El papel de la raza en las elecciones

por **Charlie319** Dom Nov 04, 2012 1:59 pm

Es interesante que se habla mucho de que la gente blanca vote por Mitt Romney... Aun cuando se conoce que el 96% de los votantes afro-americanos y el 70 % de los hispanos van a votar con Obama en proporciones muy por encima de sus cifras historicas. Hoy, tras leer algo sobre el tema, decidi postear este articulo: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/scocca/2012/11/mitt_romney_white_vote_parsing_the_narrow_tribal_appeal_of_the_republican.html?google_editors_picks=true

Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?
Parsing the narrow, tribal appeal of the Republican nominee.
By Tom Scocca|Posted Friday, Nov. 2, 2012, at 4:56 PM ET

I'm voting for Barack Obama on Election Day. This fact will appear on Slate's list of which candidates its writers are voting for, a list which will almost certainly look like the 2008 list, which is to say an almost unbroken string of "Obama." People will look at this list—Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama—and they will say, Look at the Slate writers, inside their bubble.

And they will be wrong. There is a real, airtight bubble in this election, but it's not Obama's. As a middle-aged white man, in fact, I'm breaching it. White people—white men in particular—are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense, in defiance of normal Americans. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney's candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him.

This fact is obfuscated because white people control the political media. So we get the Washington Post reporting that the election is "more polarized along racial lines than any other contest since 1988":

Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points, trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37 percent among whites, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That presents a significant hurdle for the president—and suggests that he will need to achieve even larger margins of victory among women and minorities, two important parts of the Democratic base, to win reelection.

That's not polarized. Polarization would mean that various races were mutually pulling apart, toward their favored candidates. "Minorities" is not a race (nor, you may have noticed, is "women"). Minorities and women are the people standing still, while white men run away from them.

What is it with these white men? What are they seeing that ordinary people don't see? What accounts for this ... secession of theirs, from the rest of America? John Sununu, Romney's campaign co-chair, responded to Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama by saying, "I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States—I applaud Colin for standing with him."

Sununu was trying to be snide. But there he is, standing with Mitt Romney. Just like Donald Trump and Clint Eastwood and Buzz Bissinger and Meat Loaf—one aging white man after another. It's a study in identity politics.

White people don't like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American default.

Yet Mitt Romney's election strategy depends on the notion that the white vote is separate from the rest of the vote, and can be captured as such. Back in August, National Journal ran a report on campaign math headlined "Obama Needs 80% of Minority Vote to Win 2012 Presidential Election":

Romney’s camp is focused intently on capturing at least 61 percent of white voters. That would provide him a slim national majority—so long as whites constitute at least 74 percent of the vote, as they did last time, and Obama doesn’t improve on his 80 percent showing with minorities.

Again, why are "minorities" treated as a bloc here? The story mentions no particular plan by the Obama campaign to capture the nonwhite vote. Instead, it discusses how the Romney forces hope to get a bigger share of white voters than John McCain did—by "stressing the increased federal debt" and attacking "Obama's record on spending and welfare."

Welfare, yes. Let's come back to "welfare." But first, how's the strategy been doing? A recent ABC/Washington Post poll found Romney leading Obama 65-32 among white men and 53-44 among white women, giving him a 59 percent share of the white vote overall—"a new high," and closing in on that 60 percent target.

This has been the foundation of Republican presidential politics for more than four decades, since Richard Nixon courted and won the votes of Southerners who'd turned against the Democratic Party because of integration and civil rights. The Party of Lincoln became the party of Lincoln's assassins, leveraging white anger into a regional advantage and eventually a regional monopoly. It's all very basic and old news, but it's still considered rude to say so, even as Republican strategists talk about winning the white voters and only the white voters.

And so we have two elections going on. In one, President Obama is running for re-election after a difficult but largely competent first term, in which the multiple economic and foreign-policy disasters of four years ago have at least settled down into being ongoing economic and foreign-policy problems. A national health care reform bill got passed, and two reasonable justices were appointed to the Supreme Court. Presidents have done worse in their first terms. In my lifetime—which began under the first term of an outright thug and war criminal—I'm not sure any presidents have done better. (The senile demagogue? The craven panderer? The ex-CIA director?)

