13 thoughts on “Democrats”

  1. “Meanwhile, black voters are going to demand a black person be on the ticket again or face another 2016 turnout problem. Black voters staying home allowed Donald John Trump to break through the firewall of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”

    I’m not sure that is true. Many black people really like Trump, because he is a plain talker, and a feisty guy. I don’t think “the black vote” is a real thing. The number of cultural disconnects (from abortion to gay rights to religious convictions) between many black people and the Democrat party is beginning to break the connection between the two.

    1. The black vote has gone 85-90% to the Democrats since the New Deal. I don’t expect 2020 to be an exception. The only question about the black vote is turnout, as the article indicates.

      1. Those numbers are the result of polling, the accuracy of which has been declining for years. I agree with Mfk, the cultural and economic disconnects are growing and will continue to grow.

      2. I don’t think so. In the fifties and early sixties, a lot of blacks (particularly in the South) were Republican. MLK was. They didn’t go Democrat to the degree they are today until the Great Society. As Johnson said, “We’ll have the ni**ers voting Democrat for the next two-hundred years.”

      3. I think black turnout might depend on whether Joe Biden gets the nomination.

        If Corey Booker hammers Biden as the architect of Black Lives Don’t Matter, how will Biden recover in November? As an aside, I don’t think former prosecutor (persecutor) Kamala Harris probably doesn’t have the room to attack Biden about putting innocent blacks in jail, since that’s one of her specialties.

        But if he does get attacked and if the attacks start to resonate in the black community, you’d have Trump attacking while pardoning blacks who’ve been given onerous prison sentences for minor crimes, working with Kim Kardashian and black leaders on the issue. You’ve also have Trump who has brought about the lowest black unemployment rate in decades.

        And then you have Biden, who reportedly helped craft the 100 to 1 penalty difference between crack and powder cocaine. When George HW Bush proposed massive increases for law enforcement and more prisons, cops, and courts to deal with the drug crisis, Biden said

        “Quite frankly, the President’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” Biden said in a televised response to Bush’s speech. “In a nutshell, the President’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.”

        That’s from Jacobin Magazine’s article on Biden’s crime policy, in which they call him the Mass Incarceration Zealot. Jacobin Magazine is a Democratic Socialist quarterly, but probably not widely read.

        Biden has far more baggage on the issue than Hillary, who was infamous for railing against “super predators” long before she pivoted to deplorables.

        As to how this might effect black voter turnout, the modern era has only had two major declines, and both are named “Clinton”. In 2016 it dropped by 7%, or 756,000, from the 2012 numbers. It was lower than it was in 2004 or 2008, and Obama wasn’t running in 2004, so it’s not just a decline from the Obama bubble.

        Pew Research article on black turnout, with charts

        The other prior steep decline was in 1996, Bill Clinton’s second term, after he’d rolled out all kinds of harsh criminal punishments that mainly hit the black community. There’s an academic paper on it, saying that black voters were apathetic because Clinton was no better than Bob Dole or Jesse Helms regarding race and crime.

        If Biden is the nominee then Trump will assuredly point out his horrible record to punch through the low-information assumption that Biden can’t have been bad or Obama would never have picked him as VP. The press would normally smoother such attacks with a pillow, but then Trump makes them dance like puppets, so he’ll tweet and tweet and make them talk about it.

        But to get the nomination, Biden has to get past twenty other candidates who will, in theory, be gunning to take him down anyway they can. How and whether Booker attacks Biden in the early debates, and whether Harris joins in, might have a critical influence on later events.

        1. Biden only has to remind black voters how he kept Republicans from “putting you back in chains”.

    2. “I’m not sure that is true. Many black people really like Trump, because he is a plain talker, and a feisty guy. I don’t think “the black vote” is a real thing.”

      Agreed. With one correction; many black men like the way Trump talks. Black women however are more (emotionally) attached to the Democratic party. The aforementioned black men are responsible for the low black turnout; they couldn’t quite bring themselves to vote for Trump (Republican), but like him enough (and didn’t like Hillary particularly) to just stay home. An in effect quasi vote for Trump; by not supporting Hillary. I believe Trump himself made note of that idea.

    3. I think it is becoming less true but the social pressure on black people to hate the right people is incredibly strong.

  2. From the comments over there, for anyone who thinks AOC is an anomaly, meet Candi CdeBaca, just elected to the Denver city council. She could be mistaken for AOC’s sister. Literally.

    If that link doesn’t work try this one.

    1. Washington has been electing commies to local office for years and years and we used to hope that it would be contained to Seattle but now they are the US House of Representatives and working hard to turn implement control over the more troublesome parts of the state.

    2. If you can pronounce her name while standing under a full moon, Yuri Andropov will rise from his grave.

      1. Three times. Don’t forget that you have to pronounce it three times.

        In a row.

        Ol’ Yuri doesn’t rise for just anybody, y’know.

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