Conservatism is white men

For the sages of the 'conservative' Establishment (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity), a revisiting of recent history that illustrates why a coloring in of the country isn't just bad for Republicans' electoral prospects, it bodes terribly for a whole host of social, cultural, and economic positions that define the contemporary American right. The lesson at hand today is Michigan's 2006 Proposition 2 banning affirmative action programs in education and public sector hiring, which passed with strong voter approval, 58%-42%. From exit polling on the ballot initiative:

Race/Sex	Yes	No
White men	70%	30%
White women	59%	41%
Non-white men	30%	70%
Non-white women	18%	82%

White men made it happn. If the nation looked more like Michigan and less like California, Romney would've humiliated Obama on election day. Well, if Obama was around to be humiliated in the first place--in this hypothetical US, McCain would've already crushed him in 2008.

Tangentially, note that relatively speaking, men favor equality of opportunity and women favor equality of outcome.

A couple of weeks ago, another court decision was handed down on the law, which has been wrangled over in the courts since it was passed six years ago. This time the sixth circuit struck it down. There's a decent chance it will make it to the supreme court, where democracy and judicial fiat will square off (with the winner being determined by a body with the ultimate judicial fiat power!). That's not necessarily reason for democracy to despair in this case, though--there's a lot of overlap in the electoral power behind Prop 2's success and the fact that the supreme court is centrist (for the time being, anyhow, with at least an outside chance of keeping it that way if Scalia is still sitting upon becoming an octogenarian). But if the exorable (yes, exorable) change in the face of America continues apace, both the electorate and the magistrates it ultimately appoints will no longer be able to pass initiatives like Prop 2 in the future.

Parenthetically, I detect a somewhat widespread sense of racial identity growing among whites of my generation. The GSS suggests as much and I pick it up in bits and pieces in the real world. It's nascent and inchoate, but I think it's there. Consider how support for Prop 2 broke down by age:

Age	Yes	No
18-29	59%	41%
30-44	60%	40%
45-59	57%	43%
60+	55%	45%

The older generations are whiter than the younger ones are, yet the younger ones show slightly stronger opposition to affirmative action. I suspect youthful NAMs are even more supportive of affirmative action than their parents are, which means that young whites must be non-trivially more hostile to racial preferences than older whites are, the tendency for youth and leftism to correlate happily notwithstanding here.

Time to abort opposition to abortion?

Reflecting on the 2012 presidential election, Half Sigma writes:

Republicans are on the losing side of the abortion issue. It doesn’t matter that Romney, personally, didn’t make abortion a big issue. Everyone knows that Republicans are against abortion, and he selected a staunchly anti-abortion Vice Presidential nominee in Paul Ryan. That the Republican Party has morons like Richard Mourdock who think that the demon-spawn of rapists are a “gift from God” only makes things that much worse.

The Edison exit polls, paid for and reported on by the major media, didn't query voters on abortion at the state level, but Reuters has the information. The following shows the public split on the legality of abortion in the nine tightest swing states as well as in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania--mostly white, moderate places that it is imperative for the GOP to convert to red to maintain electoral viability in the face of demographic trends (read Hispanic immigration and fecundity) coloring states like Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Nevada (which has probably already crossed the rubicon)--and eventually even strongholds like Texas--blue. The "legal" column is comprised of those saying abortion should be legal in "most" or "all" cases; the "illegal" column of those responding it should be illegal in "most" or "all" instances. The "unsure" contingents are ignored:

State	Legal %	Illegal %
Nevada	69.3	30.7
New Hampshire	67.6	32.4
Colorado	62.3	37.7
Florida	62.3	37.7
Pennsylvania	60.9	39.1
Virginia	60.3	39.7
Ohio	56.9	43.1
Minnesota	56.7	43.3
Michigan	56.1	43.9
Wisconsin	55.1	44.9
Iowa	53.7	46.3
North Carolina	53.4	46.6

In all twelve of the states under consideration, the pro-choice position is held by a majority of the electorate. And in places like Virginia and Colorado--just a decade ago seemingly reliably Republican--there exists pro-choice 'super majorities'. If the GOP isn't able to enlist the states with old America demography--Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania--in a hurry, it's conceivable to me that I'll never see another Republican president in my lifetime. The above strikes me as reasonable evidence that the part of the official 2012 Republican National Committee platform that reads as follows makes this crucial task even more difficult to accomplish:

We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage. We support the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.

