Slippery Six” Mid-West States Doom Romney—Because Of Low White Share

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about majority white states that voted against Mitt Romney, as contrasted with the "Hispanic vote" coverage. This follows this post about the future of the GOP.  This follows this post about a race hoax at U.T. Austin.  This follows this post about Emmit Till. In the meantime, you can read a very interesting book HERE.

Slippery Six” Mid-West States Doom Romney—Because Of Low White Share




http://www.vdare.com/articles/slippery-six-mid-west-states-doom-romney-because-of-low-white-share

By Steve Sailer

What can we learn from the 2012 Presidential election?

How about this? In politics (as we might have occasionally mentioned over the dozen years of VDARE.com’s existence) demography is destiny.

Mainstream Republicans appear to be waking up to a reality that they’ve gone out of their way to not think about in the 15 years since Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein pointed out that immigration-driven demographic change was bad for the GOP.

But, not having exercised their intellects about demographics over the intervening years, the first reaction of the Republican brain trust has been to grab the helpful advice of their Democratic colleagues: capitulate on Amnesty!!!

Nothing generates respect more than weakness and surrender, right?

The Democrats, these GOP strategists apparently reckon, have outsmarted us on demographics. So, being smart, they must know what is good for us, right?

After all, the only alternative would be to think for ourselves. And thinking makes our heads overheat.

However, for those of us who do think about demographics, here are two fairly good sources of data. One has gotten close to zero attention.

Here’s a chart you won’t see elsewhere:



Chart By Steve Sailer; Exit Polling By Reuters-Ipsos, Sample Size 40,000.

Before the election, I presented demographic data on 7,500 likely voters collected in October by Reuters in conjunction with the French polling firm Ipsos. What I now present above are some of their new November election numbers, using their huge sample of 41,227 actual voters. My bar chart is arranged in rank order of each group’s share of the vote going to Romney—from black single women at 2.4 percent to Mormons at 85.9 percent.

As you can see, although Obama claimed to be a uniter in 2008, in fact his 2012 campaign was scientifically divisive. The Obama coalition of fringe elements in American society is united by one main driving force: resentment of the core groups in American society—such as married white people. Hence the vitriol from the victors since Tuesday, with much chest pounding about the long-hoped for death of white America.

My bar chart was created with the help of Reuters’ superb website at American Mosaic Polling Explorer, which lets let you crosstab their data any way you like. The existence of this resource appears to be the best kept secret in the Main Stream Media. Nobody except Reuters is talking about it.

Instead, the MSM is going with the Edison exit poll, which has a sample size of 26,565. This is understandable, because the MSM paid for Edison. But it means we’re getting the same old prefab crosstabs that don’t answer the truly interesting questions.

The Edison sample size used to be enormous (almost 88,000 in 2004). Recently, however, it’s been scaled back to save money. For example, Edison didn’t release any exit polls on the voting in Texas, the country’s second biggest state, without whose 34 Electoral Votes no Republican seems likely to ever be elected President again, because its sampling was so sparse in that Republican state.

Which ought to raise a red flag about the headline news from Edison: Hispanics cast ten percent of the national vote in 2012. But how can you be so sure about the Latino vote if you barely sampled in Texas?

Overall, exit polls are not well suited for measuring turnout. The pollsters have to decide ahead of time which precincts to hire workers to cover, so they need a model of whom they expect will vote in what numbers. Not surprisingly, they tend to get back roughly the results they anticipated.

Another dirty secret: exit poll data of whatever origin typically gets massaged by the firm immediately after the election to make it match up better with actual vote totals. I can recall, for instance, Edison’s demographics shifting dramatically on my screen in the wee hours of Election Night 2004, as all evidence of their initial report of the triumph of President-Elect Kerry had to be crammed down the memory hole.

It took a couple of months of Michelle Malkin, myself and others pointing out that Edison’s celebrated report of Bush taking 44 percent of the Hispanic vote didn’t jibe with the actual votes before Edison finally retracted that guesstimate in early 2005. By then, it had become an apparently unkillable myth.

Indeed, Edison’s exit polling has had a track record of overestimating the size of the Hispanic vote. It usually reports a dramatic number deceptively higher than the big, carefully controlled Census Bureau survey reports that appear several months after the election—when nobody in the MSM pays attention. Edison’s attitude seems to be: If we’re off by four or eight or twelve years, it’s no biggie.

I’m not going to make a big deal about this either. I don’t have any more idea than Edison does what percentage of the vote was Hispanic. But I do know it ought to go through the formality of becoming true.

The Edison poll is a mixture of in-person interviews at voting locations and phone calls, whereas the Reuters poll is mostly an online panel. Cyberspace makes it cheap to sample all over. Thus in Texas, Reuters is able to report that Romney won only 37 percent of the growing Hispanic vote. That’s quite a bit better than Romney did nationally. But of course it is still ominous for the long-term future of the Republican Party. Texas follows California from red to blue, it’s Game Over in the Electoral College.

