Number Crunching

It's not that President Obama won the election a year ago that has the Wingers scared, it's that President Obama won the election with only 41% of the white male vote.



There are a couple messages you can draw from that, BooMan remarks that for the most part, the progressive movement is not made up of white men. But I think the converse of that is the more important inference to explore. When's the last time somebody got only 41% of the white male vote in this country and won...and won comfortably? It's never happened before. White men are no longer able to determine who runs this country anymore. Despite white males overwhelmingly voting for John McCain, McCain still lost both the electoral and popular votes by significant margins.

The result is Barack Obama as our nation's 44th President. The cause of that is the rapidly diminishing power of white men as a voting bloc. Some of them are terrified. Now, I agree with BooMan when he says any group losing power like that would cause a backlash. But when has that ever happened to white men before in America?

About as often as we've had a non-white President.