Last Call For Working Class Blues

Molly Ball at The Atlantic wades through election data and comes up with the fact that Democrats have recently done very well when they win the working class vote big.  When they win it by a smaller margin, Republicans are able to make up the difference with wealthier voters.

Republicans consistently win voters making $50,000 or more, approximately the U.S. median income. The margin doesn't vary too much: In 2012, Mitt Romney got 53 percent of this group's vote; in 2010, Republican House candidates got 55 percent. And Democrats consistently win voters making less than the median—but the margin varies widely. In fact, whether Democrats win these voters by a 10-point or a 20-point margin tells you who won every national election for the past decade.

In 2004, Democrats won the working-class vote by 11 points; George W. Bush was reelected. In 2006, Democrats won the working-class vote by 22 points and took the House and Senate. In 2008, Democrats won by 22 points again, and President Obama was elected. In 2010, the margin narrowed to 11 points, and Republicans took the House back. In 2012, Obama was reelected—on the strength of another 22-point margin among voters making under $50,000.

So what does 2014 portend under this theory?  Not good news.

The Pew report didn't include a breakdown based on the $50,000 threshold, so I asked Pew to crunch the numbers for me. The result: 51 percent of voters making less than $50,000 plan to vote for Democrats, while 40 percent plan to vote Republican. (The rest are undecided, and the GOP wins the more-than-$50,000 vote 49-44.) That's exactly the same 11-point margin that has meant Democratic doom in every election since 2004.

If we stay home again like in 2004 and 2010, the Republicans will win.  If we vote like we did in 2006, 2008, and 2012, we'll win.

Really is that simple.

One Wonderful Nut At The Movies

Republicans.  Law that mandates you buy health insurance, worth burning the country down over.  Law mandating students watch a documentary on how evil liberalism and Barack Obama are, 100% small government freedom of speech approved.

Conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza may be getting an influx of new viewers of his documentary film ‘America’ after a Republican state senator from Florida said he plans on introducing a bill to make the movie mandatory in public schools. 

Republican Alan Hays, inspired after seeing the movie in theaters, said he now plans on introducing a one-page bill in November which would require all 1,700 Florida high schools and middle schools to show the movie to their students, unless their parents choose to opt them out. The documentary film is a conservative-spin on American history focusing on elevating the “essential goodness of America” while discrediting criticisms about American’s checkered history with civil rights and social justice. It’s not completely inconceivable for the bill to pass the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and be signed into law by Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

“I saw the movie and walked out of the theater and said, ‘Wow, our students need to see this.’ And it’s my plan to show it to my colleagues in the legislature, too, before they’re asked to vote on the bill,” Hays said.

To recap, teaching kids about climate change is "liberal political indoctrination" and we can't have that. Teaching kids about having safe sex, also "liberal political indoctrination.".  Teaching kids about evolution, insidious "liberal political indoctrination."

Actual political indoctrination through a law whose sole purpose is to expose kids to a specific political viewpoint favoring one political party?  Now that's completely legal and awesome, because FREEDOM and EAGLE and stuff.

This is what abusing the power of the government actually looks like, people.

More GOP Minority Outreach, Rand Paul Edition

This weekend is the National Urban League's annual conference here in Cincinnati, and of course this close to Kentucky, GOP Sen. Rand Paul just couldn't resist showing up to Randsplain to us black folk why Republicans are the bomb diggety.  Or something.  Very few people wanted to hear what he had to say.

So when Republicans ask blacks to give their party a second look, they have a hard time finding an audience. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky confronted this on Friday when he appeared at a highly publicized speech to the National Urban League Conference to see row after row of empty chairs. The space did not look much fuller after one of the organizers urged people seated near the back to fill in the front rows.

He pushed forward, quoting Malcolm X: “Nobody can give you equality or justice. If you’re a man, you take it.” And he sounded empathetic as he described the arrests of three young black men as they waited for a bus. Their apparent crime, he said, was “waiting while black.” And he delicately acknowledged what was perhaps the biggest cloud hanging over his visit: hiscomments in 2010 in which he suggested that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 encroached on individual liberties. He told the crowd he supported the law unequivocally.

The speech in Cincinnati was his latest before a mostly black crowd, and it was a demonstration of how Mr. Paul — however improbably — has become the only major figure in his party who seems eager to keep going back to African-Americans to appeal for support even if his approach unsettles some fellow Republicans.

That Malcom X quote rings pretty hollow when Paul has attacked President Obama and Attorney General Holder for "overstepping their Constitutional authority".  It rings even more hollow given the fact that Paul has voted against Democratic jobs bills, immigration bills, climate change legislation, the Paycheck Fairness Act and efforts to increase the minimum wage, all things that would help African-Americans...and all Americans for that matter.  It's great that he wants to do something about sentencing laws for drugs, but even if he actually had a change of heart on the Civil Rights Act, he's still publicly come out against the Voting Rights Act.

He wants to court the black vote.  He just doesn't want too many of us to be able to vote.

Rand Paul isn't interested in justice or equality.  Rand Paul is interested in Rand Paul.

So no, I have zero interest in what he wants to say or do.  I don't trust him, and as my senator, he's never given me reason to trust him, and I will work to see he is no longer my senator in 2016.

Take your Rand Paul "well actually" baloney elsewhere.  I'm the one who has to live with him representing me, and he most certainly does not.  He's still a conservative Republican, end of story.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Israel has agreed to a UN request for a 12-hour cease fire Saturday to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the fighting is expected to escalate rapidly afterwards.
• Tensions between the US and Russia grew as Moscow is accusing Washington of a "smear campaign" over Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
• Poor weather conditions are being blamed for the crash earlier this week of an Air Algerie flight in Mali, claiming the lives of all 118 aboard.
• Further EU sanctions against Russia over Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 are running into the reality of Dutch trade with Moscow.
• The House has passed a Senate bill that will make it legal to unlock your cell phone in order to switch providers, and President Obama is expected to sign the legislation.