In the other election, the election scripted for white voters—honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the story is. Republican campaigns have been using dog-whistle signals for so long that they seem to have forgotten how to make sounds in normal human hearing range. Mitt Romney appears to be running on the message that first of all, Obama hasn't accomplished anything, and second of all, he's going to repeal all the bad things that Obama has accomplished. And then Romney himself, as a practical businessman, is going to ... something something, small business, something, restore America, growth and jobs, tax cuts, something. It's a negative campaign in the pictorial sense: a blank space where the objects would go. A white space, if you will.

The passion comes from what Romney is running against. For more than four years, without pause, Republicans have been campaigning and propagandizing against an imaginary Obama. At the most grotesque end of the fantasies, he is a foreign-born, anti-colonialist Muslim. In more reputable precincts, he is a power-mad socialist and a dumb affirmative-action baby, promoted all the way to the presidency by a race-crazed, condescending liberal elite. (As if the presidency of the Harvard Law Review were awarded to anyone but the hungriest shark in the shark tank.) This is the position of the party's mandarins and reputable spinners—that Obama was foisted off on regular Americans against their will, despite all those votes last time around.

Hence the baiting of Obama, throughout his term, for supposedly being unable to speak without a teleprompter. Republicans predicted, over and over, that the president would be exposed and humiliated in face-to-face debate with an opponent (Newt Gingrich especially fantasized about being that foe). Eventually this led to Clint Eastwood haranguing the empty chair. And then in the first presidential debate, Obama was slack and ineffectual against a sharp Romney. See? It was true!

And then Obama shredded Romney in the second debate, and kept cuffing him around in the third. Now Romney was the deflating balloon, wild-eyed and babbling and licking his dry mouth in desperation. From which Peggy Noonan—whose proudest credential is having written the scripts for a Republican president who couldn't function without being fed his lines—concluded in the Wall Street Journal that the only meaningful debate was the first one.

"Nothing echoes out like that debate," Noonan wrote, creating her own echoes. The president was "Petulant, put upon, above it all, full of himself." Full of himself. "[H]is failure seemed to underscore the cliché that the prompter is a kind of umbilical cord for him." ("He is not by any means a stupid man," she added.)

It's a strange, inverted world, the white-people's bubble, full of phantoms and rumors. Candidates are at the mercy of voter fraud, or the "urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine," according to the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio’s Franklin County. (Voter turnout is a bad thing.) Jobs numbers are being fudged. Polls are being skewed. The liberal media are trying to hide how popular Mitt Romney is.

So it was that Romney, speaking to ultra-wealthy supporters in what might have been the Whitest Room in America, ventured a joke about his father's birth in Mexico: "And had he been born of Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot at winning this, but he was [audience laughs] unfortunately born of Americans living in Mexico." Note that "Americans" is a synonym for "whites," here. Note also that a room full of millionaires—a minority group that has dominated presidential politics in recent decades—believes that the true political advantage in this country belongs to children of Mexican immigrants.

If there's one thing white people have learned from decades of being targeted by campaigns, it's that someone, somewhere, is trying to cheat them. This is the idea behind Romney's 47 percent remarks in that appearance—America is divided between regular, productive folks and the people who are victimizing them.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Here, Romney is speaking fluent White. In white people's political English, "personal responsibility" is the opposite of "handouts," "food stamps," and particularly "welfare," all of which are synonyms for "niggers." This was Ronald Reagan's rallying cry, and it was the defining issue for traumatized post-Reagan white Democrats. Like George Wallace vowing not to be out-niggered again, the Democratic Leadership Council and the New Republic and Bill Clinton made Ending Welfare as We Know It the policy centerpiece of the 1990s.

The actual policy never mattered. Now the Romney campaign is running ads in Ohio saying that Obama "gutted the work requirement for welfare" and "doubled the number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps." In mixed company, Romney glosses the food-stamp lines as concern about the country's economic status, but that's not why "work requirement" and "able-bodied" are in there. It's the rusty old Confederate bugle, blown one more time.

At the end of the National Journal piece about Romney's white-vote goals, a Republican strategist acknowledged the campaign was hanging its hopes at a shrinking target: "This is the last time anyone will try to do this." This is a demographic proposition rather than a moral one: The GOP will end its get-out-the-white-vote strategy whenever it stops working. Maybe, with luck, this will be the final sounding of that bugle.

por **Charlie319** Dom Nov 04, 2012 2:22 pm

Este articulo no solo explica el 96% del voto afroamericano... Sino que cuestiona el por que del mismo. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/03/obama-african-americans-paradox
Barack Obama and the paradox behind his African American support base

The ascent of the first black president has coincided with a steep descent in the economic fortunes of black Americans. But that hasn't impeded their outward optimism about Obama

When Barack Obama was contemplating a run for the White House his wife, Michelle, asked him what he thought he could accomplish if he won. "The day I take the oath of office," he replied. "The world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently. That alone is something."

