches are quite big among latinos in AZ and they are just as conservative and political as the white versions.
matoko_chan
And in Colorado cellonly households turned the Red Wave into beach break.
Tancredo could only win in landline demographics.
Buck got tarred as a backwards anti-abortion, anti-student loan, anti-women RTL old person.
What i Learned in the 2010 Midterms;
if Obama’s base turns out we win. if not we lose.
teabaggers and republicans are different names for the same thing.
the conservative
marksconstituents are highly permeable to scamming.25% of the conservative base is 65 or over.
In 2020 they will mostly be dead.
:)
valdivia
troting out latinos who support the arizona bill will do nothing to get the latinos back in the republican camp. IMHO.
at this point it’s the same as Michael Steele, they don’t represent us.
WereBear
True, but that hasn’t worked for them so far, and I see it continuing to Not Work. Stuff like Arizona’s law, outed as a way to make money for private prisons, just doesn’t make up for it.
matoko_chan
@mai naem: after Obama tries for 2 years to push immigration reform and the repugs stall him they won’t be so keen.
I think Marco Rubio will run for president in 2016. Palin will be post-menopausal by then, she will be done.
Rubio has already been asked to run in 2012.
hes waaay too smart for that.
i think Rubio and Martinez are signs of intelligent life in the GOP, like the two black congressmen going to the House– first time since 1966.
What is killing the GOP is that desire to win subsumes everything else..so use that desire to get equal treatment for minorities, even favored treatment.
Biologically, half the population leans conservative, half liberal…half the population is above the mean of IQ, half below…..so the Founders built tension into the system. if one side is mostly insane and stupid (happening because of Salam/Douthat stratification of cognitive ability) it is bad for all of us….throws off the balance of wahdat al wujud.
jonas
Republicans only win if bitter old white people turn out. Turning them out requires a heavy dose of race-baiting, culture war contradiction-heightening and old-fashioned demagoguing. As this demographic heads into the sunset over the next two decades, and minorities and millennials become more politically prominent, look for the political discourse in this country to head even further down the sewer pipe than it already has done.
I wouldn’t be surprised if by 2020, the GOP/Tea Party is running openly active members of the KKK as senatorial candidates. It’ll be the only way to get their last five geriatric racist bastard voters to the polls.
WereBear
These geriatric revelations are extraordinary to me; is this what LBJ envisioned when he managed to get Medicare passed?
Hordes of cranky old people on scooters intent on destroying everything good about America?
I hope to avoid this sad fate myself; I think a combination of:
*Not rising above their sex-based programming of their time (it’s no joke, younger people have no clue.)
*Heavily overmedicated; have you seen the brown bags of pills they bring to the doctor’s? Half of their prescriptions are to counter the side effects of the other half.
Steve
Rubio is a dangerous guy. He is very conservative but manages to sound reasonable most of the time. Some Democrats were thrilled when he surged against Crist but I was not one of them.
Having said that, it’s not as though there’s a massive wave of Latinos waiting to vote for Rubio if he runs for President, any more than a massive wave of women turned out for Sarah Palin. Brian Sandoval got a whopping 33% of the Latino vote on his way to becoming the first Latino governor in Nevada history. By comparison, Sharron “some of you look a little more Asian to me” Angle got 30% (and, of course, she ran well behind Sandoval overall).
beltane
@WereBear: Overmedicated, housebound, with Fox News blaring from the TV 24/7. That’s a recipe for insanity.
Suck It Up!
@matoko_chan:
Here’s the 2020 Headline:
Elderly Living Longer Thanks To Obamacare
gogol's wife
The ageism on this blog is its most unattractive feature.
kth
@Steve: The thing that Dems and progressives have to understand is that all Republicans are the same, because all of them vote with the leadership, and none of them have the courage to buck the party. Olympia Snowe is hastening the crack-up of this country every bit as much as Jim DeMint is.
So, given that “moderate” Republicans aren’t actually going to bring about moderate policy, it’s better that the face of the GOP be crazies like Joe Miller. Truth in advertising.
