Steve M. finds a key figure in Obama’s re-elect numbers: 66% of Latino voters say they are likely to vote for him, only 16% say they’d vote for a Republican. Overall, 47% say they’d vote for him, 37% say they’d vote for a Republican (these kinds of polls have huge numbers of undecideds). Obama won the election by seven points, so his “lead” here is slightly larger than it was in the 2008 election results. When you go through the figures you see what’s mostly going on: he does almost exactly the same among all groups (losing the white vote by 11, he lost it by 12 in 2008, for example), except for a 14 point increase among Latinos.
One caveat here: the overall sample was only 1500 people, so the number of Latinos in it was small enough that the margin of error is large. Still, this is a striking finding and it shows why Democrats will continue to have big advantages in presidential elections (where the proportion of non-white voters is elevated, relative to midterms) until the Republicans figure out how to appeal to Latino voters.
Personally, I don’t think Marco Rubio could do this all by himself, but if Republicans lose a reasonably tight presidential election in which they lose the Latino vote by 40 plus points, I’m sure they’ll take a good hard look at him in 2016.
Villago Delenda Est
The GOP can’t appeal to Latino voters without hopelessly alienating their base of racist white fucks.
So they’re screwed.
Omnes Omnibus
They would have to figure out an immigration policy that satisfies the yahoos and attracts Latinos. How would they do that?
Zifnab
Disenfranchisement is a cottage industry in the South. Once we start getting more of those Voting Card laws into place and throwing up more and more hurdles to access the ballot box, red states will get even more unassailable.
Republicans have had a history of playing meaner and dirtier when faced with more aggressive competition. In the deep south, I don’t know whether losing the Latino vote will hurt so much if the white guys running the show can keep pushing them around.
Tractarian
Title WIN!
Superluminar
Conservative memetic selection for FAIL is WAI, or something.
Villago Delenda Est
They also have to dance around the question of how to deal with the issue of the employment of vast numbers of mostly undocumented Latinos? As in, do you punish the victims, or the Ferengi assholes who hire them? Who also finance the GOP in the first place?
Arizona’s answer is go after the brown people (without regard of their citizenship, or their legal work status), not the white people who create the conditions that attract them. Which appeals to the yahoos, not the Latinos.
Like I said, they’re screwed.
Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
What you’re missing here is that if you throw out the black voters and Hispanic voters, Obama’s in deep, deep trouble. But you’re just an O-bot who’s in the tank for a Kenyan-born nazi Marxist atheist Muslim, so no wonder you hid the evidence.
But seriously… I wonder if that “If you disregard the black voters…” crap has fallen by the wayside with Obama’s election. Seems like there was a lot of that shit back when Bush was president, as conservatives tried desperately to “prove” that they were better liked than the Democrats by only counting the “real” voters, the “real” Americans. But I can’t think that I’ve seen any of that shit lately…
Bob Loblaw
You’re really riding the Steve M. bandwagon hard right now, DougJ. Heck, maybe he should just write for this site and cut out the middleman.
Also, I’m still not clear on why it is that Latinos have such a low turnout year after year. Sometimes I wonder if Democrats even really want them as part of their coalition at all, or if they’re just falling ass-backwards into it by default due to GOP racism. It seems to me a massive turnout operation in Texas alone would be the savviest business move the DNC has made in decades.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Villago Delenda Est: Nice thought. The problem is that the racist fucks will vote Republican anyway, in part because the Republicans can appeal to the Conservative Christian values in some Latinos and still play dog whistle with the whites.
Just remember, the only reason the GOP is losing Hispanics is that they are trying to actually pass laws. I worry that as soon as they stop trying/being able to pass these laws some Hispanics will return. It’s not like the rest of America learns their lesson.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
It matters not what President Obama does or does not do – the only thing that matters is that he be re-elected to the office of President of the United States of America.
.
.
Sentient Puddle
Usual caveat when talking about Latinos still applies: they’re not as homogenous as pollsters want us to think. Latinos in Florida, for instance, are likely Cuban, and are more likely to support Republicans than, say, a Latino from the southwest.
If there’s going to be a Republican renaissance among Latinos, it’s more likely to come from someone like Susana Martinez than Marco Rubio.
