According to Pew Research, Mitt Romney is the most unpopular presidential candidate we’ve seen going back to at least 1988. He’s more unpopular than Poppy Bush and Bob Dole were the month before they went down to resounding defeat. Only 18% of undecided voters have a favorable view of Romney. It’s incredible.
But, you know, the real story, according to Politico is that the president is weak in the Deep South, especially among white working class voters. There’s a story there, don’t get me wrong, but there is also a story in New England. What’s more surprising? That a black man from Hawaii, New York, Boston, and Chicago is unpopular in the rural South, or that a Yankee businessman can’t even compete in New Hampshire?
Why do working class white dudes have a problem with the Democratic Party? Why do they prefer to watch Fox News? I don’t really know if there is a simple answer to those questions. I don’t think it matters a whole lot. It’s a shame that Democrats are having a rough time in Appalachia and throughout the Deep South, but it is the Republican Party that is discovering that they can’t find a road to 270 electoral votes anymore. It used to be that the Democrats had a lock-hold on Congress but struggled to win the White House. Things have turned around now. The Dems will struggle to control the House as long as they can’t make some inroads in the South, but they’ve got a lock on the White House for the foreseeable future.
2010 was horrible from the standpoint of retaking the House, since it allowed the GOP to be in charge of too much of the redistricting. Fortunately (?), Tom Delay set the precedent of mid-decade redistricting so the Dems could presumably fix that if they manage to take back the state legislatures and governorships. I don’t know how feasible that might be in actual practice. I think the House remains a possibility, especially if Romney implodes, but it looks to be difficult.
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I was missing a quotation mark. Fixed now.
Your overconfidence is showing, and not just you but lots of pro-Obama bloggers. Since I’m a contrarian, that makes me worried that we’re going to see a media trend change and that for the next month we’ll see a lot of pro-Romney anti-Obama news…
that makes me worried that we’re going to see a media trend change and that for the next month we’ll see a lot of pro-Romney anti-Obama news…
This is a change?
Well there’s been a lot of anti-Romney news of late…the international trip mess, taxes, etc.
No candidate in history has handled the press covering him worse than Romney. They have absolutely no reason to say one positive thing about him, and they won’t.
.
This will be fun! Moving from one disaster to the next …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Does he even give them booze and food on the plane? You can treat the press like dog crap, but give them food and booze and they’ll love you for it(see W.). Heck, I really don’t think Cranky McSame respected the press. He just knew how to play them like Neil Peart plays the drums.
Kiss my ass – this is a holy site!
Romney needs a perfect storm. It’s not impossible, but even a strong Republican candidate is going to struggle to win with the emerging demographics of the country. If Romney starts showing strength in Virginia and Colorado, we can start talking. As long as those states remain demographically beyond his reach, only seriously outperforming Obama can save him. He has an 18% favorability rating with undecided voters. Obama is not all that much better, but the people who will decide this election actively hate Mitt Romney. And it’s not just because he’s Mitt Romney.
Ok, agreed.
From the Politico article, which you have to look for until BooMan’s phalanx of scantily-clad interns fix the link:
I don’t think that’s the right division. There is the Atlantic South – Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida – and there is the Interior South. Barack Obama got 47% of the vote in Georgia in 2008. He even got 44.9% in South Carolina, his weakest Atlantic South state.
Compare that to Alabama (38.8), Mississippi (42.8), Louisiana (39.9), Arkansas (38.8), and Tennessee (41.8).
Also, take the mountain counties out of Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, and Obama is way ahead.
Or, leave them in and project 5-10 years ahead. With current demographic trends and voting patterns in those states, NC and VA will move from purple to blue while GA becomes a swing state.
As a Georgia resident below Atlanta, you got that right about the mountain counties. My hubby wants to buy a retirement home there. The views are pretty, but the citizens are way way reactionary.
On another note, not easy to overemphasize exactly how disastrous the 2010 election was for the Democratic party in this state. We lost every single state wide office there is. The balance is so skewed right that after 2010 the GOP started showing signs of intra- party divisiveness. That’s been the only positive thing about what happened. THERE is one Democrat on the November ballot and that’s for a seat on the Public Service Commission. On a good note, the state Dem party, in their own words, is leaner and meaner, and they actually defeated a turncoat Dem to GOP’er from the Athens area by getting folks to vote on the Republican ballot in last Tuesday’s primary. The young turncoat was instrumental in authoring the restrictive no abortions after 20 weeks bill which is now law.
at this point we probably need to include West Virginia in the interior south as well
Naw, upper Appalachia. West Virginia doesn’t have squat for a minority population (unlike the South), and the white working class there are not as broadly hostile to Democrats as a whole as in the Interior South.
Kevin Phillips suggests this a tribal divide between lowland English and upcountry Scotch-Irish. Maybe there is some historical truth there, the low country vote was always more amenable to the GOP. Perhaps the divide is economic as much as cultural. Lowland monoculture and coastal trade has always generated more local wealth than resource extraction in Appalachia.
