Democrats losing the White vote?

Just a few more notes on the elections.

In my last post I started out with this:

Rush Limbaugh was in full on denial mode today, bragging that yesterday’s election result meant that the American people soundly rejected liberalism.  Nu-uh.  All it means is that civic minded Republican voters are more likely to turn out to vote during mid-term elections than young people who only know about the President and not much else…And that will be obvious in 2016 when Republicans, who will have more Senate seats to defend than Democrats, lose the Senate gains they’ve just won.

Just to elaborate on that point a bit, if I were to guess right now, I would guess the electorate would swing right back into the Democratic camp in 2016. There is a big difference between the number of people who show up to vote in the mid-terms and those who show up in Presidential years. Based on the numbers I’ve seen this morning, turn out for this year was even lower than in 2010, which was another big Republican year. So you have a 76 million voter turnout for this year, but in 2012 you had 129 million voters.

That’s about a 50 million voter difference between the midterms and the Presidential voting years. So I suspect GOP gains will be washed away in 2016; particularly since there will be more Republican Senate seats to defend then Democratic ones that year. So all of the Republican high fiving will turn to bitter salty tears two years from now, while the current Democratic rage will turn to Democratic gloating.

And demography continues its relentless march,

But I did stumble across a mind blowing revelation, and hat tip to the Parapundit blog for bringing this to my attention, but according to the New York Times, Democrats have not won the white woman vote since 1992.

Where the white women at?

Apparently trending to the GOP.  And I am surprised that I didn’t know that before now.  For decades I’ve been hearing about the GOP’s gender gap, and I knew it was a phony issue.  I mean overall, if your numbers are down for the woman’s vote, the inverse of that is that the numbers are up for the male vote.  However the media doesn’t frame the question that way.  Why can’t Democrats attract Male votes?  Nobody cares about that although the issue is just as real for the Democrats as any alleged female gender gap for the Republicans,  However there is a resistance in the media to accepting that simple truth, no matter how obvious it is.  Certainly that was the case in reference to the Texas Governor’s race in which a Salon writer regards math showing that Davis didn’t win the female vote as racist. White women stayed away from her.

And whites in general are slowly but surely abandoning the Democrats.  An AP article made this point in an exit poll study:

Across 21 states where Senate races were exit polled, whites broke for the Republican by a significant margin in all but four… 

The shift is particularly acute in the South, where some of the last white Democrats in the House of Representatives lost their seats on Tuesday.

In North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan carried just 33 percent of the white vote

In Louisiana, Mary Landrieu captured just 18 percent of the white vote

 Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin captured 43 percent of the white vote in his successful bid for re-election, that’s down 18 points from his support among whites in 2008.

After the 2012 election I wrote a post about this very issue, the gradual re-arranging of the political parties along ethnic and racial lines. Of course I thought then that Democrats still had white women, I didn’t realize that as a group, they had left the Democrats a quarter of a century ago.

How you feel about this I suppose depends on your point of view.  If you are a Democratic strategist, even though turn out failed for the Democrats this year, the long term demographic trends are heartening.  As whites move into a smaller percentage of the electorate, the coalition of everyone else will eventually establish more or less permanent political power.  Although that won’t happen quickly, since whites will still be the single largest group.  They are not exactly fading into that good night just yet.

For me, even though the election was disheartening in a lot of ways, I think presages the end of a modern political democracy and voting based on issues into the realignment of parties drawn along ethnic, racial, and religious lines.  In other words, we’ll become like every other 3^rd world crap hole country in which issues are irrelevant, only your tribe matters. To me, that’s a sad end for the American experiment.