Saturday, July 18, 2015

"THERE COULD COME A POINT WHERE DEMOCRATS CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE ANY MORE WHITE VOTERS"

Frontpage Mag ^ | 07/18/2015 | Daniel Greenfield 


Hillary Clinton has been doubling down on Obama's radical coalition strategy, but that depends on passionate base turnout and the only people passionate about Hillary hate her. Meanwhile the Democrats are losing white voters badly.
"Democrats are hemorrhaging those voters and need to figure out how to stop the bleeding," said Mo Elleithee, a former top Democratic National Committee official who now runs Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. "There could come a point where Democrats cannot afford to lose any more white voters. It's in the interest of Democrats to be taking steps to reverse that now."
Elleithee pointed to Florida, where President Obama's 2-and-a-half-point 2008 victory narrowed to a 1-point 2012 win, which then became a 1-point loss in Democrat Charlie Crist's run for governor in 2014—even though the Crist campaign hit its turnout targets for African-Americans and Latinos.
Steve Schale worked on all three campaigns. He said it makes more sense to increase support from whites just a little bit than trying to boost support from minority groups a lot. "Take Hispanics alone: Every point of white share you lose, you have to win Hispanics by 4 to 5 points more" to make up for it, Schale said. "In '08, we knew if we really focused on keeping whites above 40 (percent), we couldn't lose. To me, that makes more sense than always trying to cobble out a tight win. And at some point we are going to max out (with) Hispanics."
And Hispanic votes tend to shift with the general electorate, like Jewish votes, unlike black votes which are much less mobile. That makes reliance on a Hispanic voting bloc a risky strategy. But the Dem left has its head and it loathes white voters.
Hillary Clinton is increasingly outsourcing her campaign to corporate consultants who are treating it like a marketing opportunity and left-wing veterans of Obama who are trying out the same playbook.
But tellingly it's a Democrat who warns about the importance of white voters and a Republican who dismisses them.
Meanwhile, Republican pollster Bill McInturff scratches his head while watching all this hand-wringing over a demographic group that will continue to decline in significance. For one thing, he said, the 27-percentage point advantage Republicans built among white men in 2012 is probably about as bad as it can get for Clinton, given that a sizeable percentage of white men are white-collar liberals.
McInturff has prepared an analysis that even increases the Republican advantage with white men, to 31 percent, and decreases the GOP's disadvantage among black and Latino voters slightly. But it still shows Republicans losing the next election by 3 points.
So to him, it's not even worth debating whether Clinton should work to appeal more to white men, which her husband Bill Clinton successfully did 23 years ago, rather than the "Obama coalition" of urban whites, young people, and minorities.
"The hell with it," he said. "For all the trees that have been killed by the press about which strategy she should pursue, her campaign is doing exactly the right thing. There's not a choice. She's pursuing the one strategy that will win the presidency."
And this in a snapshot is why we're losing. The Democrats are abandoning white voters, but so are Republicans.

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