Here's Steven Den Beste on the Dems' problem with white males, a bit more, shall we say, "nuanced" than that character's obsession with racism. :-)
Stardate 20031229.1422
(On Screen): In the American winner-take-all system, a candidate for office doesn't have to gain the votes of every citizen. And because of the Electoral College, a candidate for president doesn't even have to gain the votes of the majority of voters who participate. What he has to do is to gain a majority in enough states so that he has the majority of the Electoral votes. (Which is why more than one man has been elected president even though his opponent got more total votes.)
Thus much strategy in Presidential elections revolves around determining which states each party can pretty much assume they'll win (e.g. Massachusetts for the Democrats, Texas for the Republicans) and which ones are less certain and which might be won if contested closely.
But the parties also tend to divide the overall electorate in other ways, such as along lines of education and employment. Historically the Democrats tended to do much better among industrial workers than they did among professionals, although there were certain sub-categories in each case that were exceptional. It also turns out that there are voting patterns which tend to correlate with age.
And there are voting patterns associated with race and gender. The Democrats have long tried particularly hard to appeal to "minority groups", and in most elections will tend to get the majority of votes cast by Blacks and Hispanics.
But there's one minority where they never do well: white men. Making up just shy of 40% of the voters, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that more white men overall will vote Republican than Democratic. Generally speaking, it's not really so much of question of whether the Democrats can get a majority of White Male votes as of how big the Republican margin will be. If the margin is sufficiently small, the Democrats have a chance of compensating for it with majorities in other demographics. If the margin among White Males is too large, however, then the Democrats will lose.
That's because as a group, White Males are more Jacksonian than any other race/gender demographic.
In the LA Times, Ronald Brownstein writes:
In the modern political era, Democrats never expect to carry white men, who reliably tilt Republican. But the emerging threat to Democrats in 2004 is that Bush will win white men so decisively that the party can't overcome his advantage with other voter groups that lean in their direction, such as minorities and college-educated white women.
Analysts in both parties agree that Bush is benefiting among white men from his aggressive use of force against terrorism and his alternately folksy and blunt "bring 'em on" personal style. Some senior strategists on both sides believe the risk to Democrats with white men could increase if the party nominates Howard Dean, whose opposition to the war, liberal positions on social issues and buttoned-down persona create clear contrasts for Bush.
To a great extent, this is because white men as a group prefer cowboys to metrosexuals.
Bush's strength among white men derives as much from his personal style as his policy choices, most analysts agree. Blunt in his words, comfortable on his ranch, dismissive of ceremony, impatient with diplomacy, Bush fits "an old-fashioned male ideal, deeply embedded in our cultural mythology," said Bill Galston, a former Clinton advisor now at the University of Maryland.
The ideal "is that a real man is a man of few words and determined, resolute action: like in [the movie] 'High Noon.' And Bush captures this almost perfectly and effortlessly."
The president's black-and-white pronouncements on terrorism and war — from his promise to capture Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" to his "bring 'em on" taunt to Iraqi resisters — which generate unease among many women and even some more affluent men, help cement Bush's attachment to blue-collar men, who, recent polls show, support him at higher levels than men with college degrees.
But there are also specific issues which are important here, because as a group white men are far more concerned about national security issues than other race/gender demographic group, with the health of the economy being their second concern.
Bush is benefiting, too, from a political environment focused on terrorism and national security issues that highlight the aspects of his personality that many men like best. Men have traditionally been more inclined than women to support military action, and recent polls show white men significantly more enthusiastic about the decision to invade Iraq than other Americans.
"He kind of runs a testosterone-driven White House, in terms of both the rhetoric and the dominant issue, which is war," said John Anzalone, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster. "It's a natural resonance with men, particularly white men. Usually the only thing that knocks that down for a Democrat is the economy."
So if the nation's economic recovery continues, and if the war continues to go reasonably well, then Bush is likely to get a huge percentage of white male votes next year.
Stanley B. Greenberg, the pollster for Gore in 2000 and Clinton in 1992, agreed. "Younger, married white men are disastrously, overwhelmingly Republican," he said. "They are trending more Republican over time. Everything about George Bush speaks to them."
Recent polls underscore the challenge for Democrats with white men. In an ABC/Washington Post survey released last week, white men preferred Bush over an unnamed Democrat in 2004 by 62% to 29%, a head-turning 33-point margin; by contrast, white women gave Bush just a 10-point lead.
Even a ten point margin among white women is a massive problem, but a 33 point margin among white men is catastrophic for the Democrats. And polls have shown that Bush has a 36 point margin among white men against Howard Dean.
For the Democrats, this represents what looks to be an insurmountable dilemma.
I wrote in October about the way that when the nomination in a party is contested during the primaries, that this forces the candidates to pander to extremist elements of the party, who are far more influential within the primary process than they are during the general election. Since it seems as if the Democratic candidates are most concerned about the so-called "Democratic wing of the Democratic party", they have been delivering a particularly extreme message during their campaigning.
That particular part of the party is the one which is especially leftist, and it holds a group of opinions which are particularly extreme. They were the ones who, after 9/11, tried to get us all to "ask yourselves why they hate you". They opposed war. They favored American submissiveness to the UN and to "multilateralism". And on social issues and domestic policies they basically align pretty closely with European "third-way" socialism. They believe in victimology, and advocate preferential treatment for racial minorities and any other victim group in order to redress past wrongs done to them or to their ancestors.
