We were listening to MSNBC last night, and they were discussing patterns in the Super Tuesday voting. We usually watch parts of Tweety and all of Countdown, and I don’t recall exactly which two talking heads were on at that moment, but the two white men who were speaking were very excited that Obama had gotten a couple points more among white men than Clinton had.<\/p>\n
Now I’m impressed and happy that there seems to be so little of a racist effect among white Democratic voters. But the excitement they expressed was over the top. “Democrats have had such a terrible time attracting white men!” they said. “It looks like Obama will have a better chance attracting them this time!”<\/p>\n
The problem here is two-fold. First, they showed no evidence that Obama had brought more white men into the Democratic fold. Young people, yes, black voters, yes, but no sign that more of those all-important white men were flocking to the Dems because of Obama.<\/p>\n
The silliest bit, though, was the excitement that white men were voting for Democrats! Wow! It’s a Democratic primary, stupid people. Everyone who votes is going to vote for a Democrat (unless they’re uncommitted, but even then they’re Democrats).
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I would like to think that, if Obama is the candidate, he can make some of those Southern states competitive for Democrats again. But I doubt it. No way is he going to reach the core of the Republican party, nor will Hillary.<\/p>\n
A two-point advantage in a Democratic primary is not a world-changing advantage. And the pundits need to get some perspective when they discuss these things (but I won’t hold my breath).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We were listening to MSNBC last night, and they were discussing patterns in the Super Tuesday voting. We usually watch parts of Tweety and all of Countdown, and I don’t recall exactly which two talking heads were on at that moment, but the two white men who were speaking were very excited that Obama had gotten a couple points more among white men than Clinton had. Now I’m impressed and happy that there seems to be so little of a racist effect among white Democratic voters. But the excitement they expressed was over the top. “Democrats have had such a …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p13tCM-7D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fierce.jnfr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}