Core Vs. Fringe, Cont’d: Media Starts To Catch Up On Sailer Strategy

By Steve Sailer

11/10/2014

For example, following the 2014 elections and the sputtering of the Democrats’ “Republican War on Women” strategy, it’s not quite as much of a secret anymore that the little known Marriage Gap is usually larger than the celebrated Gender Gap. George Hawley, a professor of political science at the U. of Alabama, writes in his informative new book White Voters in 21^st Century America:

Steve Sailer is one of the few journalists who began writing extensively on the marriage gap long before the 2012 presidential election.[P. 125]

What other ideas might pop up next? Perhaps the inherent fragility and divisiveness of the Democrats’ Coalition of the Diverse? Someday, it may even be understood that the Obama Administration’s choice to try to increase black turnout by angrying up the mob in Ferguson, MO was a textbook example of why assembling a party out of fringe groups is a tricky business.

Back in 2009, I suggested that, just as the Democrats and the mainstream media treat the GOP as the White Party, the GOP should slyly work to rebrand the Democrats as the Black Party. That would pose an interesting question for Hispanics and Asians: who do you think will treat you more fairly and competently? The leadership of the White Party or the leadership of the Black Party?

Ironically, in 2014 the Democrats made themselves the Black Party by anointing the late Michael Brown, the not-so-gentle giant of Ferguson, the face of the Democrats. Not surprisingly, Asian voters appear to have reacted with dismay.

The last century was one of ideology, while this one is driven by identity. In the relatively homogeneous America of the 20^th Century, it was not uncommon for large numbers of voters to change their minds, as elections as wildly different as 1964, 1972, 1974, and 1984 demonstrated.

In the 21^st Century, however, we live in an age, as we’ve so often been reminded, of diversity. And this Era of Identity means, as Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore pointed out, that voters couldn’t afford to change their minds or vote the issues. Elections are won less by coming up with better platforms than by ginning up turnout among your demographic slices.

A diverse country turns out not to be a very interesting one for rapid political change in response to new ideas or circumstances. Instead, we see a constant grinding out of small margin elections. The four Presidential elections of this century have been bizarrely consistent state by state, with partisan patterns correlating closely with the rate at which younger white women are married.

But we’re also not supposed to think honestly and hard about Diversity. So, the big parties routinely make stupid mistakes, and the press echoes their misunderstanding. This time, the Democrats believed their own hype and suffered a defeat by trying to knit their fractious coalition together over Ferguson, feminism, and foreigners to drive blacks, single women, and Hispanics (respectively) to the polls.

The Democrats’ divisive diversity politics can only hang together if they can keep their coalition of the fringes from turning their knives on each other. The obvious way to do this is to use the mainstream media to stoke fear and loathing among the fringes against the core of the country. The KKKrazy Glue that holds the Obama coalition together is the delusional paranoia about all the white male rapist racists running amok.

Of course, liberals want to define the core as narrowly as possible: white, male, straight, and, in a comic refinement that I started seeing in 2013, “cisgendered.”

In 2012, the Obama campaign, with the collaboration of the mainstream media, managed to keep the logic of its coalition building relatively obscured from its intended victims. Yet, the day-after touchdown dances by the press were of the crass “Suck it, white boy, hurry up and die” variety.

Ever since, the Democratic-Mainstream media Complex stoked hatred of Cisgendered Straight White Males. But after nasty cultural politics backfired in the 2014 election.

The most notorious Democratic flop of 2014 was in majority minority Texas, where the national mainstream media had somehow got themselves excited over the gubernatorial hopes of “single mother” Wendy Davis. Feminist fury would turn the cornerstone of Red State America permanently blue, denying the Republicans any hope of ever winning the Electoral College!

The phoniness of the Democrats’ rhetoric about female victimization by evil men is wonderfully symbolized by the hopes they invested in this hot blonde adventuress who had dumped her first husband, the father of her daughter, for a rich Democratic politician who paid for her Harvard Law School tuition. (As Gerald Ford used to say, there will never be a final victory in the Battle of the Sexes because there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.) Then she dumped him too.

Democrat Davis wound up getting trounced by Greg Abbott 59-39.

It turned out that women in Texas voted against their designated avenger 54-45. There was a sizable gender gap of 12.5 points (men voted against her 66-32), but that was smaller than the marriage gap, which was 20 points between married and single women. Although Davis won 43-57 among single women, she lost married women 62-36.