Comrade DougJ
@Bob Loblaw:
If I ever take a break, I plan to ask him to guest blog here.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: My question was meant to be rhetorical. Great minds…
Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Uncle Clarence Thomas:
¿Qué? ¿Huh? In the immortal words of Bill Murray, in Groundhog Day: ¿What the hell?
Caz
What does everyone think the reason for the following is:
1. That 60% or whatever of latinos support Obama.
2. That 90% of blacks support Obama.
Am I missing something? Has he addressed any race issues? Or maybe they think he is the best chance for addressing them in the next 6 years since he has a vested interest.
You don’t see these racial lines drawn when it comes to white candidates or politicians. White are evenly split between democrats and republicans, Gingrich and Obama, etc.
What gives? It’s a serious question. Are they voting purely on race? That seems a little too simplistic to be true, but the data seems to support that. Not that I would blame African-Americans for supporting the first African-American president in history!
I’m Sicilian, but I lived in NYC in 1905, I’d probably be on board with candidate Carlo Pastafazulo just because he’s “my people” and “my people” need representation. Seems logical. Is it really that simple? What do y’all think?
Comrade DougJ
@Caz:
It’s because they know Republicans hate them and are out to get them.
Bob Loblaw
@Caz:
Republican troll is Republican. But not the interesting type. Disappointing.
Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Caz:
Are you serious? I think it’s more that Obama’s a Democrat than that he’s a black guy. There’s still a lot of racism in this country, even though it’s far more hidden and subtle than it was before the Civil Rights laws of the 60’s, and even I, a fairly lucky and clueless white guy, can pick up on it, some of it, at least. You can be damned sure minorities see it a lot more clearly than I can, and they know which party is wallowing in racist shit up to its ears.
Superluminar
@Caz
I suspect the fact that Republicans are racist fucks might answer your in-no-way-concern-trolling-question.
Butler
To your second point, he gets 90% not because of his race but because he’s a Democrat.
Kerry got 90% of the black vote. So did Gore. I couldn’t swear about Clinton because I haven’t seen the numbers, but I would bet that he got at least that high, especially in 1996. Obama did do a little bit better among black voters in 2008, but it was a marginal improvement, something like 93% compared to 90% for Kerry, and at the same time he also did better than Kerry among pretty much every demographic group.
As to Latinos, its a similar phenomenon, but not as cut and dry. I suspect a lot of it is Democratic identification, while at the same time Latino’s also see how Republicans are acting towards them and see that he’s the better bet. For example, it was Republicans who wrote, passed and defended Arizona 1070, and it was Obama who opposed it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Caz:
Yes.
David in NY
My experience in Brooklyn makes me doubt the viability of Rubio, particularly among Hispanics. Rubio is Cuban. Most Hispanics are not. In my part of Brooklyn, full of immigrants from all parts of the Caribbean, voting is not necessarily on a pan-Caribbean basis, but is split sharply among Haitians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, etc., etc., etc. That is, being from one island does not assure the allegiance of people from any other. So even should Rubio be able to overcome the anti-brown faction, the TP’ers, in the Republican party primary, it may not do him much good in the general.
Ed.: And yes, as somebody pointed out above, whoever the R nominee is, to win the general he’ll have to find an immigration policy satisfactory to the yahoos and more Hispanics. Fat chance.
Butler
For some reason I can’t edit my comment, I meant to quote Caz. Though now I see the whole thing was likely a waste of effort.
General Stuck
I would like to see a larger number of Latinos polled, but it is a good sign, that even this early so many of those voters are turning away from any chance of voting GOP in 2012. I believe it was Rove and company that calculated the GOP could not win the WH with less than 40 percent of the Latino vote.
The tea party is the dems best recruiter these days, and they are even more purity minded than their left wing counterparts. And are much more prominent in the power zones of gooper politics. I figure by 2016, or before, they will have alienated every voting bloc except white male conservative. They are not so much building a electoral movement for the future, but rather forming divisions of true believers. The old guard wingnut is just along for the ride.
Butler
@David in NY:
Adding to that, Cubans are one of, if not the, most Republican of all Latino groups, and my understanding is its all about Castro and how badly we can treat him. Most other latinos don’t seem to care about that.
David in NY
My real question — why isn’t Obama doing even better among women?