Four months after he was sworn in, at least one kid saw himself differently. It was May 2009 and 5-year-old Jacob Philadelphia had gone with his dad, a black ex-marine, to the Oval Office for a family photograph with the president.

With him were his mum, Roseanne, and his older brother, Isaac, 8. The boys were allowed to ask Obama one question each. The parents had no idea what they were going to say. Isaac asked why the president had got rid of the F-22 jet fighter. The president said because it cost too much. Jacob asked:

"I want to know if my hair is just like yours."

He was so quiet, Obama asked him to repeat the question. Jacob obliged.

Obama said: "Why don't you touch it and see for yourself?"

He bent down lowered his head so that it was within Jacob's reach.

Jacob paused. The president prompted. "Touch it, dude!" he said

Jacob reached out and rubbed the presidential pate.

"So, what do you think?" Mr Obama asked.

"Yes, it does feel the same," Jacob said.

The White House photographer snapped the moment. "Every couple of weeks the White House photographers change out the photos in the West Wing," Michelle Obama said at a fundraiser in September. "Except for that one. So if you ever wonder whether change is possible, I want you think of that little black boy in the Oval Office of the White House touching the head of the first black president."

The symbolic resonance of Obama's victory for black Americans has not diminished. At rallies the hawkers are still there with T-shirts setting him alongside Martin Luther King, setting his logo within Superman's crest or insisting: "I like my coffee black. Like my president". According to Gallup 90% of African Americans intend to back him and they plan to turn out at the same rate as white voters. No other block of voters is more loyal.

No other block of voters is more optimistic. Over the past few years polls have consistently shown that African Americans are more likely than any other group to be bullish about their own future, to think the country's best days are yet to come and that the economy is already recovering.

A Pew survey in January 2010 indicated that the percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off than they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007. There were also significant increases in the percentages who believed the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was decreasing. No wonder they love the president.

There was only one trouble with these assessments. They weren't true. African Americans, as a group, are far worse off now than they were when Obama came to power and the gap between whites and blacks in terms of wealth and income has increased under Obama's tenure. The overall rate of unemployment may be close to where it was when Obama took office, but black unemployment is up 11%. Meanwhile the wealth gap has doubled during this recession with the average white American now having 22 times more wealth than their black counterparts. So too has the educational achievement gap with the rate at which white Americans graduate from high school growing at a far faster clip than black students.

"We haven't seen much of the stimulus trickle down to our people here," Mark Allen, a Chicago-based community organiser who used to work alongside Obama, told the Washington Post. "I liked the community organiser Obama better than President Obama … Democrats say Barack has got 90% or whatever of the black vote wrapped up. What they don't tell you is it's 90% of those who actually come out and vote. What if it's 90% of just 30 or 40% who vote?"

In short, Jacob's odds of getting a decent job when he gets older actually got worse since he felt the president's hair, while the gap between his life chances and his white schoolmates widened and his odds of going to prison remained pretty much the same. In empirical terms "the change that [has been] possible" for Jacob and his family under Obama has been change for the worse. One can argue about the cause of those changes and the degree to which Obama bears any responsibility for either creating them or fixing them. But one cannot argue about the fact of them: the ascent of America's first black president has coincided with the one of the steepest descents of the economic fortunes of black Americans since the second world war both in real terms and relative to whites.

Herein lies the dual paradox. The group that has fared worse under Obama is not only the group most likely to support him but also the most likely to feel optimistic about the deteriorating situation in which they find themselves. And why has that loyalty to the president yet to be fully tested? What do they know that the numbers don't show?

Discussing this dilemma within the black community can be tantamount to heresy. Wagons circle, messengers are shot, ranks close, critical faculties are suspended. "Too many black intellectuals have given up the hard work of thinking carefully in public about the crisis facing black America," Princeton professor Eddie Glaude told fellow academic Fred Harris recently. "We have either become cheerleaders for President Obama or self-serving pundits." Not only are criticisms shunned but even constructive critiques are unwelcome. At times it seems like questions as to how his tenure has affected black communities either should not be asked or, at the very least, should not be answered honestly.