Why do working class white dudes have a problem with the Democratic Party?
I think we all know why, besides race. The Democratic Party stopped fighting for the working man on economic issues.
If yours was the correct answer, then we would expect Democrats in the South who run on strong pro-union platforms to do well there, or at least, to do better than those Democrats who do not.
This is not the case.
If yours was the correct answer, then we would expect Democrats in the South who run on strong pro-union platforms to do well there, …
And how many of them actually run on that? None! Find me one. Most of the Representatives(meaning the white ones) from Dixie are DINO’s(aka Blue Dogs).
Alan Grayson. Also every member if the Congressional Black Caucus.
Well, OK, but these are not candidates who do well among the white working class in the South.
And how many of them actually run on that? None! Find me one.
You do realize that you are providing evidence for my point, right?
You can’t think of a single professional, career politician who wants to win office and has pursued it by running on a pro-labor, pro-union platform in the South. Some might interpret this as evidence that such a platform is a massive political loser.
Joe, it can be done. You have to wrap it up in progressiveism, sell it as race neutral, and scream out on class warfare. But it CAN be done.
Professional politicians don’t think that way. That way is burned earth. But it does work.
None of the successful politicians do this. The politicians who try to do this are not successful.
I hope you’re right, but I fear I’m right.
You can’t think of a single professional, career politician who wants to win office and has pursued it by running on a pro-labor, pro-union platform in the South. Some might interpret this as evidence that such a platform is a massive political loser.
As I said, I’m not talking about the John Lewis’. I’m talking about the kind of districts represented by John Barrow, or formerly represented by idiots like Gene Taylor. Before redistricting, Barrow represented a district that had a Democratic lean. And yes, there is Alan Grayson, if Florida is considered part of what we consider the Deep South. And I am talking about nominees. Because we know the DCCC recruits the most conservative candidate possible.
A dynamic analysis would be that the Democratic Party stopped fighting exclusively for white working class men. Those men then turned to the GOP that blamed the downwardly mobile plight for white working class men on minorities, women, liberals, etc. and stuffed them with the fiction that white guys would rule again once they decimated their “enemies.” The worse it gets for those white guys, the more they cling to the illusions and ignore the fact that there has been very little liberal legislation in the past fifty years and heaps of regressive/corporate crap served up by the Republicans they keep voting into office. It’s as if Archie Bunker was their role model and never noticed that their living wage jobs have been outsourced by the capitalists they praise.
By not fighting for the working man, I mean things like NAFTA. That’s not a race issue. I’ll give you another example. Back during the Teahadist hey-day when they were attacking Democratic Reps at town halls, a video came out. A loopy constituent questioned Gene Taylor(a corrupt Blue Dog) on what turned out to be the PPACA(aka ObamaCare). What do you think Taylor did? Dipshit didn’t correct any of the O’Reilly/Limbaugh/Beck bullcrap the constituent was spewing. And people wonder why I despise Blue Dogs like that. Stuff like that is why Democrats are doomed in the South. Taylor didn’t even have the guts to point out the good parts of the PPACA.
NAFTA would have been a moment to rediscover the Democratic Party’s New Deal, working class roots. However, by then, the working class white guy had been gone for a quarter century and the Democratic Party elite were into “socially liberalish” and economically regressive. A formulation that diehard Democratic party partisans like and gags democratic socialists. They still swoon over Bill Clinton (and I have nothing kind to say about Hillary).
Blue Dogs simply skip the “socially liberalish” part of the official DEM Party corporate/militant consensus for the consumption of their more retrograde constituents. Details aren’t effective in mitigating an emotional response. Consider how many Americans today cling to the notion that they are middle class even as their financial well being and security has declined over the decades for one reason: they have health insurance. Health insurance that they may have secured or retained because they accepted or stayed in jobs they dislike and/or saw more and more of their income going to pay for it. Then all of a sudden those that from their perspective didn’t do the right things to deserve health insurance are being given a big handout. Easy to stoke anger and resentment in such a situation.
What we need is a political party devoted to the plight of the hard working white man, and his resentment of those who are leeching off of his hard work…sounds familiar…
From the article:
Not true. Here’s a very plausible map that has Obama winning 290 votes without any of those states:
http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=pHf
I could probably make more combinations that would work if I had more time, but this is the first that came to mind.
these are the folks who vote against their own economic best interest..
they’re clinging to that WHITENESS, BooMan.
and, I, for one, could care less.
if they wanna cling to it…so be it.
It will be quite something if Obama wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote.
Why? bush did it.
It would be justice for 2000. I will laugh uproariously if that were to happen.
Me, too!
But when I’m done, I will very solemnly shake my head and agree with the howling Republicans that something awful has just happened, and we need to fix the corrupt system that allowed it to transpire.
Obama had the simple answer before he was persuaded to waffle: guns, God, and gays. Add race and there ya go.