David in NY
@Butler: And I think (though I may be wrong), a lot of other Hispanics think Cubans are snotty. Rich folk, just waiting to reclaim their property after the counter-revolution.
FlipYrWhig
@Bob Loblaw:
Wild-ass guess here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Latinos really had come to the conclusion that, since neither party does very much to advance their interests, they might as well not even bother voting. (There’s a bloc of lefter-than-Democrats who always talk about feeling the same way.) But then, when one party goes out of its way to _harm_ Latino interests, it galvanizes them out of their true ambivalence and into joining the other camp. Sound plausible?
patrick II
Who do you mean by “they”? The Republican party leadership? Sure. The chiristian/white right wing of the party that votes in primaries? I don’t think so. Race runs too deep with them.
gex
@Sentient Puddle: You do realize you named a female right? Yeah, that will play well with the old white dudes.
Comrade DougJ
@David in NY:
He’s doing 19 points better among women than among men. That’s pretty typical for a Democrat.
OzoneR
@Caz:
Suing to stop Arizona’s “Driving while Hispanic” law is something he’s done for race issues.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: Do you think Republican bigwigs will eventually triangulate against the “Tea Party” themselves?
FlipYrWhig
@patrick II: But Republicans love tokens too, because it helps them to insist that they’re not The Real Racists.
Mark S.
I like how 1% of blacks surveyed prefer a GOP candidate. I also like how the MSM doesn’t like to address this topic.
gex
@David in NY: I’m guessing the “family values” shtick works on some. There are way too many women on the right who buy into the subservient to their man crap. Then you get the ones swayed by the abortion issue, although why that would work on women is anyone’s guess.
OzoneR
@David in NY:
+16 is pretty remarkable among women
Cris
It’s been frequently remarked on this site that if not for the racist bugfuckery (notably, but not limited to, immigration policy), Latinos would be a natural GOP constituency. It’s an interesting argument on its merits, and I’m not sure which side persuades me more, but it’s ultimately academic because it depends on a pretty huge conditional — “if the Republicans stopped being racist assholes…”
I don’t see that simply running a Republican of the appropriate heritage, like Marc Rubio or Susana Martinez, is going to be any more effective at winning a constituency than Michael Steele was. The GOP’s approach to diversity is stalled out at tokenism.
David in NY
@Comrade DougJ: True. But I sort of wondered why he could barely clear 51% with women, though. And isn’t it only a 16% spread?
I’d expect something closer to the Asian spread, but I guess there’s a lot of midwestern white ladies, or something. Maybe this is just normal.
gnomedad
Up next: Ann Coulter explains why only white people should be allowed to vote.
gex
@FlipYrWhig: Now that would be fun, seeing as how they trained them to have a take no prisoners, compromise is for losers approach. The GOP has really played themselves into a dead end on this. (I hope)
Jeffro
@Duncan Dönitz (formerly Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Duncan’s right: blacks don’t vote Obama in any higher proportions than they vote Democrat. Caz fail.
Comrade DougJ
@David in NY:
He loses men by 3.
Nineteen is actually on the high side for a gender spread but not by much. There was a 12 point one in 2008.
Cris
My understanding was that while it is indeed about Castro, it’s more about how badly we have failed to assassinate him. A large and vocal portion of Cuban-Americans were refugees from the revolution, so a hard-line stance against Castro became the litmus test.
gex
@Comrade DougJ: There has been a lot of anti-abortion/anti-contraception activity since 2008. Plus a new irritating trend of states wanting to equate miscarriages with manslaughter. It’s as though they think they can do it all with only old white men.
Zach
Don’t forget that 2008-vintage McCain still had a pretty broad appeal with Latinos. And also that his home-state advantage in Arizona boosted numbers a little bit. Unless the GOP conspires to not have questions about immigration at its debates, any candidate emerging from the primaries will be less popular with Latinos than McCain who’s not Rubio.
Without his sizable Latino support, McCain loses Texas and Arizona and gets clobbered in Colorado, Florida, New Mexico, and Nevada instead of losing by a fairly narrow margin.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
There are signs of that in the House, with the old guard taking away the gas cans and matches from the tea tards. I think the tea party is experiencing the apex of their power right now, and it will begin to contract into a mostly southern geographical entity. But they will still hold some cards in the gooper camp, but there is a limit to how far ordinary wingers will go, and this will create a lot of tension for awhile, and the GOP will not be able to count on much boost from them in a general election. But in the meantime, they are the Johnny Appleseeds of dem recruitment with the tones of nativism and echoes of white supremacy. And general mean spirited assholishness.