Cacti
@Steve:
It’s almost as if Latinos and women are smart enough not to pull the lever for someone just because they have a brown face or lady parts.
Whodathunkit?
And if the fastest growing ethnic group keeps breaking around 65% Dem in future elections, I’d say the future is looking pretty good.
magurakurin
@gogols wife
bitter old white people screaming “keep government out of my Medicare” and carrying old-timey style racists drawings of the POTUS are America’s most unattractive feature.
gogol's wife
@magurakurin:
Many of the older people in this country fought for years in the civil rights, feminist, anti-war, and gay rights movements. Your stereotyping about them is no more attractive than it would be about African-Americans, women, or any other group.
matoko_chan
@gogol’s wife:
sure, but those people are old DEMOCRATS.
old republicans did none of that, and they still want to keep their boot on our necks.
this country is increasingly stratified on age, education, cognitive ability, skin color and sexual preference.
Dont pretend.
In case you havent noticed…..for me, most of this blog consists of old gasbags correcting my combox ettiquette and yelling GTF off my lawn!
martha
@matoko_chan: Your writing style has really grown on me, just sayin’ ;)
And when old people act like old people they deserve all the scorn we heap on them. I know 87 y.o. women who act younger than most of the yahoos shrieking about ageism these days…
shecky
The biggest problem is that the Republicans, who loved to think they represented the Party of Ideas, really have none. Latinos are still, imo, prime candidates for being groomed into voting Republican. The old nugget of just a few years ago that Latinos are “natural conservatives” I think still holds true. That Latinos may be trending away from voting Repubican may paradoxically be evidence to support this idea, a very conservative (and rational, considering the current Republican state) “leave-me-alone” sentiment. Rather than pick up Latinos, whom they largely still don’t know or understand, by espousing such simple ideals as “leave-me-alone”, Republicans would rather drive them away by playing up a passionate block of sure bet voters with anti-Hispanic xenophobia, even if that voter block is shrinking every year.
I’ve posted this link before, but it’s so telling it deserves another.
http://www.frumforum.com/can-conservatism-survive-mass-immigration
Frum and a few other recognizable conservatives hash out this problem with immigration and the Right, and a little reading between the lines from Frum indicate exactly what I said at the beginning. Republicans really have nothing to sell but fear of outsiders. That falls flat to most reasonable people. And fails completely with actual outsiders, the immigrants themselves.
catclub
“Overmedicated, housebound, with Fox News blaring from the TV 24/7. That’s a recipe for insanity. ”
I thought that part of the reason the Germans went crazy
and went for the Nazis was that they had to read medieval Gothic fonts in
their newspapers.
47% unemployment may have also factored in.
catclub
I had a problem with the “in 2020 most of them will be dead”
statement. Isn’t 2020 also when the peak of the baby boom will be 65? And won’t they have become more conservative in those 10 years?
I also saw in the news that the electorate did not get dramatically more conservative between 2008 and 2010.
It was simply a different electorate that voted in the two elections. The old people were very conservative in both elections, and the young people were liberal in both elections.
The difference was that many more old people voted in the second one.
matoko_chan
@Suck It Up!:
that is okfine wid meh.
right now its just the rich old white conservatives that live longer.
O-care will keep old darkskinned poor liberals alive longer too.
its how we infiltrate the greys.
NWBCW!
:)
mds
@mai naem:
Um, the House GOP and their new membership are already talking up “immigration enforcement” as one of their top priorities. And come January, the chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law will be Steve “Illegal immigrants are livestock” King.
So yeah, between Marco “I only approve of minorities if they’re wealthy Cubans” Rubio and Michael Steele, I’m absolutely terrified of the Republican inroads with minority voters.
(Good god, in Connecticut’s ongoing trainwreck of a gubernatorial election, the Repub’s campaign announced that they were headed to court because it was unconscionable that minority voters in Bridgeport weren’t denied the right to vote. Though they said it slightly prettier than that.)
matoko_chan
@catclub: average life expectancy in america is 78.4 years. im just stating facts. 25% of the GOP base is 65 or older. By 2020 we can reasonably expect those people to be mostly dead.