Nevertheless, unless the Republican Big Boys cave in to putting illegal aliens on the “path to citizenship,” it’s not a near-term threat—because Romney won a stunning 76 percent of the white vote in Texas, to canter to an easy victory.

White solidarity in Texas is likely to keep the Republicans viable in the White House hunt for a few more elections.

Of course, the Republicans can’t win more than 100 percent of the white vote in Texas. The distant future does look dire for them…unless they DO something about immigration.

Note that, in 2008, the GOP nominated John McCain, sponsor of the 2006 amnesty bill with Ted Kennedy. According to the conventional wisdom that Hispanic voters only care about immigration, McCain should have been a great choice. Instead, he only earned 31 percent of the Latino vote—not significantly better than Romney’s 28.3%, according to Reuters.

Note also, for the record, that Reuters/ Ipsos shows Romney’s overall white share as just 58.1% vs. Edison’s 59%. This makes it clearer that Romney’s white share remained stuck at the high end of the mediocre post-Reagan range. (More comparisons here).

Having a second opinion from Reuters is particularly helpful for small sample size groups. For example, both Edison and Reuters report that Jewish support for Romney rose from the Obamamania depths of 2008. Edison has Romney’s 2012 Jewish vote at 30 percent and Reuters at 34 percent. If you assume Jewish opinion tends to be out in front of the rest of the public, that bodes a modest amount of ill for Obama’s second term.

And what about the Asian vote, which Edison reported as an unprecedentedly low 26 percent for the Republican candidate? Is that a trend? Or a small sample size fluke? (In contrast, Edison says the enigmatic “Other” racial category gave 38 percent to Romney.)

Unfortunately, Reuters just lumps Asians in with all “Other Minorities.” Of that group, 38 percent voted for Romney.

So I would say the jury remains out on the interesting question: Is legal immigration from Asia disastrous for the GOP—or just bad?

Thanks again, Wall Street Journal Edit Page!

Finally, there’s another finding from the Reuters data that’s not widely comprehended yet.

Romney could have won the Electoral College in what can be called the Big Ten states (after the college football conference of the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest). He did win Indiana, and he lost Obama’s home state of Illinois badly. The other six states in this region, however, all slipped through his fingers: Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

In each of these Slippery Six states, Romney won at least 45 percent of the vote. But he still wound up a cumulative 0 for 80 in Electoral Votes. If Romney, rather than Obama, had won all six, he’d be President.

The Slippery Six are states with old-fashioned white and black voting demographics, still with a smattering of old time unionized factory workers. Hispanics, much less Asians, are, for the moment, still a minor matter politically.

According to Reuters, Romney lost the Slippery Six states because (exactly as VDARE.com warned repeatedly while digging white share data out of reluctant tracking polls, see here and here and here), he did badly there among white voters—winning only 52 percent, six points worse than nationally.

Most notably, Romney did terribly among the white working class in these six states. Thus he did only two points worse among whites with college degrees in the Slippery Six than he did nationally. But among the white “some college” component, he came in six points worse than nationally. And among the white “no college” voters, he performed 11 points worse than across the country—finishing tied with Obama.

In fact (although sample sizes are getting small), Romney even appears to have suffered the ignominy of a reverse gender gap among no-college whites in the Slippery Six—winning 51.4 percent of the women, but only 48 percent of the white working class men.

So the hidden story of the 2012 election just might come down to Romney not appealing to blue collar white guys in this swing region. Or you could attribute it to the immensely rich Obama campaign’s relentless negative advertising all summer depicting Romney as an outsourcing zillionaire.

But, how much did Romney offer working class whites in this swing region? Did they have much cause for hope that he’d take a strong stand against legal and illegal immigration? Affirmative Action? How about some public sympathy about their difficulties with influxes of Section 8 renters, whom rich liberals have been evicting from Chicago lakefront housing projects? Is that fair?

No—but mentioning it is divisive!

It’s much less controversial for Republicans just to stick to “economism”…and lose.

Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative and writes regularly for Takimag. His websitewww.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here and here (Kindle)

Why is Romney Losing? Because Immigration Is Electing A New People

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about why Mitt Romney could lose. This follows this post about elections in Texas.This follows this post about the Black Caucus hurting Black Americans with their immigration stand. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more that you can do to get involved click HERE and you can read this very interesting book HERE.

Why is Romney Losing? Because Immigration Is Electing A New People


http://www.vdare.com/articles/why-is-romney-losing-because-immigration-has-elected-a-new-people

By Peter Bradley
Ominously, although national presidential polls show a neck-and-neck race for the Presidency, or even a slight lead for GOP presidential nominee-presumptive Mitt Romney, the Electoral College maps tell a much grimmer story. According to the CNN electoral map projections, Obama leads the race by 247 to 206, with 270 delegates needed to win. Karl Rove’s electoral map shows Obama up 194 to 101 for Romney.

The fact that formerly deep red states like North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado are now up for grabs indicates that Romney has an uphill battle ahead of him.

But how can this be? Unemployment has been over 8 percent for 41 straight months and stands at 8.2%. The economy is growing at an anemic 1.5 percent. Deficits and debt are at an all time high with no end in sight. The price of gas routinely hits over $4 a gallon.