It is like a mini surge of the southern strategy, or a last gasp maybe, in a more distilled and toxic solution for the wingers. But it is all they have right now. I am optimistic right now for 2012, so long as there is some recovery for the economy. The tea partiers are waking up all sorts of sleeping dem giants.
cat48
There’s a lengthly Republican poll taken to see what they would have to do to appeal to Hispanics. There really wasn’t a lot they offered that appealed to them. It was done in CA and the numbers were high for the Dems, just like the ones in this poll.
Comrade DougJ
@Cris:
I’m never sure I buy that. People say blacks might vote Republican because they supposedly hate teh gay and so on. But the truth is black people are just more likely to side with the poor and with workers than white people are, in general, and that makes them actual liberals by and large. I suspect it’s the same with Latinos.
cleek
one other caveat: the election isn’t for another 18 months.
Cris
@cleek: in Village, it is always election day
Dr Dave
@David in NY: There may also be another conflated demographic here, namely age. Women tend to live longer than men, and older voters, whether female or male, tend to skew toward the R side. My almost 90-year-old Midwestern mom and her sister, bless them, don’t fall into this category, but there are an awful lot of WASP retirees among their peers in Florida and elsewhere who would probably never vote for one of “those” people, for whatever imaginary reason.
Also, too, the difference between women and men is sizable, so the fact that Obama manages to win a majority among all women is pretty significant.
Jeffro
@General Stuck:
Yup – that’s why the Arizona stuff drives him (Rove) nuts. It’s just so blatant, and it really does kill any hope of them regaining the WH.
Garrigus Carraig
Um. ¡¿Isn’t the obvious winning Latino GOP candidate P. Bush?!
FlipYrWhig
@gex: Yeah, I was trying to imagine it… there’s clearly a concerted effort in the pundit class to push the “reasonable” Republicans like Daniels, and the non-Bible-thumpers like Christie. But I have a hard time seeing how such a candidate could consolidate “the base.” Really, when you think about it, Gee Dubya was the Republican dream candidate, with his ability to bind the religious, the resentful, and the big money. If they could run Dubya every 4 years, they’d always be close and often win. But who’s the next one? Rubio’s the one I have my eye warily on.
Citizen_X
@Bob Loblaw:
Bingo.
Yes, but that would require Texas Dems to get their shit together.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go contemplate the possibility of that happening over a fifth and a loaded pistol.
Cris
@cat48: I’d like to see that same poll done in TX.
FlipYrWhig
@Dr Dave: I’ve never known if that’s a fact of life, that as voters age they’re more likely to accept Republican/conservative positions, or if voters basically vote the same way their whole lives, and the older ones now are the hippie-haters and “I Like Ike”-ers. Eventually we’ll have old people in nursing homes playing Xbox all day.
PeakVT
losing the white vote by 11, he lost it by 12 in 2008, for example
Dear fellow melanin-challenged Americans,
Stop embarrassing me.
Eskimo kisses,
PeakVT
Citizen_X
@Cris: I’d bet you it would look only slightly better for the GOP.
The Valley (border/Rio Grande region) is 90+% hispanic, and it’s pretty reliably Democratic in presidential elections.
harokin
@Garrigus Carraig: I’m sitting here in stunned silence, realizing it will have been at least 40 years since the Republicans won the White House without a Bush on the ticket. Just, wow. They need Pee, man.
cat48
The poll can be googled: Republican poll Hispanics
Favorable Unfavorable No Opinion
Dems 62% 22% 17%
Repubs 26% 47% 27%
TParty 20%
400 Hispanics
Nylund
@Villago Delenda Est:
True, but also somewhat true for Democrats. The more Latinos embrace dems, the worse dems do among white voters according to recent research. I say “good riddance” to such people, but it has been observed that the democrats can’t seem to hold on to as many white voters the more they embrace non-white voters, although, thankfully, that pattern isn’t observed in this data. Hopefully, the democrats have already purged a good deal of the racists from the party.