Among white women she lost 66-31, and among whites of both sexes 72-25.

How did Davis do among married white women? The crosstab isn’t broken out, but she probably didn’t get more than 25 percent of their vote.

This wasn’t supposed to happen, as amusingly illustrated by the now notorious headline in Salon:

White women didn’t just fail Wendy Davis — they failed the rest of Texas, too

It’s already been said that Greg Abbott won among women voters. So are women of color not women?

By Jenny Kutner, November 6, 2014

In 2014 the Democrats did even worse than the pre-election polls had predicted. Unlike in 2012 when the Democrats performed slightly better than the polls forecast, this time the survey-driven models were badly biased against Republicans. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com reported the day after the election:

… the average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points. The average gubernatorial poll was nearly as bad, overestimating the Democrat’s performance by 3.4 points. … the polls were biased toward the Democratic candidate in almost all key races.

What should we have learned from the Democrats’ dismal 2014?

For example, the Republicans were told over and over by Democrats and the press that they were electorally doomed by the inevitable Hispanic outrage if they didn’t pass an Amnesty and guest worker bill.

Some innumerate Republican Senators, such as Marco Rubio, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham, signed on to this transparently disingenuous advice. Yet, enough perceptive Republicans in the House understood the numbers and political psychology well enough to not let Speaker John Boehner bring the Senate’s Amnesty bill to a vote.

The symbolism would be even more important. Passing an Amnesty bill would have been treated in the mainstream media as more or less the Articles of Surrender of White America. Enough House Republicans understood that humiliating your own side is no way to win a turnout driven election.

To this surprising show of strength by white Republican leaders, Hispanic voters responded as meekly as I, but few others, expected. Nobody will know what percentage of the vote cast was by Latinos until the Census Bureau issues its turnout report next year (the exit polls have overestimated Hispanic turnout every election since 2000). But all indications are that not many Hispanics bothered to vote. And among those who did, the Democratic House candidates took only 62 percent, which for the GOP is quite survivable.

In contrast, the GOP wound up with 60 percent of the white vote, which was roughly an order of magnitude larger than the Hispanic vote. Which would you rather have: 62 percent of Hispanics or 60 percent of whites?

Of course, 60 percent of whites are probably not enough to win the next Presidential election. That’s because the hoopla of a campaign for the White House brings to the polls the kind of fringe voters who don’t really grasp concepts like the Separation of Powers, but who do enjoy voting for the Celebrity-in-Chief. Since the Democratic Party is basically a high-low coalition against the middle, these kinds of marginal voters go strongly Democratic, if they remember it’s Election Day.

As I pointed out last year after analyzing the Census Bureau’s report on voting demographics, Obama in 2012 enjoyed a huge turnout among blacks, especially old ladies.

But with that nice Mr. Obama not on the ballot this year, how were the Democrats supposed to excite the black vote in 2014?

In 2012, the Trayvon Martin — George Zimmerman shooting had served to whoop up black anger at white men like Zimmerman. Granted, Zimmerman was obviously Hispanic and even a little black. (He looked disturbingly like the son Obama never had.) And Zimmerman’s trial in 2013 turned out to be an immense fiasco for the Narrative.

So what could get the Democrats through 2014?

Ferguson!

In a country of over 300 million people, tragic events happen every day. It shouldn’t be hard for the Democrats to find one genuine outrage in an election year to exploit. And yet, the Democratic-Mainstream media Complex routinely fouls up selecting the case to illustrate that black babies’ bodies are being gunned down by white racists on every street corner.

But that still doesn’t stop them.

On August 30, 2014, The New York Times reported:

At Risk in Senate, Democrats Seek to Rally Blacks

By JONATHAN MARTIN

August 31, 2014

WASHINGTON — With their Senate majority imperiled, Democrats are trying to mobilize African-Americans outraged by the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., to help them retain control of at least one chamber of Congress for President Obama’s final two years in office.

Please note that this article about Democrat strategy was published 15 days after the revelation of the convenience store video of 6’4” and 292 pound Michael Brown beginning his Thug Life crime spree by assaulting the little Asian clerk. At that point, it was obvious that the whole Ferguson narrative was going to unravel, but the Obama Administration and the national mainstream media simply doubled down and kept up the propaganda until late into the fall.