By any fair measure, Obama has been a failure on the economy. And don’t Americans vote primarily on the basis of the economy?

This simplistic argument gives hope to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. He expects (or perhaps just hopes for) a 1980-like scenario where Reagan vaulted ahead of Carter in the final days of what had been a close race.

But the American electorate has changed quite a bit in the last 32 years.

Some pundits still don’t realize how much. Thus National Review’s Jim Geraghty starts off his 1980 vs. 2012 column (July 25, 2012) promisingly by noting “It’s a demographically different country.”

But he then informs us that the country was 79.5 percent white in 1980 while it is 72 percent white today. He concludes: “So if the racial demographic change amounts to only a small shift in favor of the Democrats, what societal trend has helped them?”

From there it is all downhill, as Geraghty [Email him] stresses the lack of a foreign policy crisis and the spread of early voting in sealing Romney’s doom.

Of course, non-Hispanic whites were actually down to 63.7% in the 2010 Census and are certainly less in 2012.

I went through the bother of registering for NRO’s online comments section and sent in a polite correction on Geraghty’s elementary error. Of course, it was never posted.

Far from causing a “small shift” to the Democrats, the racial transformation of the U.S. caused by over-immigration is the only major reason why the GOP is sailing into oblivion.

In 2008, McCain won 55 percent of the white vote and lost by a near-landslide. In 2000, Bush won 55 percent of the white vote and squeaked by with a win. Shouldn’t that tell Geraghty and other Conservatism Inc. operatives that something is going on?

The racial breakdown of the 2008 presidential race was as follows:



Whites 55% to 43% for McCain

Blacks 95% to 5% for Obama

Hispanics 67% to 31% for Obama

Asians 62% to 35% for Obama

The most recent polls show the same fatal trend in 2012: only whites support Romney in great numbers. Almost 90 percent of Republican votes come from whites. And Romney has yet to crack the 61% support of whites he likely needs to win. (It’s eminently doable—the GOP got 60% in its Congressional sweep in 2010).

Geraghty’s ignorance of the impact of demographics is unforgiveable, given that the magazine for which he writes once (pre-purge!) published a cover story that accurately predicted what would happen to Republican electoral prospects given unchecked immigration:

Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein presented the facts about the declining GOP majority in a National Review cover story in June 1997 [Electing a New People]. They crunched the numbers and predicted that 2008 would be the first year in which the demographic wave would catch up with Republicans. After that the prospects for electing Republican presidents would just get worse. They wrote:



Demography is destiny in American politics. This point was made brilliantly almost exactly thirty years ago, by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority (1968). In the shadow of the Democrats' long-dominant "Roosevelt coalition," and amid the wreckage and recrimination of the disastrous Goldwater defeat, Phillips boldly predicted a generation of Republican victories based on the persistent but dynamic pattern of ethnic politics. He has been triumphantly vindicated.

But the Republican hour is rapidly drawing to a close. Not because the "Phillips Coalition" of the West and the South, of the middle class and urban blue-collar voters, is breaking up in the traditional manner. Instead, it is being drowned—as a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Act, which ironically became effective in the year Phillips's book was published. Nine-tenths of the immigrant influx is from groups with significant—sometimes overwhelming—Democratic propensities. After thirty years, their numbers are reaching critical mass. And there is no end in sight.



The fact that so few conservative and Republican pundits even know the facts of the demographic revolution is remarkable, given how thoroughly VDARE.com and others have documented this issue for over a decade.

The conservative rank and file seem to be even worse. Comments to Geraghty’s article hardly mentioned demographics. Most responders just bickered back and forth about whether Romney could be another Reagan.

But the blinders may be lifting. Last week, Rush Limbaugh approvingly read Pat Buchanan’s entire column to his audience on how immigration has swept away the GOP in California and promises to do the same thing nationwide.

Buchanan was as incisive as ever. He wrote:



Race, age and ethnicity are at the heart of the problem. And they portend not only the party's death in California, but perhaps its destiny in the rest of America.

Consider. Almost 90 percent of all Republican voters in presidential elections are white. Almost 90 percent are Christians. But whites fell to 74 percent of the electorate in 2008 and were only 64 percent of the population. Christians are down to 75 percent of the population from 85 in 1990. The falloff continues and is greatest among the young.

Consider ethnicity. Hispanics were 15 percent of the U.S. population in 2008 and 7.4 percent of the electorate. Both percentages will inexorably rise.

Yet in their best years, like 2004, Republicans lose the Hispanic vote 3-to-2. In bad years, like 2008, they lose it 2-to-1. Whites are already a minority in California, and Hispanics will eventually become the majority.


Say goodbye to the Golden Land.

The only serious counter to the demographic deluge facing Republicans: the Sailer Strategy—which is basically that the GOP should rally to its white base by appealing to its interests. Central to the Sailer Strategy: a time-out on immigration to stop the demographic displacement of whites.

Of course, the GOP elite has ignored this advice. It continues blindly pandering to Hispanics and others--who will not vote for it in significant numbers no matter what it does.