Roger Moore
@Caz:
Sure you do. Whites as a group lean Republican. Racist whites lean strongly Republican. If whites were truly equally divided and minorities leaned strongly Democratic, the electorate as a whole would lean moderately Democratic. That’s not the case.
priscianus jr
@Caz:
Zach
@Bob Loblaw:
Probably the biggest accomplishment of Clinton’s primary campaign was mobilizing the Latino vote and crushing in the California primary (and in general on Super Tuesday). Of course for her success in that, then-campaign-manager Patti Solis Doyle was bounced from the campaign.
Brachiator
Early surveys which put Obama up against “unnamed Republican” are especially meaningless. And surveys which lump all Latinos into a monolithic lump are doubly meaningless. Latino voters in Florida, New York, Arizona, Texas and California (the states with the largest number of Latino voters) are not monoliths, nor do they necessarily look at issues in the same way.
Also, I noted in a previous thread that Obama won the white vote in the Northeast and West, a fact which I’m sure is not lost on GOP strategists.
And while some like to insist that it’s only a Democrat vs Republican world, Independent voters will be hugely important.
@Comrade DougJ:
And the “blacks are the reason gay marriage failed in California” is a lie that just won’t die.
And it’s weird that blacks and teh gay are pitted against each other as if all gay people are white, except for 3 Latino gays and Margaret Cho.
OzoneR
@David in NY:
In these types of polls, that’s the low water mark. He’ll almost certainly win some, if not most, of the undecideds, which means he could get as high as 64%.
If the undecideds break evenly, it means he gets 58% of women.
lamh32
This might be a good place to post some video of Obama’s trip to South America, since it got virtually NO coverage here in America. I’d love to know from anyone who watches Spanish language TV if the South America trip received more coverage?
‘City of God’ welcomes Barack Obama
lamh32
Obama cheered at Brazil’s ‘City of God’ favela
Calouste
@Zifnab:
Latinos don’t form a massive voting group in the South except in Florida, and the South is solid R anyway. What the Latinos will tip are Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and possibly Arizona. That’s at least 20 EV’s solidly in the D camp. It means Obama can lose Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Iowa and still win.
MikeJ
@Zach:
Bounced because it was a stupid way to win the Democratic nomination. In a Republican, winner-take-all contest, it was the right way to go. Not the fight they were in though. That campaign was the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Buncha morons couldn’t be arsed to read the rulebook for the contest they were in.
Mnemosyne
@David in NY:
Because, unfortunately, being a woman does not make one immune to being a racist. There are plenty of white women out there who would never vote for one of “them” no matter how nutty the Republican candidate is.
Chet
@gex: Kristin Luker helps explain why in her book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood:
“The values that lead pro-life and pro-choice women into different attitudes toward abortion are the same values that led them at an earlier time to adopt different lifestyles that supported a given view of abortion.
“For example, pro-life women have always valued family roles very highly and have arranged their lives accordingly. They did not acquire high-level educational and occupational skills, for example, because they married, and they married because their values suggested that this would be the most satisfying life open to them. Similarly, pro-choice women postponed (or avoided) marriage and family roles because they chose to acquire the skills they needed to be successful in the larger world, having concluded that the role of wife and mother was too limited for them. Thus, activists on both sides of the issue are women who have a given set of values about what are the most satisfying and appropriate roles for women, and they have made life commitments that now limit their ability to change their minds. Women who have many children and little education, for example, are seriously handicapped in attempting to become doctors or lawyers; women who have reached their late forties with few children or none are limited in their ability to build (or rebuild) a family. For most of these activists, therefore, their position on abortion is the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ a shorthand way of supporting and proclaiming not only a complex set of values but a given set of social resources as well.
“To put the matter differently, we might say that for pro-life women the traditional division of life into separate male roles and female roles still works, but for pro-choice women it does not. Having made a commitment to the traditional female roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, pro-life women are limited in those kinds of resources-education, class status, recent occupational experiences-they would need to compete in what has traditionally been the male sphere, namely, the paid labor force. The average pro-choice woman, in contrast, is comparatively well endowed with exactly those resources: she is highly educated, she already has a job, and she has recent (and continuous) experience in the job market.
