Mar

5

Studying politics as a sport is really a stupid move. You can't get any good bets down, the venues have the ambiance of failing dog tracks, and the contestants are neither physically nor morally attractive. The only place where politics matches, say, baseball or American or international football is in the journalism; the people who get paid to write about it are equally ugly and ignorant.

So, of course, it remains my passion. If I am still unable to kick this habit, my only excuse is that the team Ulysses Grant organized has been winning once again, in much the same way Al Davis' Raiders did during the Madden and Flores years.

This is still news to most of the world press. Even now, if you read and watch "the news", the underlying presumption is that the Democrat Party just had some bad luck (caused entirely by the Russians). The current prediction among the smart money wise heads is that the current scandals will bring a new Watergate and the investigations will bring a return to power for the party of permanent government employment.

I can understand why CNN and the Times see things this way. Even two Presidential election cycles ago, the Democrats still were the majority party in the United States. They had 29 of the 50 Governorships.

They controlled nearly twice as many legislatures: 27 vs. the Republicans' 14.

And, thanks to the election of President Obama, they had absolute control of the Federal government, owning the Senate - 59 to 41 - and the House - 257 to 178.

It certainly made sense in 2008 for the then Dean of political sports writers to predict that this was the beginning of another Roosevelt sweep: "A growing number of political scientists, analysts and strategists are making the case for a realignment of political power in the U.S. to a new Democratic majority based on two trends: 1) the increasing numbers of black and Hispanic voters, and 2) a decisive shift away from the Republican Party by the suburban and well-educated constituencies that once formed the backbone of the GOP."

Yet, two years later, the Republicans, led by John Boehner (John Boehner!@#!!!!!!), somehow managed to gain 63 seats. This was the largest gain in the party's entire history. The only comparable event is the Democrats' success in 1948 under Truman when they won 75 seats.

Within the next 6 years, the Democrats somehow managed to lose all control; and the Cubs won the World Series.

This is not what happened in the 1930s.

What happened this time around is simple; events did not provide the glue to bind together the elements of the Roosevelt coalition. What cemented (yet another adhesive metaphor) the Roosevelt majority was Pearl Harbor and the spontaneous surge of patriotism that followed.

What happened after President Obama's first election was the opposite. The Democrats' control over "the groups" - "blacks" - 90%, Hispanics and Asians - 65-70%, women and young people - 55-60% - came at the expense of their appeal to everyone who still put American before the hyphen of their ancestry and gender.

This was not supposed to matter because the white people were going to die off. What no one expected was that the declining white majority - still 70% of the total electorate - would be joined by renegades from the groups who - traitors - put their being American first.

Trump, the Mexico-will-pay wall builder, did better among Hispanics than the candidate (Romney) who was fluent in Spanish and promised to support "immigration reform".

Musa al-Gharbi, who is the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia puts it this way:

"Democrats may try to assure themselves that things are not so bleak. The party still pulls in nearly 90 percent of the black vote, two-thirds of Hispanic or Asian votes, and majorities among racial and ethnic "others." They continue to capture a majority of women and young people. While the exit polls show that Republicans have been consistently chipping away at this coalition, the trend does not suggest the GOP will actually win majorities from any of these groups anytime soon. But here's the rub: Republicans actually don't need to outright win – or even come close to winning – any of these demographic categories in order to come out ahead. If minority turnout is low, Republicans win. If Democrats fail to capture 2012 levels of black, Hispanic and Asian votes, they lose. It doesn't really matter if lost votes go to Republicans or independents – the outcome is the same."

His study of the exit poll demographics is fascinating.


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