In a 2008 article for VDARE.com called “End of the Party?” I wrote:



Here is a scary thought: even if Obama turns out be as inept as Jimmy Carter, we might be stuck with him for 8 years.



Obama has indeed turned out to be inept, but he may be reelected anyway. If he gets a second term, Republicans, Conservatism Inc. and conservatives (not the same thing) will finally have to confront the demographic tidal wave that demoralized (if not destroyed) them in California and is now is spreading nationwide.

The only alternative will be partisan (and national) extinction.

Peter Bradley (email him) writes from Washington D.C.

All I know is what I read in the papers about immigration

A very interesting post from http://isteve.blogspot.com/ about Barack Obama's polling numbers after his amnesty edict. This follows this post about Arizona's 1070. . This follows this post about Barack Obama's Amnesty Edict. This follows this post about the Black Caucus hurting Black Americans with their immigration stand. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more that you can do to get involved click HERE and you can read this very interesting book HERE!

All I know is what I read in the papers




We heard over and over again that Obama's Administrative Amnesty was a political masterstroke, but now the polls are finally in and the Washington Post reports "No Immigration Bounce for Obama." It turns out that -- What do you know? -- immigration is a bad issue for Obama, especially in swing states (in red above -- and, no, I don't know what the right half of the graph means.)





What does make a difference is the sheer racial change created by immigration. If the U.S. still had the demographics of 1980, Obama would likely lose as badly as Carter. As brilliant GOP strategic thinkers like Rove, Bush, and McCain argued, therefore the Republicans should speed up demographic change.

Sean Trende: Why The Sailer Strategy Dooms Obamnesty

A very interesting post from http://www.vdare.com/ about the fact that Barack Obama's amnesty makes him LESS likely to get reelected. This follows this post about the rational to fight Barack Obama's amnesty executive order. This follows this post about Marco Rubio's DREAM Act. This follows this post about the Black Caucus hurting Black Americans with their immigration stand. This follows this post about how to Report Illegal Immigrants! For more that you can do to get involved click HERE and you can read this very interesting book HERE!

Sean Trende: Why The Sailer Strategy Dooms Obamnesty






http://www.vdare.com/posts/sean-trende-on-the-sailer-strategy

By James Fulford


Sean Trende writes in RealClearPolitics on why Obama's Administrative Amnesty is a bad thing for Obama—for reasons that we've been talking about for more than ten years, and that we call the Sailer Strategy. (This is an excerpt, and the links in it are Trende's)







1) Latinos are underrepresented in swing states. While the Latino vote is frequently portrayed as a critical voting bloc, in truth it is concentrated in only a few swing states with just a handful of electoral votes. The only states where Latinos make up more than 10 percent of the electorate are: Arizona (16 percent of the electorate in 2008), California (18 percent), Colorado (13 percent), Florida (14 percent), Nevada (15 percent), New Mexico (41 percent), and Texas (20 percent).



Of these, only Colorado, Florida, and Nevada are swing states; New Mexico and Arizona are at best borderline swing states. In Florida, the Latino vote largely (though decreasingly) comprises voters of Cuban descent and is therefore atypical of other Latino electorates.



So in the end, we’re talking about Colorado and Nevada as the states where this is likely to produce dividends of any size, for a total of 15 electoral votes.



2) There is a trade-off here. Fifteen electoral votes could still be crucial in a close election. But here’s the rub: The analyses that focus only on the potential effect among Latino voters miss half of the equation: The potential effect among white voters.



I’ve made this point before, but consider the case of Arizona. For many liberal commentators, the silver lining to the state’s immigration bill was that it presaged the eventual death of the state’s Republican Party. By alienating Latino voters, Republicans would soon find it impossible to forge winning coalitions in the state.



To be sure, Latino voters were alienated. In 2004, George W. Bush won 43 percent of that group in Arizona. Four years later, John McCain won 41 percent. In 2010, Jan Brewer pulled in a paltry 28 percent.



Yet Brewer ran ahead of both McCain and Bush overall. The key is that her policies played well with white voters. In particular, McCain captured 60 percent of whites without college degrees and 58 percent of whites with college degrees.



Brewer actually ran somewhat behind McCain among whites with college degrees, capturing 55 percent of their vote. But among whites without college degrees, Brewer won 66 percent of the vote. This is where her increased victory margin came from.



This is important, because Obama has ongoing weaknesses with working-class white voters. So weak, in fact, that they threatened his presidential bid during the Democratic perfect storm of 2008.[Obama's Puzzling Immigration Decision By Sean Trende - June 19, 2012]





In one of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, he explains that while tactics is something that needs careful study, "strategy’s another matter. At the simplest, it’s mere common sense" involving the "the age-old laws that you learn in the school playground"--I. E. how many on our side, how many on theirs.



In an election, this is a pure counting exercise. One of the earliest pieces we ran on VDARE.com was







WSJ: "Republicans need to keep courting Jewish and black voters."



By Steve Sailer on December 9, 2000 at 2:15pm



VDARE: Make that counting!