“In consequence, anything that supports a traditional division of labor into male and female worlds is, broadly speaking, in the interests of pro-life women because that is where their resources lie.”
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
The Democratic party is courting disaster if it continues to take the Latino vote as a given. As Brachiator noted in his post at #67, the Latino vote is far from being monolithic. I would add to that observation that Latino voter turnout is often low and that the Republicans have no problem with fielding successful Latino candidates where they can.
In my opinion, the Dems would be well advised to put forth legislation to resolve our immigration dilemmas and to put some serious effort into GOTV work in the Latino community. Those Latino are ours only as long as we earn them.
Dr Dave
@FlipYrWhig: The inevitability of older people voting conservative is an interesting question to which I also don’t know the answer. There is the old aphorism which goes something like “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young you have no heart, and if you’re not conservative when you’re old you have no brain,” but I can’t say that I actually know anybody who fits that description. YMMV, but my family has been in the liberal camp my entire life while my in-laws (with the exception of my wife and one of her brothers) have been conservatives since at least the Carter administration.
Joel
@Cris: I think Nate Silver put that idea to rest some time ago. I can’t find the link unfortunately.
Cris
That seems to be the crux. The passage overall seems to be talking about feminism in general, not abortion in particular.
Brachiator
@Dr Dave:
But this also has to do with specific appeals of the GOP to certain demographic groups. In other countries, such as the UK, people don’t inevitably switch from Liberal or Labour to Tory once they reach retirement age. The continued appeal of the GOP in the South and parts of the West, especially to older groups, is not solely based on people just getting old and ideologically crusty.
Cris
@Dr Dave: Mileage definitely varies. The one thing I can see in favor of the common wisdom is less about age per se and more about changing economic status. As we get older, many of us develop a more secure lifestyle — family, property, career. And so our interest in policies develops accordingly.
Having been a young Republican, though, I reject the aphorism. Young conservatives think they’re smart, but they are just as driven by emotion and lacking in brains as their young liberal counterparts.
gex
@Brachiator: Almost as though they were pitted against each other deliberately in a divide and conquer tactic. Hmmm.
Brachiator
@gex:
Hey, the old slimy tactics are tried and true.
Chet
@Comrade DougJ: I’m inclined to agree with you. And the anti-Castro Cuban exiles – rich people itching for the day when they can go back home, reclaim their property, and get back to lording it over the rest of that island as in the good ol’ Batista days – are the exception that proves the rule.
Cris
@Chet: I’m curious (but not curious enough to look it up): does the Asian mega-demographic have a similar split? That is, are Asian-American populations whose immigrations followed Communist takeovers (like Cambodia, maybe) more likely to be GOP supporters?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
The GOP has a solution for this. It’s called disenfranchisement.
Cris
Actually, I said I couldn’t even be bothered to Google, but here’s one breakdown from 2008 that came up in 30 seconds:
Whatever that means.
Tax Analyst
@David in NY:
Seems to ring true for the Miami Cuban-expat group. I’m not Hispanic, but I sure resent the hell out of the way they’ve hijacked our Cuban policy for 50 years.
AAA Bonds
NICE lyric.
Brachiator
@Cris:
In Los Angeles County, here’s the 2008 Asian breakdown for Obama (abbreviated)
Asian 63% Obama
Asian Indian 86% Obama
Chinese 69% Obama
Filipino 57% Obama
Korean 60% Obama
Vietnamese 51% Obama
One interesting little nugget of Asians age 55 and over
Native Born 66% Obama
Foreign Born 48% Obama
From: “Asian Americans at the Ballot Box,” Asian Pacific American Legal Center
Tom Q
@Brachiator: I think it’s more particularly that today’s older age group formed its strongest allegiances during the Nixon/Reagan alignment, and they’re carrying those views to the grave. My strong recollection is that in 1984 — Reagan’s dastardly landslide — older voters (who still remembered the New Deal) were the GOP’s weakest group. So it’s not strictly an age thing.