HS thinks dropping the pro-life platform (along with a determination to hold the line on tax rates for high earners) from the national ticket is the way to get there. The I'm-no-political-strategist disclaimer assumed, the GOP should take a 10th amendment states' rights tact on abortion. It'll retain the pro-lifers (because hey, at least the federal government won't be against us*) without turning off SWPL whites, who don't do much aborting of their own but who like to think they'd be able to if the need ever arose. Taking a page from Gary Johnson's playbook, it could even be pitched as being the ultimate 'pro-choice', position. Onward, liberty!

* In states like Mississippi (37.8% legal, 62.2% illegal), abortion could be outlawed entirely, although there'd undoubtedly be some rhetorical adroitness required to deal with the charge that to get to a states' rights spot on abortion, Roe v Wade would have to be revisited.

Not confirming a minority woman? Probably not!

There's been a palpable shift among those in the Establishment towards openly, without the air of furtiveness, subjugating the concerns and well being of heterosexual white men to those and that of all our assorted 'minorities'* since Obama's reelection earlier this month. The "new normal" was prominently on display today on NPR's Morning Edition, in a conversation between Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts on Obama's trip to Asia (audio is here):

ROBERTS: Critics say the administration hid the information so as not to damage the president, politically. And the latest example they're giving are these so-called talking points that Ambassador Rice used on the Sunday shows. And whether those talking points were changed, from the time the CIA developed them, if so - who changed them.

Now, the Democratic chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein, says she's seen them and the only one insignificant word was changed. It was consulate was changed to mission. We're really, you know, talking about angels on the head of a pin here. But Senator Feinstein says she'll investigate this.

WERTHEIMER: But what's really going on?

(LAUGHTER)

WERTHEIMER: Is this really about Benghazi or is this something else?

ROBERTS: It seems to me, Linda, that it's about Republicans trying to regain supremacy on national security. As you well know, the fact it's Jon McCain and Lindsey Graham leading the charge on this, is instructive. They both believe that their party has gone off the deep end on a lot of other issues, especially immigration. But they want to keep the traditional Republican advantage on defense and national security. And for the moment, the Republicans have lost that as well.

And so, those senators probably think it's the easiest place to start rebuilding. And the Benghazi attack seems the perfect place to lay down a marker, but a couple of things are getting in the way. One is that their guy, David Petraeus, whom many Republicans were touting for president, is having problems of his own - to put it mildly.

But also what's happening right now, between Israel and the Palestinians, leaves the president no choice but to be tough on Israel's behalf. And it makes it harder for the Republicans to paint them as weak-kneed.

WERTHEIMER: Now, some Republicans are making it clear, though, that they will make it difficult for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be confirmed as secretary of state, if President Obama should choose her to succeed Hillary Clinton. Do you think that the new-found strength of women in the Senate will help her?

ROBERTS: I think it probably will. I think that the Democratic women in the Senate are likely to lead the charge to confirm her, if her name is put forward. But I think the real problem for Republicans is women in the electorate rather than their own colleagues. Look, they've just gone through an election where they're keenly aware that they lost women and minority voters. Do they really want their first big fight to be over not confirming a minority woman? Probably not.

But it's also true that we now have a critical mass of 20 women in the Senate. Did you ever think we'd be able to say that, Linda?

WERTHEIMER: It's remarkable.

(LAUGHTER)

ROBERTS: It is. And it makes a difference in all kinds of things. And they tend to have a way of putting things in a way that makes their male colleagues cringe. So, I don't think that the Republicans senators want to get on the wrong side here.

Laughter. Laughter!