In his quest to block imaginary inroads on the "Hispanic Vote", President Obama, like Republican Hispanderers, has lost count of the voters who will actually swing the election.

Forget the TEA Party- the DEMOCRATS are having the CIVIL WAR!!!!!

A timely post from www.vdare.com  about the Civil War in the DEMOCRATIC PARTY as opposed to the much covered one on the Republican side. This follows this post about the border with Mexico and the Falcon Lake murder and this post which shows that there are 30,000 openly illegal immigrants in the border town of El Paso. For more interesting stories like this click here to follow this blog.



Diversity Is Strength! It’s Also…A Lot Of Problems For Democrats (Richly Deserved)

By Steve Sailer




[Also See: The Balkanization of Barack's Party, by Patrick J. Buchanan]



Fifty two weeks ago, I pointed out that the Democrats’ winning 2008 strategy–positioning Barack Obama to blacks as the black candidate, to Asians and Hispanics as the minority candidate, and to whites as the postracial candidate–did not make for a long-term stable political strategy. To quote me: "A black-led four-race coalition is an inherently fragile thing." [Sailer Strategy Supplement: Rebrand Democrats As The Black Party, October 04, 2009]



Now I have to congratulate me. Subsequent electoral events in the heart of the political universe–the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia–are proving these inherent fragilities.



I was recently asked by a political savant: How could the Republicans survive in the future when the electorate is significantly more nonwhite? I replied: "How do they survive in the South today?" The answer, of course: by winning a larger share of the white vote–just as Democrats win a huge share of the black vote all across the country.



He briefly expressed surprise at this concept, then conceded that this, indeed, is how things work in the largest region of the country.



But how enthusiastic, he asked, will the growing number of non-black minority voters be about a Republican Party that wins a large fraction of white votes?



"How enthusiastic will Asians and Hispanics be about a Democratic Party over which blacks feel increasingly proprietary?" I responded.



What we might laughingly call the Republican brain trust has been terrified that, in the competition for Asian and Hispanic votes, the GOP might be seen as the White Party. But the downside for the Democrats of being seen as the Black Party are less discussed, although they are potentially much worse. After all, immigrants had their reasons for moving to a white-run country like the U.S. rather than to a black-run country like Haiti.



No doubt immigrant ethnic elites will align with the Democrats. But that doesn’t mean their putative followers will vote the way they are told. With Asians and Hispanics, there’s always a high likelihood that they just won’t bother to vote.



Case in point: Political trends in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area–of special interest since it represents a Best Case Scenario for Obama Era Democrats.



As imperial and economic power has been consolidated in the federal government since the 1930s, the Washington metropolitan area, long reviled by foreign ambassadors as a humid, dull backwater, has grown vastly in wealth and talent. For example, the DC Metro Area now leads the country in percentage of residents with college degrees (47 percent), well ahead of Silicon Valley with 43 percent. (Riverside, CA is last in the U.S. with 19 percent.)



In theory, the region should be a Democratic electoral utopia. Almost everybody is either a government employee or the relative or neighbor of a government employee. There’s a large, politically sophisticated black population, including one of the country’s biggest black middle classes. Wealth has attracted a large number of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.



Moreover, the economy has been relatively strong in the Washington area. (See the September 30, 2010, article in the Washington Business Journal, Washington job growth third-best in nation. by Jeff Clabaugh) So the Democrats’ current all-purpose excuse that they are just experiencing a little in-flight turbulence is less applicable here.



And yet … things aren’t working out quite so well in the Washington area as Democratic strategists would figure.



The first regional symptom appeared in November 2009. The state of Virginia, which had given 53 percent of its vote to Obama the year before, suddenly elected Republican Bob McDonnell governor with 59 percent. The white share of votes went up from 70 percent in 2008 to 78 percent in 2009, and their devotion to the GOP increased from 60 percent to 67 percent. Non-black minorities dropped from 10 percent to 6 percent of the votes.



Well, okay, that’s Virginia, a traditionally Republican state. But what about enlightened Maryland?



A reader recently alerted me to trends in Montgomery County, Maryland, just north of D.C., home to Chevy Chase and other elegant suburbs. It’s the eighth wealthiest county in the country and perhaps the best educated: 29 percent of adults claim advanced degrees. Obama won 71.5 percent of the vote in 2008. By 2009, the population was down to 52 percent non-Hispanic white (It’s 18 percent black, 16 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian).



Montgomery County is Democratic Nirvana.



Or it ought to be–except that as it gets more diverse, it gets less engaged with public affairs. The reader pointed me to a September 16, 2010 post in the Maryland Political Watch blog, On Montgomery County’s Plummeting Turnout. Even in this extremely politicized locale, turnout in the September 14th Maryland primary dropped to a new record low of only 15 percent of voting age residents. Montgomery County Democrats just couldn’t be bothered to turn out and vote in 2010–especially in nonwhite districts.



Finally, there’s the District of Columbia itself, where the recent mayor’s race disillusioned many white liberals. And there sure are a lot of them in D.C. The 2008 exit poll had Obama winning 86-12 in Washington … among whites!



