Kausfiles on The White Vote And The Swing States

02/22/2012

Mickey Kaus writes

Big Swinging Swingers: You say Latinos are key swing voters in swing states? How about lower-income whites? Fivethirtyeight.com‘s Nate Silver notes that “low income whites are concentrated in swing states ….” If a presidential candidate loses these voters by, say, Hispandering on immigration, he loses, no? Maybe Mitt Romney’s strategists have seen the same numbers. …

P.S.: I’m not saying that a candidate should choose immigration policy on the basis of what will win him an election. It’s supporters of an immigration amnesty who are constantly and unashamedly urging that calculation. ( Nice little party you got there. You wouldn’t want to alienate the fast growing “crucial demographic” of Latinos, etc..). Silver’s calculations simply suggestthis advice may be wrong even at the level of crass unprincipled politics on which is is pitched. …

P.P.S.: It seems to me Silver’s numbers also suggest that Obama can’t afford to replace low-income whites with high-income environmentalists, at least if he wants to win in the Electoral College. Higher-income whites seem to be more concentrated in non-swing states (e.g New York, California). …

This speaks to several points we've made over the years about theSailer Strategy:

Latinos are concentrated in states that don’t swing.
They're still much less numerous than whites, that’s why they're called a "minority."
Which is why a small shift in the white vote is bigger than a massive shift in the white vote.

Finally, in the ballot box, where all votes are counted equally, the top ten percent of earners will always be outvoted, as they are outnumbered, by the bottom ninety percent. That’s extremely simple arithmetic, that neither Obama or the Wall Street Journal Editorial board seem to grasp.

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