The demographic change among younger voters — or, put another way, the Last Really White Generation aspect of today’s old folks — makes it easy to look at it as a young/old divide, but it’s more a matter of political allegiance based on already-determined interest.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Omnes Omnibus: Wait a few years, say 2020. The other day I saw a news report, where Arizona Teahadists were pissed at some renegade GOPers who voted against some very extreme anti-immigration bills. The angry Teahadists at this town hall were all old and gray, I’d waqer the youngest was at least mid-50’s. PPerhaps may do a FU to the Beckistanis in 2014, but that would take major minerals to do that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mr Stagger Lee: Everything I have seen over the past few years leads me to believe that there is is real dividing line on issues of race and homophobia right around births in 1960. It might even be the parents of kids born in the 60s and later taught their children well. For those born after 1980, it seems even better. These are the kinds of things that keep me hopeful.
maus
@Villago Delenda Est:
Technically they can do that in Miami, where older Cubans tend to be more racist towards blacks/Mexicans/Hatians, but it’s good to know that doesn’t work *everywhere*.
gex
@Brachiator: The foreign born thing makes sense to me. My dad his siblings are from China, all very Republican.
Here’s how Republican my dad is. It just became clear that he has been hiding 2/3 of his income from the tax man. (He’s divorcing my mom and so a CPA has to do their taxes). Now it might be helpful to know that he went to state schools and the got a job with Lockheed. Because when I called him on his bs, he said “the government would just waste it.”
I had to say I agreed with him. I mean, we spend all this money educating Chinese immigrants and paying the really nice salaries to build weapons we don’t use. (Nothing he was on would be used in Iraq or Libya).
My other favorite anecdote from him: when he retired and went to sign up for social security, he came home with a complaint about “all the foreigners there taking his money.”
I wonder how he made a liberal out of me? ;)
@Tom Q: One point I like to make is that all those older people were born before desegregation. Because I feel it is instructive somehow.
Tax Analyst
@Brachiator:
What? You mean there’s more than that? Well, I guess that’s true ’cause I think we have more than 3 Latino gays right here where I work.
But no Margaret Cho.
Tax Analyst
@Calouste:
Do you mean Latinos don’t form a monolithic block voting group in the South, Except FL?
And I would argue against your presumption that the South will automatically go R. Yes, it certainly leans “R”, but remember, Obama won Florida in the 2008 General Election 51%-48%. Took NC & VA and didn’t do all that badly in GA (47-52%).
And Gore probably won the Florida vote in 2000, although that’s now pretty much a moot point.
It’s not a good idea to automatically cede the South to the “R’s”, it leaves very little room for error elsewhere.
Calouste
@Tax Analyst:
Just not that many of them (besides Texas, which I forgot). The range is from 3% in Missouri to 9% in Georgia.
There is still quite a big margin of error. Both Gore and Kerry would have won if they had picked up NV, NM and CO, even though they lost all of the South and parts of the MidWest. There’s no reason to automatically cede the South, but it helps to know that you will still win even if the Katherine Harisses of the world stack the deck against you.
Zach
@MikeJ: “Bounced because it was a stupid way to win the Democratic nomination.”
In the California campaign in particular, Clinton gamed the proportional delegates thing to great success. I agree that, in general, trying to rack up wins instead of delegates was a bad move. In a race with more than two candidates grabbing significant amounts of delegates it’s not a bad idea, but it became a two-horse race very quickly.
rikyrah
well, they keep on doing ‘WHAT ABOUT IF YOU AIN’T WHITE DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND’ laws all across the country…..
Black folks already know which way is up, so we know they’re not about us..
Latinos better get hip and real soon..
and they also better figure out that Senator Anchor Baby Rubio will throw their asses over and support those ‘ WHAT ABOUT IF YOU AIN’T WHITE DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND ‘ laws.
he supports the one in Florida they’re trying to pass.
lol
@Zach:
Clinton crushed on Super Tuesday? She got fewer delegates than Obama on Super Tuesday, the day that she was supposed to win the nomination. She didn’t win the day in net delegates until March in Ohio, and even then just barely(she won Ohio, but lost Texas).
Super Tuesday was a disappointment for Obama only in that expectations had risen to such heights that he was expected to win massive upsets in California, Massachusetts, New York and elsewhere.
Still, your point about her mobilizing latinos stands.
estamm
Rubio for president? Was he born in this country? Where is his birth certificate? Does anyone remember him when he was a child? I find it very strange that no one in this country can remember him as a child. Obviously he is hiding something.