"I have friends," says Virginia state delegate, Onzlee Ware from Roanoke, who is an ardent Obama supporter, "who, if I bring [his shortcomings] up as an intellectual conversation, they say I'm a traitor."

There are some sound reasons for this. The first is the overt racism that Obama has faced from a significant portion both of the political class and the public as a whole. There are plenty of reasons why one might oppose Obama that have nothing to do with race. When you look at how the things they accused the Clintons of – killing people, smuggling drugs from abroad, embezzling – the Obama's are not unique in being the targets of a right wing hyper-caffeinated lie machine.

Nonetheless, the nature of these particular lies and attacks have, as often as not, been rooted in race. Half of white Americans in one Pew survey shared the birthers' doubt that Obama was born in this country. The percentage of Americans who believed he is a Muslim has doubled since he took office. After the president produced his long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump demanded his college transcripts (claiming he was not smart enough to get into an Ivy League school). Newt Gingrich branded him the "food stamp president". Southern congressmen shout "liar" while he's speaking, Romney surrogates question his connection to "Anglo-Saxon values".

Far from his election signalling a post-racial era of equality it has exposed and unleashed a visceral level of intolerance that has produced the most racially polarised electorate for at least a generation. Having alienated blacks and Latinos, a recent poll revealed that Romney's support is 91% white – that's a higher proportion than any candidate since Bush's father stood in 1988 and may yet surpass it.

Meanwhile a recent AP poll revealed that, if anything, racist attitudes have hardened in the country since Obama's election. The poll showed that "51% of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48% in a similar 2008 survey". The proportion who express anti-Hispanic feelings is roughly the same. That's within the margin of error. But what's clear is that it's not going down. Anyone who seriously believes Obama's election ushered in a new period of racial harmony simply hasn't been paying attention.

In this atmosphere many African Americans become understandably defensive. Under such sustained racial onslaught the space for free-wheeling conversation and constructive criticism becomes limited because the issue has shifted from what Obama has done to who he is. Given the nature of the attacks the need to defend Obama's right to be in office at all eclipses any more nuanced conversation about his actual record.

Moreover much of the criticism Obama has faced from the black community has been either ridiculous or self-defeating. Last year former Princeton professor Cornel West led a well-publicised assault insisting that Obama has "a certain fear of free black men".

"It's understandable," he said. "As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening ... He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable."

Essentialising Obama's racial and cultural makeup in such a way makes the very mistake that the right makes – assessing Obama not on what he does but by who he is.

It also harps back to an era of black political leadership, where black politicians emerged from the church or historically black colleges, and fought not to win office outside the black community (white people wouldn't vote for them) but to put the needs of that community on the agenda. There was, in a previous generation, a sense of ownership that black communities had over their politicians that no longer exists. This is partly progress. Ivy League universities will admit them, corporations will hire them, funds will come to them, white people will now vote for them. A whole range of opportunities are open to politicians of Obama's generation that were created by Cornel West's generation.

But that, in turn, has changed what it means to be a black politician and what, if anything, we mean when we talk about black politics. Unlike, say, Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King, Obama was not politically produced by the black community, but presented to it after he had made his way through the mostly white elites. His political ties to the black community are not organic but symbolic. His arrival in the political class is hailed as the progress of a community when in fact it is the advancement of an individual.

"[Obama] is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness," Angela Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told me in late 2007. "It's the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That's what makes him conceivable as a presidential candidate. He's become the model of diversity in this period … a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference. The change that brings no change."

That is why criticisms of him for "not doing enough for his own people" both miss and devalue the point. The demand to close the racial gaps bequeathed by centuries of discrimination is not a sectional interest but a national one. Demands for equality and racial justice should be made to any president of whatever race or party.

Obama should do more for black people – not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama – not because they're black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and centre and if black people aren't going to apply that pressure then nobody else will.

But in fact precisely the opposite has been happening. With Obama in the White House African Americans representatives have been backpedalling. Black politicians, too, have held their fire.

"With 14% unemployment, if we had a white president we'd be marching around the White House," said the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), Emmanuel Cleaver. "The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn't to someone white." That's pathetic and counterproductive. These are the very people who are now showing up with empty hands and trying to galvanise the black community to go to the polls.