So Washington D.C. features the most liberal whites in captivity. Yet, as the acrimonious D.C. mayoral election of September 14th illustrated, the white-black political division within the city is rising to another peak.



First, some background: the Constitution makes Congress the ultimate authority in the District.



During the Kennedy Administration, Alabama governor George Wallace would taunt Jack and Bobby for demanding more black electoral power in Southern states than the Kennedys were willing to allow in D.C., where they lived. Wallace challenged JFK:



"I think the American people should have a right to look at the city of Washington bein’ controlled by its local inhabitants, and therefore, because I would just like to see what would happen, I think you ought to have home rule."[Wallace, By Marshall Frady(1968) P. 167]



The federal leadership, which had to work in D.C., however, was in less of a hurry to carry out that experiment. Congress didn’t take Wallace up on his challenge until December 24, 1973 when it passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act allowing for limited local governance. The first District of Columbia mayor was the aptly named Walter Washington, who took office on January 2, 1975.



Generally, the first generation of black mayors in black majority cities tended to be cautious, respectable souls, like Tom Bradley of Los Angeles (1973-1993). But they were soon followed by the "race men", most famously Marion Barry, who was elected mayor of D.C. in 1979.



Barry was prevented from running for a fourth term by his 1990 arrest for smoking crack. He had been set up by the FBI and local police who got it all on videotape.



Whether this notorious event could be considered a coup by the federal government to rid itself of a troublesome mayor is one of those questions that isn’t discussed in polite circles. D.C. voters, however, felt strongly enough about it to return Barry to the Mayor’s office in 1994.



The Feds put in place a financial control board in 1995 to keep Barry from running amok. Moreover, federal agencies have long been expanding their departmental police forces, especially after 9/11 in the name of fighting terrorism. The number of uniformed men with guns on the streets of D.C. increased and crime started to fall.



The crack wars have died down and the crime rate has dropped since Barry’s heyday. So the white share of the D.C. population began to rise again. Blacks with good government jobs had long been leaving for the suburbs. Immigrants, including Africans, whom hospitality employers found generally more amenable than African-Americans, increasingly squeezed out D.C.’s black underclass. (Compare the trajectories of Washington and Baltimore in recent years.)



By the last decade, D.C. was becoming among the most fashionable destinations for young white singles. But, once they stopped being single, who could afford to stay in D.C. rather than move to Montgomery or another suburban county?



The central complaint of young white liberals became D.C.’s schools, which were not only full of black students, but were administered by black bureaucrats for the benefit of black bureaucrats. D.C. whites compared the local black-run public school system to Chicago and New York, where Mayors Richie Daley and Michael Bloomberg had seized control of the schools and installed dynamic white administrators, Paul Vallas and Joel Klein, respectively, to shake up the systems. Publicly, nobody ever quite put it in terms quite that blunt—everybody hand-waved about "bad schools"—but it was hard to avoid thinking that way.



Let’s do the math. Say you are typical nice white engaged couple in D.C., one with a federal job, the other with a media job. You wouldn’t dream of sending your future kids to a mostly black school after puberty, but you think that public education ought to get them through K-5. If D.C., however, can’t provide even decent public elementary schools, though, that comes right out of your net worth. Now, Sidwell Friends, where the Obamas send their children, costs $31,000 per year. But, say, you could find a low end private school charging only $12,000 annually. Well, six years times two children times $12,000 equals $144,000.



Ouch.



Yet if D.C. public elementary schools improved enough so that lots of other nice white people like you become willing to send their kids to them, not only would you save $144,000 in private school tuition, but your property would appreciate in value–because now your condo comes with "good schools"!



Not surprisingly, the national press was excited in 2007 when new D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, a yuppie black, appointed as school chancellor the energetic and ambitious Korean-American Michelle Rhee. (She’s the heroine of the current much-lauded documentary Waiting for "Superman.") If Rhee could actually clean out the Augean Stables of the D.C. schools, she could literally provide many in the national press with a financial windfall. So when she fired a large number of teachers for underperforming, the white press was ecstatic.



Black voters were not ecstatic with Rhee, however. According to Paul Schwarzman and Chris L. Jenkins of the Washington Post in How D.C. Mayor Fenty lost the black vote - and his job [September 18, 2010]:



"...blacks also see the school system as a primary employer, providing jobs to thousands of teachers, school bus drivers, administrators and secretaries. When Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee laid off hundreds of teachers, many blacks saw … an assault on economic opportunity."



So in the 2010 Democratic primary, Fenty was defeated by veteran black city councilman Vince Gray 54-44:



"Fenty won 53 of the city's majority-white census tracts but only 10 of those that are predominantly black. Gray, in contrast, captured 108 majority-black census tracts and just five that are majority-white…"



The Washington Post asked its readers on September 16: "Should she stay or should she go?" A commenter calling himself kentonsmith vividly expressed the black community’s attitude:



"Rhee got her overrated fame. Now...scam!!! Scat!! …



"She's a consultant, folks. Nothing more....she just happens to be Asian; something we haven't seen before, and folks think that means she has created the "Suzuki Method" or something. It's amazing how much credit a person can get for firing Black professionals. I mean...the chick fires Black folks and ends up on the cover of TIME magazine as courageous?"