No stopping progress. I recall scoffing at the rejoicing over Elena Kagan's appointment resulting in--for the first time ever!--a Supreme Court with three female justices sitting on it at the same time. Don't think that the first black this or the first Latina that is the end of it, ever. There's the second, third, and forty-first black this and Latina that--or in this case, the twentieth simultaneous female senator--to celebrate.

Rice's conduct is immaterial. Yeah, she probably knowingly misled the entire country by propagating a fabricated, baseless narrative with the objective of somehow making American religious intolerance into the reason Christopher Stephens got his just desserts rather than pointing out that it was an especially violent case of Arab Muslims being Arab Muslims. But she's a black woman for heaven's sake--only a sexist racist (or a racist sexist?) would have the audacity to raise questions that might impede her progression up the political ladder. So Lindsey, how does it feel to block the bridge in Selma, anyway?

There's plenty of other leftist bilge here, too; "off the deep end" on immigration by maintaining a position that is supported by an overwhelming majority of the country, "angels on the head of a pin"--those dastardly Scholastic Republicans, they--standard media fare.

If there's some tipping point at which white men collectively realize they are witnessing--and by essentially doing nothing in protest, acceding to--their political, moral, and cultural dispossession, we have to be close to reaching it. But I'm not going to suffocate holding my breath waiting for that realization to be made.

* Not necessarily in a numerical sense, of course!

The Silent Xenophobes

Alerted by Steve Sailer of the ability to cross tab exit polling data for free via Reuters, I thought it'd be a fun challenge to try and paint an electoral map red--entirely--to contrast with the easy-to-create blue one. Perhaps married white men earning at least six figures annually (though in honor of Jokah Macpherson, I suspect that demographic trends slightly progressive in Vermont)? Unfortunately, the sample sizes aren't large enough to look at anything interesting in states with electoral college votes of the single digit variety.

The data doodling is available for more than just presidential election exit polling, however--users are free to play with results from other Reuters' polls as well. Speaking of the election, the stage looks to be set for a resurrection of the 2007 'bipartisan' amnesty bill that was torn apart, limb from limb, by a hostile public that won't quite roll over and die:

Emboldened by the large turnout of Hispanic voters in last week's general election, U.S. President Barack Obama said Wednesday he plans to move quickly to address what he has called the biggest failure of his first term - comprehensive immigration reform.

Steve says "bring it on". Hell yes. This will be Obama's social security privatization push, obsessed over by a handful of wonks but facing populist opposition so deep and widespread that it will taint his entire second term.

Don't take it from me, though, consider public sentiment. In July of this year Reuters polled respondents on their positions (among four, see below) concerning three immigration-related issues germane to the discussion about Arizona's SB 1070. The Establishment regularly labels those who approve of any of said positions as "extremist", "anti-immigrant", "xenophobic", etc, and, excepting Pat Buchanan and maybe Mark Steyn, it's difficult to find a mainstream pundit who vigorously assents to any of them. Randomly open up the phone book, though, and chances are the person picking up the phone will.

I've come up with what will be deemed a restrictionist score by race, computed using a simple formula:

(% strongly favoring * 2) + (% somewhat favoring) - (% somewhat opposing) - (% strongly opposing * 2) = Restrictionist Score

Thus the scale runs from +200 (everyone strongly favoring the enforcement tactic at hand) on the especially restrictionist side to -200 (everyone strongly opposing enforcement) on the utterly open borders end of the spectrum.

"Require law enforcement to check the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens."

Race	R Score
Whites	+107
Blacks	+45
Hispanics	-9

Notice this goes beyond merely authorizing law enforcement to inquire about a person's residency status--it requires that they investigate it. A majority of whites (54.2%) strongly favor this approach while just 6.9% strongly oppose it. More than three-quarters of whites hold anti-immigrant, xenophobic views, uncouthly desiring the people's laws be enforced by those sworn to enforce them! Blacks, skeptical as they are of cops digging into people's personal business, are mostly restrictionist, too. Hispanics, at -9, are almost evenly split--a reoccurring trend, as we shall see--the perfect balance for a rational, informed discussion of the issue to be had among the self-proclaimed leaders of the "Hispanic community", right?

"Allow law enforcement officers to arrest anyone unable to document immigration status."