Their reticence is partly explained by the fear of a backlash. "If we go after the president too hard, you're going after us," Maxine Waters, a California Democrat in the House, told a largely black audience in Detroit last year. But then that's what leadership is about. Explaining to those audiences that there are large numbers of people lobbying for Obama's attention, including people with huge amounts of money and power. If the black community wants it they must demand it.

Some have spoken out. In August after a month-long round of job fairs organised by the CBC across the nation John Conyers, the longest serving black American in Congress said. "We want [Obama] to know from this day forward that we've had it. We want him to come out on our side and advocate, and not to watch and wait … We're suffering." Unfortunately it was followed by little in the way of action.

In the absence of that pressure Obama has felt little need to focus his attention on the problem, even rhetorically. In his first two years in office he talked about race less than any Democratic president since 1961. In all of his state of the union speeches he mentioned poverty just three times: last year's was the first since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor at all. When he did talk about it it was to preach better parenting, healthy meals and greater discipline.

At a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in September he told his former colleagues: "Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying." Compare that to the meeting he had with bankers not long after he was elected when they thought he was going to impose serious regulation. "I'm the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks. I'm not out there to go after you," he told them. "I'm protecting you."

This would not be the first time that the black Americans have shown great loyalty to a Democratic president who did not return the favour. Bill Clinton is still revered even though when he ran in 1992 he made a special trip back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector – a black, lobotomised inmate so mentally incapacitated that when given his last meal, he opted to save the dessert for after the execution. When in power he signed off on a welfare reform that would prove devastating to large numbers of black families, especially women. He presided over an economic boom Obama does not even have that.

It may be in this mixture of realism and low expectations that one can understand where logic of optimism in harder times. That black Americans are doing worse than everyone else, and that the man they elected to turn that around has not done so, does not fundamentally change their view of how American politics works; almost every other Democratic president has failed in a similar way while Republicans have not even tried to succeed.

Conversely the fact that a black man might be elected president, that enough white people might vote for him and that nobody has shot him, really has changed their assumptions about what is possible. Jacob's story from the Oval Office is new and inspiring; the story of his odds of success beyond that moment are wearily familiar.

The day Obama took office, the world may have looked at black America differently, but black America has yet to look at Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement: power. As Frederick Douglass said: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

por **Charlie319** Mar Nov 06, 2012 12:26 am

Es interesante que cuando los votos etnicos se aglutinan a favor del candidato que trae embelesada a la prensa, es bueno... Pero cuando se aglutinan del bando del conservador se empieza a usar el idioma de la negatividad. este es el fenomeno de etnomasoquismo. Ciertamente el voto "Latino" es mas fragmentado no solo a lo alrgo de los intereses de las diferentes nacionalidades, sino de los sub-grupos que incluyen a los indigenas y los criollos o mestizos que vienen a el pais sin papeles y tras tener prole aqui persisten par de decadas para poder arreglar papeles.

Polls point to a racially polarized electorate

By Hector Becerra

November 1, 2012, 6:05 a.m.
When election night is over, a strong majority of either whites or blacks and Latinos who cast ballots will be disappointed, according to numerous polls.
This year’s presidential election is shaping up to have possibly the nation’s most racially polarized electorate ever. More than three-quarters of blacks and Latinos support President Obama’s reelection. And a growing majority of whites are expected to vote for Mitt Romney.

A Washington Post-ABC national poll found that 60% of whites could vote for Romney with only about 37% supporting Obama. Meanwhile, several polls show Obama garnering about 75% of the Latino vote and more than 95% of the black vote.

Many experts say that if black and especially Latino voters turn out in large numbers, Obama probably will win. But Romney likely will win if he captures the white vote by the large margin and either the Latino or black turnout is low. The Romney campaign’s internal goal is to get at least 61% of the white vote. Obama needs to get about 80% of the minority vote, which seems plausible. But he also needs a significant turnout of blacks and Latinos, which isn’t as certain.

Latino turnout in particular historically lags behind black and white turnout, though Latinos are the fastest-growing part of the American electorate. The widening margins of support for each political party among these groups could have repercussions beyond 2012, prompting both Republicans and Democrats to recalibrate their messages to at least stop the bleeding.

