Monday, December 1, 2014

A Total Loss

Instagoofball has some 2016 predictions, and nobody's surprised to find he's predicting a total wipeout of the Democratic party, as the conventional wisdom now is that Democrats have permanently lost the white vote forever.

Working class white people don't like President Obama much. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 27% approve of him. That's 21 percentage points down since he took office in 2009.
A standard talking-point is that these voters don't like Obama because they're racist. But that assumes that the key word in "white working class" is "white." In fact, the key word is "working." After all, Obama isn't any blacker than he was in 2009.

That's a pretty bizarre chunk of logic there: because fewer white voters like Obama now than six years ago, none of them can be racist, otherwise they would have hated Obama six years ago. Putting that idiocy aside for a moment the fact that the right wing noise machine has spent the last six years trying to convince white voters that Obama is the racist and that he will give taxpayer money to black voters as reparations and bribery, we arrive at this:

Can the Democrats solve this problem? Sure. These are all policies that could be changed, though a lot of party constituencies would oppose it. And Democrats might choose a working-class-friendly nominee, too, if they can find one. Of course, the current favorite is Hillary Clinton, who went to Wellesley and makes $300,000 for giving a speech, and the No. 2 prospect for 2016 is probably Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor who made $212,000 for representing an asbestos company. Portraying either of them as working class heroes will be an uphill battle.

And there's another problem: The white working class may have abandoned Obama, but the black and Hispanicworking classes have mostly stayed loyal to him. But what do Clinton or Warren have that might inspire similar loyalty? Come 2016, it may not just be the white part of the working class that the Democrats have trouble with.

Democrats not only cannot be populists because they make money (you know, like that Obama guy) but that racist, anti-white Democratic minority voters are going to stay home because the Dems will nominate a white person, so nobody on Earth will actually vote for them and Republicans will win easily because they are the party of the working class. 

That's actually kind of funny if you think about it.  Certainly the Democrats can lose.

But only if they try to be the Republicans.
 

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