Race	R Score
Whites	+74
Blacks	+14
Hispanics	-6

Majorities of both whites and blacks feel those without 'papers' should be arrested. Hispanics, again, are divided straight down the middle. Tough to see where the political sell for amnesty is to be made, but we have one more shot remaining.

"Make it a crime for illegal immigrants to try to work in the United States."

Race	R Score
Whites	+101
Blacks	+45
Hispanics	-3

Look, they're just trying to make a better life for themselves and all that--go after the employers who exploit these undocumented workers if you must, but don't punish people for doing the jobs Americans won't do, racists! Nope, the public doesn't buy the tripe about people who've knowingly broken the laws of the land by consciously ignoring the national sovereignty of the US somehow being innocent victims. Again, a majority (52.9%) of whites strongly favors a law such as this, while only 6.5% of whites strongly oppose it. By a 2-to-1 margin, blacks are on board with. Hispanics, once more, are split on the idea.

Be ready to contact your congress critters when the legislative process of electing a new people gets going again in earnest. If you're looking for an easy, comprehensive (heh) way to go about doing so, check out NumbersUSA and sign up for action alert notifications. The war may be lost, but we can still make a heroic stand and enjoy the sweet taste of victory in a few battles. Bring it on.

2012 electoral maps by sex, race, and income

Upon realizing that for cost-cutting reasons there were insufficiently sized exit polling operations carried out in 19 safe states and the District of Columbia, I'd resigned myself to the actualization that it wouldn't be possible to create hypothetical electoral maps based on select demographic characteristics for the 2012 Presidential election. Damn.

But the media consortium didn't conduct detailed polling in the excluded states because they are among the most predictable, and as Steve Sailer has pointed out countless times, people only care about prognosticating about coin tosses. Consequently, with a couple of exceptions that will be noted below, it's obvious how the demographic groupings considered here broke in those states.

Much is made about the gender gap in US politics. While there is a gap more than twice as wide by marital status as there is by sex, the male and female electoral maps look a lot different from one another. Various thinkers on the right have explored how female suffrage has steadily pushed the US leftward. Men and women vote similarly by ancestry, geographic position, and station in life, but the latter are shifted five or six points to the left, movement that is more than enough to tip the scales in one direction or the other in the tight national elections that have been the norm in the country for over a decade now.

First, if only women voted:

Obama wins reelection in an even more convincing fashion than was actually the case, trouncing Romney 347-185 (6 undetermined).

This time, with a little sense and no 19th Amendment:

Under this scenario, Romney wins by nearly the same margin that Obama actually won by.

During the 2008 campaign, Half Sigma doggedly complained that the Sarah Palin wing of the GOP was turning away wealthy, upper class whites who didn't want to be associated with the instincts and concerns of 'prole' whites. Despite the perpetual claims of Republicans being the party of the rich, Obama beat McCain among voters making over $200,000 a year. Romney reversed that in a substantial way, swinging the $200k+ vote 16 points back in the Republican party's favor in 2012. If an income threshold for voting existed, setting it at six figures would be more than enough to give the White House to the Republican party:

Among those making $100k+ annually, Romney obliterates Obama, 372-166. I guess that's a silver lining for guys like HS.

We're repeatedly told how crucial it is for the Republican party to 'reach out' to the one-fourth of the public that is largely hostile towards it at the expense of the nearly three-quarters of the country that more-or-less shares its values and objectives. Knowing that this guarantees the perpetual diminution of the contemporary GOP, those on the left eagerly and disingenuously urge the party to embrace this favorite tactic of the Establishment.

Pandering to and working towards increasing the size of the non-white vote has helped put the Republican party in the spot it now finds itself in, of course. As Ann Coulter puts it, "If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope." She dances delicately around the race/ethnicity issue, but she is unique among popular pundits on the right in realizing that there is more to the makers-takers dichotomy than just W-2s.