Four years ago, Obama lost the white vote to John McCain by 12 percentage points. About 90% of the voters who cast ballots for the Arizona senator were white. But Obama is poised to lose the white vote by more than 20 points this year. It’s a reversal for a candidate who actually did better among white voters in 2008 than John F. Kerry did four years before. Now Obama’s support is even dimmer than the 41% Kerry got in 2004, and it is especially grim among white males and whites without college degrees.

Mike Madrid, a Republican campaign consultant in Sacramento, said this election would essentially come down to the margin of support each party gets from these racial and ethnic blocs, and their respective turnout on Tuesday.

“This is the most racially polarized voting in a contest for the president of the United States,” he said.

Although the Latino vote has been more elastic than the black vote — with more than 40% voting to reelect President George W. Bush in 2004 — both groups have long voted strongly Democratic. But Madrid said polls suggest the white vote has consolidated to an unusual degree.

“Presidential elections have always been about how the white vote breaks,” he said. “This is fundamentally different.… The outcome of the presidential contest is no longer just about how the white vote breaks, but by how many Hispanics and blacks turn out against the white vote, which is troubling.”

A recent Associated Press poll found that more Americans — now a slight majority of 51% — express prejudice toward blacks than in 2008. But Madrid says he thinks the economy’s continued struggle is the main reason that more white voters in Rust Belt and others states in particular are planning to vote against Obama, coalescing with the overwhelmingly white Republican base in Southern states.

“There’s a shift happening in these quote-unquote moderate battleground states,” Madrid said.

David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, D.C., said demographic shifts favor the Democrats in the near future, particularly the rapid growth of a largely younger Latino electorate and a shrinking older and white electorate.

“The Republican Party can’t continue to be the party of the white southern conservatives or they’ll die off or become a regional party,” he said. “They are going to have to change.”

Bositis said that while many Latinos harbor conservative beliefs and often feel strongly about securing the border, the tenor of some of the rhetoric against illegal immigrants or against the poor has turned off many Latinos — who remain a largely working-class group. In a speech to donors near Boca Raton, Fla., Romney said that if Latinos ever began to support Democrats at the same level as blacks do, “why, we’re in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation.”

While such a strong level of support for Democrats among Latinos is unlikely, Bositis says the simple fact that this group is growing quickly means Republican presidential candidates can’t keep losing this vote by such huge margins. In the short term though, Obama’s anemic support among white voters could doom his changes of being reelected. The last time a Democrat polled as badly among whites was in 1988, when George H.W. Bush got 59% of the white vote compared with only 40% for Michael S. Dukakis.

Bositis said racial animus undoubtedly played a role in why some white voters would cast ballots against Obama, but so did dissatisfaction with the state of the economy. He also pointed out that Obama is the first Democratic president since John F. Kennedy who wasn’t from the South, probably costing him some support in Southern states.

But while Obama has slipped among white voters, the Romney campaign has been unable to make significant advances with the Latino and black vote.

Beyond Tuesday’s election, the steady increase in Latino voters will force the Republican Party to do a much stronger outreach to at least close the gap of the Democrats' advantage. The Asian vote is also more Democratic than in the past, though Bositis points out that the largest concentrations of Asians are in states like California and New York, which are not battlegrounds.

Madrid, the Republican consultant, said there are opportunities for the Republican Party to nab a larger percentage of the Latino vote, something GOP leaders like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Karl Rove and most recently conservative anti-tax activist Grover Norquist have argued. And it will be important that the party pursue that because the Latino population is growing in swing states that could decide who wins the presidency for elections to come.

“There’s no more time left demographically to be tinkering at the margins, doing window dressing like they have for 20 years,” Madrid said. “That’s not going to work anymore.”

hector.becerra@latimes.

La solucion al problema de la balkanizacion del pais y el voto es sencilla. Hay que reducir la probabilidad de que los esfuerzos de las elites de crear una nueva nacion dentro de los EEUU, una nacion que obedece mas los intereses de las tribus etnicas y del interes propio e individual mas que a los intereses nacionales. Esto se lograria haciendo valer las leyes de migracion y deportando a todos y cada uno de los individuos que se hayan presentes en el territorio ilegalmente. De esa manera el voto hispano se vera reducido a los que lleguen legalmente y no a aqullos que consideren los intereses de otro soberano antes de votar aqui.

por Contenido patrocinado

El papel de la raza en las elecciones

El papel de la raza en las elecciones

Re: El papel de la raza en las elecciones

Interesante columna del LA Times... Pero no dicen mucho del 96%

Re: El papel de la raza en las elecciones