The White House should have immediately stopped hyping Ferguson on August 15, but they just couldn’t help themselves. The decision to send Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson was made in a private meeting by Obama, Holder, and Valerie Jarrett while they were all vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, of all places. [ The Obama Whisperer,By Noam Scheiber, The New Republic, November 9, 2014]

Obama, Holder, and Jarrett are all from the African-American upper crust and know little about the black masses. Holder is a Barbadian who was raised in a West Indian bourgeois bubble in New York, while Jarrett was born in Iran.

Obama, Holder, and Jarrett decided, in effect, to hand strategic direction of the Democrats’ campaign over to the looters who painted “Snitches Get Stitches” on the side of the (wrong) Ferguson store they torched in vengeance.

One effect was that Asians suddenly swung sharply Republican. The 2012 exit poll claimed that Romney won only 27 percent of their vote. But in the wake of Ferguson, and the Obama Administration’s absolute lack of interest in the video of the giant black man attacking the Asian shopkeeper, Asians voted 50-49 for the GOP. This was the first election in which Asians went Republican since the 1990s, after the black pogroms against Korean shopkeepers during the April 1992 Rodney King riots.

It’s fun for Asians to make fun of the white man when the American mainstream media tells them to, but the idea that Obama, Holder, and Jarrett — the Black Party leadership, as it were — sided with black looters instead of Asian shopkeepers is, rightly, horrifying to them.

The lack of black enthusiasm for voting after the Democrats’ Ferguson Campaign speaks well for African-Americans’ sense of self-respect. They turned up in vast numbers two years ago to vote for Obama, who, for all his flaws, is at least a respectable credit to his race. This year, in contrast, they found the prospect of voting for Michael Brown depressing.

What will happen next to the Democrats as they continue to pursue the logic of a coalition of the fringes?

One little discussed problem that came home to roost for liberals in 2014 is that the transparent bogusness of their narrative about the evils of cisgendered straight white men tends to attract sleazeballs. For example, here we are in 2014 and veteran sleazeball Rev. Al Sharpton is at the apogee of his influence over the White House. The talking points of the mainstream media’s war on whites repel individuals of conscience but attract those hungry for money and attention. In turn, the poor human quality of the loudest liberal voices drives away normal voters.

For example, 2014 saw the Rise of the Politically Correct Adventuress. We’re used to being lectured on our sins by indignant lesbians, but the emergence of hot babes as politicized scolds wherever men with money were to be found was a recurrent pattern over the last 12 months. The most notorious example was Donald Sterling’s treacherous mistress V. Stiviano, while Silicon Valley was overrun by faux feminists, egged on by a press corps penning implausible stories about alpha male computer programmers.

In 2014, one set of cisgendered straight white males — guys who really like playing video games — noticed that the liberal journalists that cover their hobby (but mostly seem to denounce their own readers for being straight white guys) were in bed — sometimes literally — with various untalented female game developers they kept promoting as the exciting diverse alternative to boring old stale pale maleness.

This mainstream media scandal was dubbed Gamergate. In a unique incident in recent American history, the famous computer chip company Intel announced that it would stop advertising at one corrupt publication.

Aghast, the mainstream media swung into action to defend its journalistic colleagues by denouncing those uncovering press corruption as rapists implicitly violating the central if unspoken taboo of modern America: members of the Core cannot self-organize explicitly to defend their own interests; and everybody knows that videogamers are CSWMs, and thus deserve to lose.

The gamers replied that they were organizing not as straight white males defending themselves from denigration, but as consumers trying to clean up a conflict of interest. The mainstream media, however, was relentless in its umbrage at Gamergaters for valuing honesty over diversity. Moreover, gamers are seen as an implicit core defense group and thus should have no right to organize.

Did Gamergate open many voters’ eyes? Perhaps not, although here’s one example. But this novel controversy is highly representative of the cultural dynamics of the last 24 months that culminated in the Democrats’ repudiation last week.

Have you ever noticed that basically everything you are supposed to believe in these days — feminism, diversity, etc. — turns out in practice to just be another way for hot babes, rich guys, super salesmen, cunning financiers, telegenic self-promoters, and powerful politicians to get themselves even more money and power?

Steve Sailer writes regularly for Takimag and blogs at the Unz Review.

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