Politics and Dharma

This interactive election guide from NYT is a great resource because they also show the relative results of the last eight presidential contests for each state. I like to think that the way to read this as the effects of having a particularly charismatic figure running for office. The effect of having a Reagan or a Clinton or a Bush running for office is noticeable. I don’t think there’s any question that Obama is more charismatic than McCain, so I would read the ‘1992′ year data as similar to what one might expect this year.

What’s disturbing is that I’m familiar with the maps of racial distribution in the US and the correlation between this and the relative power levels of the parties is astonishing. For those of you unfamiliar with demographics collection methods (which I would presume is most of you), there are four basic ways to group people: by gender, by age, by language, and by “race”. I think we should be honest and admit that “race” means “color code”, or more specifically, the “Whitey Hierarchy”. You know, it’s the old slaveholder’s designation of free Europeans as “white”, while the slaves were “black”. (”Hispanics” are considered “white” by race, but “Spanish” by language.) The fact that the states with the have the highest proportion of white people are solidly red makes a very specific statement about the long-term viability of the Republican party.

My very non-scientific estimates based on my own spotty memory is that the Democratic party in Texas is largely composed of whites and Hispanics, with a small proportion of blacks. At this last convention, the black caucus brought in a significant proportion of delegates. It showed me to what degree the blacks had been ignoring the entire process. Up to this point, the Republicans had been actively recruiting financially successful Hispanics into their party, with some success. I think that this year’s concentration by the Clinton team on the Hispanic vote has probably already sucked a lot of air out of GOP efforts in this area. Obviously, the Dems now have the leader that can really motivate the black vote.

I think the 2008 Democratic primary season has purchased for the party a number of southern states in the November general election. Republicans may end up with only the English-speaking white people in their camp, losing the southwestern states for their Hispanic bias. We may even see a large portion of Dixie turn blue in November. The NYT map shows that Colorado and New Mexico as ‘battleground states’. I think Arizona and Texas fall into that same category for much the same reason — Hispanic voters flocking to the Clinton campaign. Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and even Virginia are appearing to be very strong Obama states, and with voter turnout in the primaries as incredible as it was, I have no doubt that in November, there will be an unprecedented number of voters, and that this can only be an advantage to Democrats.

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