This black-led four-race coalition idea … it’s still got a few kinks to work out, doesn’t it?



The Republicans should despair less over how they can survive and think more about how they deserve to survive.



[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]

Who Are “Asians” Anyway—And Why Are We Giving Them Affirmative Action Benefits?

A follow up from here about a possible future GOP strategy! This is from the insightful Steve Sailer of http://www.vdare.com/.

Who Are “Asians” Anyway—And Why Are We Giving Them Affirmative Action Benefits?
By Steve Sailer
The Republican Party should worry less about “outreach” to hostile minorities and more about “inreach” to mobilize its natural white base—will be viable for a surprisingly long time, despite current immigration policy.But it will obviously help if some minorities can be persuaded to be less enthusiastic about the Democrats. In devising any long-term strategy for preventing one-party Democrat rule in America, the Asian vote, which went for Obama 62-35 over McCain, must be analyzed especially closely.A generation from now, Hispanics will have an abundance of votes, but Asians will have plenty of money and brainpower. Hispanics will naturally continue to gravitate toward the tax-and-spend party, but Asians are more unpredictable. With their higher earning power, Asians, in theory, might not prove hostile to a party advocating limited government. On the other hand, if Asians continue their current shift to the left, their talents will magnify the impact of their numbers.I’ll discuss the Asian vote in detail in an upcoming column, but today’s essay will merely explore the political implications of one basic question:Who are “Asians” anyway?Asia is an awfully big place. It has four billion people inhabitants. Is everybody from Asia an “Asian” according to U.S. government regulations?For instance, everybody would agree that, say, Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Senator from Hawaii for the last 46 years, is Asian because his parents were Japanese.But what about Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana and a potential 2012 Presidential candidate? Is the blue-eyed Daniels an Asian? After all, he is of Syrian Christian descent, and Syria is in Asia.Well, of course not! Everybody knows that West Asians aren’t whom we are talking about when we talk about “Asians”.Then, how about Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana? He is of Asian Indian descent. Does that make him an “Asian” Asian?Funny you should ask. See, Jindal was officially Caucasian for the first decade of his life. But then the Reagan Administration changed him to an Asian. So now he’s an Asian.To begin at the beginning: originally, the concoction of the overall “Asian” category was another folly of the Nixon Administration. Rather than simply continuing to tabulate separately each of the mutually antagonistic East Asian nationalities, with their lurid histories of aggression and atrocity against each other, Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget lumped them together into the single racial category of “Oriental Americans”, making them a legally-protected class able to sue for disparate impact.Nixon’s creation of an “Oriental” category (later changed to “Asian” to entrap unfashionable people who fail to keep up with the latest PC nomenclature shifts) inevitably called into existence a pan-East Asian class of activists to protect and extend their racial privileges.As I argued when reviewing Sandra Day O’Connor’s disastrous, Bush-backed, majority opinion in the Grutter quota case, if the government announced that people born on Wednesdays were now a legally preferred class, there would soon spring up pressure groups with names like The Children of Woe to lobby for more Wednesdaytarian power. PBS would run Wednesday Pride documentaries during Wednesday History Month about esteem-building people born on Wednesdays, such as Jimmy Carter, Bruce Lee, and Rosie O’Donnell.Of course, the (relatively) good news about “Asians” is that since they tend toward competence, they benefit from fewer quotas than blacks and Hispanics. Thus the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s notorious Four-Fifths Rule for detecting disparate impact results in de facto quotas for Asians much less often than for Non-Asian Minorities (NAMs).Still, those Asian activists are in action. Thus, back in the 1970s when Gov. Jindal was a child, Indian and Pakistani immigrants and their offspring were legally considered racially Caucasian, in accordance with the general findings of physical and genetic anthropology. But then, Indian immigrant businessmen clamored for the Small Business Administration’s low-interest minority business development loans. So, in 1982, the Reagan Administration lumped immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in with East Asians, declaring them all to be “socially or economically disadvantaged” Asians.This is the result: Imagine you are a Taliban terrorist from the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. You immigrate to America. If you are from the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass, you are now officially “Asian”, and you qualify for taxpayer-subsidized low-interest loans. But if you are from the Afghanistan side, you are officially white and are out of luck at getting a government loan.Got it?Lumping together East Asians and South Asians is transparently bogus. Pyong Gap Min, a professor at Queens College in New York City, pointed out:"[Asian] is a political term used by Asian-American activists and enhanced by governmental treatment. In terms of culture, physical characteristics, and pre-migrant historical experiences, I have argued, South and East Asians do not have commonalities and as a result, they do not maintain close ties in terms of friendship, intermarriage or sharing neighborhoods."The Reagan Administration’s attempt to bribe a talented pressure group, the Indians, by declaring them legally nonwhite is another example of the shallow short-term thinking about race that has left the Republican Party with its future in doubt.It’s absolutely nuts for Republicans to expand a system under which immigrants can win money and prizes by declaring themselves victims of whites.You don’t make friends that way, you make