Friday, November 10, 2006

Emerging Majority/Perot Voters

While I don't agree with most of what John Judis has to say; after all he is a very liberal (former socialist) and partisan Democrat who predicted incorrectly in 2000 that there would be an emerging Democratic majority in this country http://www.emergingdemocraticmajority.com/edm/chapter1.cfm
he agrees with me (and most analysts are now concluding) so he can't be that bad:-) that it was the Perot/Reagan Democrats who switched in this election and gave Democrats the victory.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061120&s=judis112006
"Perot, of course, vanished from the scene after attempting a repeat performance in 1996. But the constituency he had spoken for remained and even grew. In 1996, Clinton and the Democrats won back many of these voters, but, after September 11, they gravitated toward the Republican Party, helping to account for Republican success in 2002 and 2004. In this election, however, independents flocked back to the Democrats. Nationally, the Democrats won independents by 57 percent to 39 percent. In the East, the margin was 63 to 33 percent; in the Midwest, 56 to 41 percent; and, in the West, 58 to 35 percent. Democrats also did well in many of those Western and Midwestern states where Perot had won over 20 percent of the vote in 1992: Arizona, Colorado, Kansas (where the Democrats won two of four House seats and the top state offices), Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
The Democrats also made gains amo
ng a critical subgroup of independents--the white working-class voters known as Reagan Democrats. In the Midwest, Democrats won these voters (most clearly identifiable in the polls as voters with "some college") by 50 to 49 percent. White working-class support accounted, among other things, for Democratic victories over Republican incumbents in three predominately white downscale Indiana congressional districts that had backed Bush in 2000 and 2004."

Just to poke a little fun at him, notice his book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority" is conspicuously absent from this tnr bio http://www.tnr.com/showBio.mhtml?pid=26
I suspect that he will now start touting his analysis again and claim that 2000-2006 was just a hiccup along the way. He seems to be doing that in this article by citing 9/11 as opposed to Democratic policies that ruined the "Democrats emerging majority".

I am of the opinion that Republicans and not Democrats have the better chance of being the majority party, as African-Americans (and other minorities) are unlikely to continue to vote for Democrats 90% of the time in the future unless the Democrats manage to anger the Perot voters again. The New Deal coalition broke apart over issues like affirmative action and there seems to be no reason why something similar can't happen as the interests of these voters are diametrically opposed on a number of issues which are bound to come up in the future.

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