60 to 65 are also mostly conservative….the difference is that old poor minorities die off faster…..they cant afford to be kept alive because they dont have health care once their medicare benefits run out, and their health is more susceptible to previous compromise because no-care issues earlier.
for example average life expectancy for blacks is 73.1 years.
matoko_chan
@martha: awww tyvm.
chan is the japanese honorific for young person, so that should be a warning label.
i think of my personal style as a mashup of stream of consciousness, txting l33tspk, slang, and Barrens chat.
it isnt for everyone.
Steve
@matoko_chan: It hurts to even respond to this comment. Life expectancy figures measure everyone, not just the people who make it to 65. For example, if the infant mortality rate is higher among blacks (it is!) then blacks will have a lower life expectancy, but that doesn’t say anything about the survival rate of 65-year olds. For that matter, if the average life expectancy is 78.4, does that mean most 78-year olds will die this year? Think about it!
matoko_chan
and mistermix, id like to point out that youth turned out in colorado in the same proportions as in 2008.
colorado had cellphone spoof based on university town cellonly population concentrations. Tancredo was shown as close, and Buck was ahead by 4 pre-election. Both candidates lost.
But the Fetal Personhood amendment failed at roughly the same proportion of the vote as it failed in 2008 (over 70% against) when the state went for Obama.
matoko_chan
@Steve: no, retard, it doesnt mean that.
however, it does mean that a lot of 65 AND OLDER conservative voters will be dead by 2020. That is a REASONABLE FACT-BASED PREDICTION.
Steve
@matoko_chan: Sure, a lot will. If you had said that then your comment wouldn’t have been dumb. By the way, “retard” as the casual slur of choice? Barrens chat indeed!
matoko_chan
@Steve: its a reflex.
im low verbal. if i could talk in equations i would. i kinda thot you would get the implied maths.
:)
Elizabelle
The main takeaway from what little telephone calling I did for Organizing for America:
I have got to learn Spanish, on at least a basic level, soonest. Like starting yesterday.
It’s hard enough to get a voter on the phone, and reaching a human, and then not being able to communicate, was just beyond frustrating. Particularly when you sensed they would be receptive.
(I far prefer walking neighborhoods but phoning is the biggest bang for the buck if you can get voters to talk to you.)
It’s laughable, but maybe we could do an occasional Balloon Juice thread in Spanish in the future?
Maybe it would draw in some new readers, and maybe we would send those readers into hysterics with our “Spanglish”, but how can learning Spanish be politically not profitable?
Think of it as outreach and teaching many of us a new language.
Adios.
toujoursdan
I think most Latinos follow Catholic doctrine even if they are no longer Catholics. They are conservative on abortion and gay rights (though Latino countries are becoming gay friendly quickly: Argentina and several Mexican states have gay marriage), but they tend to be liberal on social programs.
It’s hard to believe the GOP can make much of an impact on them outside of abortion
Quaker in a Basement
It’s a mistake to base a strategy on the existence of a Latino or Hispanic unified voting bloc. Cubans are not Mexicans are not Puerto Ricans.
henqiguai
@gogol’s wife (#12):
Elizabelle
@Quaker in a Basement:
That is so true.
I am always amazed when people assume Latinos are a unified bloc, on politics or even immigration reform.
Bad assumption.
rikyrah
Latinos don’t have to choose immigration as their big issue.
But, voting for a party that puts in ads ‘ SPIC SPIC SPIC SPIC SPIC’
I can’t wrap my mind around it.
I mean, this was some straight up racist ass shyt being thrown around by the GOP. they weren’t even speaking in code, as they’re doing with Black folks, so some Whites can pretend that there aren’t 10 ways to call me NIGGER without calling me NIGGER, and that I’ m not smart enough to know them all.
Black folks don’t vote Democrat because they’re in love with Democrats. It’s just that, for the most part, we have a collective self-respect that just would hit us in the face trying to justify voting for mofos that call you Nigger to your face.