enemies. It’s basic human nature.Unfortunately, almost everybody thinks about diversity in only the most abstract terms: e.g., If we give Group X the special benefits their leaders demand, they will vote for us more. I mean, their politicians wouldn’t have ulterior motives, now would they?But, in reality, to understand the effects of diversity, you have to think about how individuals actually act, about how they feel when they act. You have to put yourself in their shoes.Consider this example. In 2005, the Office of the Inspector General sent a report to the SBA: Criteria for Overcoming the Presumption of Social Disadvantage is [sic] Needed. A whistle-blowing citizen had filed a complaint about an Asian businessman in his mid-20s who had qualified for the SBA’s 8(a) minority business development programs. The whistle-blower argued that the entrepreneur was not really disadvantaged.See, in theory you don’t qualify for taxpayer-subsidized loans just by being “Asian”. No, you have to be a socially or economically disadvantaged Asian. And how do you demonstrate you are disadvantaged? You fill out a form about how you’ve suffered under the lash of white bigotry.Thus this Asian entrepreneur related a tale of woe on his application, including:“I then watched as young, less experienced white men got the promotions and salary increases that I had been promised.”The Inspector General’s office discovered, however, that in the company where the victim toiled, his father was a senior officer and shareholder. In fact, this young martyr to social and economic disadvantage:1. came from a wealthy family; e.g., according to a newspaper article, since 1996, three companies his parents founded and were affiliated with were sold for approximately $3 billion;2. was raised in his parents’ home, which had an assessed value of $5.2 million as of January 1, 2005; …5. was gainfully employed by the United States Senate, Goldman Sachs International … among others.As the title of the 2005 report points out, after decades of handing out loans to each and every Asian who submitted a form claiming to be “socially or economically disadvantaged”, the federal government still hadn’t gotten around to developing criteria for “overcoming the presumption of social disadvantage”.In other words, if you are Asian, the government just takes your word for it.Consider the psychological effect of the government prodding you to lie about white persecution. Sure, this Asian applicant no doubt knew he was fibbing the first time the government asked him to complain about being discriminated against by whites in order to qualify for quotas. Yet, as the years go by, and he keeps having to fill out these forms to get more advantages over whites, and keeps donating to ethnic lobbies to preserve his privileges, it will only be natural for him to start believing his cover story about how he’s the real victim and thus he deserves his loot.If you pay people to exploit you, they will come to believe you deserve it.In fact, maybe you do.The policy implications are twofold.First, the next time the Republicans get any power, they need to abolish all programs that treat “Asians” as victims deserving special treatment.If Asians are put on a basis of legal equality with whites, they will get along well enough with them—and cease to identify with the people, and the party, benefitting from quotasSure, there will be a short-term political price to pay. But if you don’t do it now, when will you do it? When Asian voters are more numerous?Second, South Asians must be reclassified back to Caucasian, and the “Asian” category renamed “East Asian” (if not Oriental).It was particularly shortsighted of the Reagan Administration to declare South Asians officially nonwhite. South Asians tend (especially compared to East Asians) to be extraverted, loquacious in English, interested in politics and argument, and intellectually venturesome. There are already far more South Asian than East Asian pundits in America. Policies that incline these Indians to the left could turn out to be disastrous.There are some grounds for hope. One of the main reasons for anti-white feelings among East Asian men is that white men are much more likely to marry East Asian women than East Asian men are to marry white women, leaving a lot of cranky East Asian bachelors left over. This is less of a problem for South Asian men, who keep their womenfolk on tighter leashes. Arranged marriages are still common among South Asians in America.Because the GOP is inevitably destined to be considered the white party, it would be best to have the Indians, as Lyndon Johnson vulgarly but memorably said of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “inside the tent p-----g out than outside p-----g in”.And it’s not at all too late to rectify the Asian definition to detach Indians. The current categories are hardly set in stone. For example, in 1997, the OMB broke apart the silly “Asian or Pacific Islander” group into “Asian” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander”.Note, however, why this was done. Right now, only minority activists pay attention to the federal definitions of race and ethnicity. Thus the “Asian or Pacific Islander” group was split not because it was plainly stupid to lump massive Samoans in with wiry Vietnamese—and certainly not because it was good for America. Instead, it happened because Native Hawaiian groups felt that being aggregated with Asians was slowing their endless campaign to badger Congress into treating them like American Indians (for instance, let them have casinos to cater to gambling-crazed Chinese tourists).Asians are richer than Pacific Islanders. So lumping them together statistically diminished the Polynesians’ claims of victimization.Bottom line: American whites have long subcontracted out to minority pressure groups the question of how Washington develops the racial categories used to award legal privileges and perquisites.When whites made up an overwhelming majority of the U.S. population, as they did during the Nixon Administration, that heedlessness may have seemed trivial.But as whites lose their numeric dominance because Washington’s immigration policy, they will have to learn to play these grubby games, too.
[Steve Sailer (email him) is movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available here.]