Who was the do-er of those past wrongs that need to be redressed? If racial minorities get preferential treatment, who becomes unpreferred? White men, that's who. Explicitly or implicitly, their preferred social narrative (or morality play) is that white men are the bad guys, and white men should feel guilt, do penance, and should now be discriminated against in order to make up for earlier times in which they were the beneficiaries of discrimination.
And so it's hardly surprising that the majority of white male voters take a very dim view of any candidate who seems to be pandering to such leftists.
Traditionally, the strategy has been to take extreme positions during the primary process, and to try to move towards the center and to deliver a more moderate message during the general election campaign. But will that work for the Democrats this time? Supporters of Dean think so, but I don't. In October my contention was that barring some major unexpected change in the situation, the Democrats had essentially zero chance of winning the White House next year because it was impossible for them to nominate any candidate who actually had a chance of winning.
There's a natural tendency for leaders to become targets within the party. It's a basic consequence of any kind of zero-sum competition involving multiple parties where only one can win: players who are competing with one another will still cooperate temporarily to take down front-runners.
Consider the card game "Hearts". The game ends when any player's score exceeds 100, at which point the player with the lowest score wins. If the players are skilled, the score at the end is nearly always pretty close because if any one player's score is quite a lot lower, the other players will tend to concentrate on giving that player more hearts, and he becomes the preferred target for the Queen of Spades until he "catches back up".
That's happening now amongst the Democrats. It has always really seemed strange to me that press coverage will include designation of some candidate as the "winner" before any delegates have been chosen, but for a while there when Dean emerged as a front-runner there was at least some coverage I saw which began to imply that it was all in the bag. And as a result the other candidates began to concentrate on Dean, leading to Dean making a rather lame request that everyone cease criticizing one another.
Dean seems to be in the lead, but it is not a very strong lead. The field will get weeded out; that always happens. Usually it's because a candidate who trails badly ceases to be able to raise enough money to stay in the race. But there's a big difference between a 2-person contest and a 6-person contest, and right now I think the latter is more like what we're going to see.
In the general election, the electoral votes of 48 of the 50 states go as a block to the candidate who got the majority in that state. But when it comes to selection of delegates during the primary process, that's not really as true. Most states end up awarding delegates proportional to the number of votes each candidate got. And though Dean right now is the front-runner, it isn't by very much.
That's assuming that "front-runner" means anything before any delegates have been selected. All we really have right now is polls among Democratic voters showing which candidate they think they're more likely to vote for, and Dean has consistently been the most popular choice. But the votes are spread very widely, and there doesn't seem to be any deep consensus forming.
Of course, the numbers vary enormously depending on who is doing the polling, how they're selecting their sample, and how they phrase the question, so it's difficult to be certain what the margin really is. This one from December 14 showed Dean with 18%, and Lieberman second with 12%, Al Sharpton at 10%, and everyone else in single digits. I've seen polls which had Dean as high as 30%, but none have ever come close to giving him an actual majority. And considering the deep divisions within the Democrats right now, it doesn't seem as if that will really change.
So what I'm beginning to consider is the possibility that no single candidate will have the nomination locked up when the Democrats hold their convention in Boston in late July. In such a case, what you will get before and during the convention is maneuvering to try to put together a winning coalition, where some candidates will drop out of the race and support other candidates.
But that's not all that straightforward, because there's a bewildering array of rules out there on how delegates must behave. In some states, the delegates are legally required to vote at the convention for candidates on the basis of the state's primary results. Sometimes they must always vote in that way; in other cases they have to do so for a certain number of ballots and then are cut loose. If they were pledged to a particular candidate, it's not clear that candidate has the ability to transfer them to someone else. (In at least a few cases they explicitly do not.)
And not every delegate is selected by primaries or caucuses. The majority are, but there are also a pretty considerable number of party wheel-horses who become delegates automatically without necessarily representing any state or being aligned with any faction within the party. If going into the convention no single candidate is close to having a majority of delegates, anything could happen.
In fact, in the case of deadlock, they might well be forced to give up on all the candidates entirely and draft someone else to unify the party. (Such as a white woman senator from New York.)
Ultimately I don't think it will matter. Regardless of which candidate ultimately prevails at the convention, this would mean that the intraparty sniping would continue until early August. The winner would then have 3 months to try to heal the divisions inside the party and unify it behind him (or her), while also trying to moderate the party's message enough to have a chance of appealing to the unaligned middle of the American voters who would be repelled by the extreme messages which had dominated party rhetoric before the convention.
Meanwhile, Bush is not facing any significant opposition for renomination within the Republican party. He'll do some campaigning during the primary process, but since he is already certain to be the Republican candidate he will campaign for the November election. Instead of tuning his message for the Republican faithful, it will be aimed right at the unaligned middle. It may not even be necessary for him to engage in negative campaigning about the Democrats, because they'll do him the favor of taking care of it themselves as the Democratic candidates continue sniping at each other.
As long as the Democratic nomination is still in doubt, Democratic candidates won't be able to begin to moderate their message so as to begin to appeal to centrist voters. And by early August, the centrist consensus may end up as "A plague on all their houses" -- especially among white men, who are especially repelled by rhetoric which appeals to the Berkeley-left inside the Democratic party.
It's becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that unless something extraordinary and unexpected happens between now and then, the Democrats are inevitably going to crash and burn most spectacularly next year. |
