The Black Vote in 2012

Spread the love

Loading

Bruce Walker @ American Thinker

Republicans are making another pitch to win black votes in 2012. Are we going down the same fruitless path for black voters who may be utterly locked into voting Democrat, especially when the Democrat is black?

Political pundits love to put people into convenient classes, but much like the “Hispanic vote” or the “women’s vote,” the characterizations are far too broad. Within the Hispanic vote, for example, are people whose ethnic connections are from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and a number of other nations. Lumping these together as the “Hispanic vote” makes about as much sense as speaking of the “European vote.”

Women are just like men: they do not vote as part of some tightly knit group, but as Americans who work or stay at home raising kids or live on Social Security or are on welfare. They are the most passionate opponents of abortion and its most passionate advocates. Feminists once tried to lump all women into their collective, but that failed wildly.

Although there is a “gender gap” — which breaks down on closer examination as a gap between married women and single women, women who work and women on welfare — it is hard to imagine anything sillier than lumping “women” in America into a group. But that is what has happened in political punditry. There is a group of women who, often because they are unwed mothers (and for other reasons, like affirmative action), perceive their interests to be with Democrats, but that is about it.

The black vote, likewise, has been irrationally thrown together as if it were a single mind, a single soul, a single voter. In fact, black Americans are disproportionately religious; they sign up for the military in greater percentages than white Americans, and many, like Star Parker, are more utterly opposed to morally destructive welfare programs than are white Americans.

What is also obvious is that black Americans who are most inclined to hear the message of Republican conservatism live in the South. In 2010, 35 black Republicans ran for House seats, and 20 of those 33 came from the 11 states of the Old Confederacy. Two of those 20 won — Alan West of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republicans in the House. All three black Republicans running for the Senate were from the South. The highest-ranking black Republican in Congress — indeed, the highest-ranking black in Congress — has been J.C. Watts of Oklahoma, which is a conservative border state.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of

1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

This says it all:
http://www.therightplanet.com/2012/08/mia-love-vs-sandra-fluke-who-do-you-want-to-be-your-daughters-role-model/

I’ll just add that, while a lot of CA blacks came out to vote Obama in 2008, they were also the very ones whose votes sent DOWN to defeat a Prop 8 that would have made gay marriage legal!

Obama has alienated a bunch of his base.