Before heeding the Establishment's advice and running off the electoral cliff, Republicans should consider how favorable things look for them when the white folk are asked what they think:

Even the two big blue strongholds of California and New York abandon the multiculti party as Romney--compared to Reagan by some boosters during the campaign--enjoys a Reaganesque victory, winning 470-61 (7 undecided). Upping the ante even more, some sense along with revocations of both the 15th and 19th Amendments:

Oh what hideous cartography! Romney wins the electoral college among white men 490-41 (7 undecided). Parenthetically, Rhode Island, one of the states excluded from serious exit polling this time around, gave 48% of it's white male vote to McCain in '08. Given that Romney garnered the support of 62% of white men to McCain's 57%, it's certainly conceivable that Romney won among white guys in Rhode Island this time, but without being able to definitively make that call, I gave it to Obama in the above. If Romney won it, the electoral score becomes 494-37 (7 undecided).

If the US looked like Nebraska, it wouldn't necessarily follow that we'd have a two-party system consisting of a perpetual majority and an ever-defeated opposition. Instead, general election campaigns would be as competitive as they are today. Gauging public sentiment has come a long, long way from Dewey beats Truman, and campaigns on both sides are able to calibrate the message precisely enough to reliably get, at a minimum, say 45% of the vote. The difference would be that general elections would look like Republican primaries do now, and the typical Republican primary would resemble a debate between Sailer, Auster, Buchanan, Barone, Raimondo, and Reynolds. The demographic transformation the US is currently undergoing is driving a stake through the heart of political conservatism. Indeed, we are doomed.

With all this reclinating back towards the good 'ole days, it feels like we're forgetting something far more relevant for the future. How does the electoral map look when we consider non-whites exclusively? Well, despite representing the driving force behind the nation's demographic changes, it looks exactly the same as it did in 2008. Rather than recreate it here, I'll just ask you to take a look at the original.

On the 2012 ballot initiatives

As an addendum to the previous post, a few remarks about the various ballot initiatives up for electoral consideration yesterday:

- If Hispanics are naturally traditionally-oriented, family-values conservatives, why did they back Colorado's Amendment 64 to legalize recreational marijuana usage 70%-30%, while Coloradan whites--a fairly liberal bunch--split 50%-50% on the issue?

- Younger Americans are more skeptical about a further socialization of health care in the US than older generations are, a notable departure from the general trend in which youth and affinity for socialism tend to go hand-in-hand. In Florida, voters under 30 voted in favor of Amendment 1, which would've prohibited individuals and businesses from being mandated to participate in any health care system, 55%-45%. All other age groups shot it down, with those 65 and older doing so 41%-59%. Spare me the nonsense about the elderly wanting to ensure the nation they've left to the rest of us is fiscally sound--everybody wants to stick their noses in the public trough, ancients included.

- The rapidity with which public opinion has shifted on same-sex marriage is remarkable. When the GSS asked respondents if those of the same sex should be allowed to marry one another, only 11% answered in the affirmative. Today, that is the majority position. No longer are besieged traditionalists on the losing side of history even able to claim that whenever it's put to the public, the public rejects same-sex marriage, and it's only through judicial fiat or by way of furtive legislative action that it is allowed. Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota all voted in favor of it. Results from Washington are still being processed, but at the moment it looks like it'll be legalized there as well.

Parenthetically, in all four states, men voted against and women voted for legalizing same-sex marriage. I wonder if running on a platform to repeal the 19th Amendment would be viable? Keep the 15th, though--blacks rejected same-sex marriage in Maryland (and likely the other three as well, though sample sizes were too small to be included in exit polls from those states).

- While the presidential exit polls broke out the voting behaviors of those married with children from the rest of the electorate, polling on the ballot measures over marijuana legalization did not. As education and income rise, support for legalization does as well, even as personal use of it declines. It's always easier to approve of self-destructive behaviors in the abstract than it is when one feels their consequences firsthand. I suspect those with kids are less supportive of legalization than singles and the childless married are.

GSS variables used: MARHOMO, YEAR(1988)

On the 2012 presidential election

I'd planned on creating electoral maps by various demographic characteristics today, but to my great disappointment it appears that exit polling was only conducted--or at any rate, recorded--at the state level in select places, unlike in the last few presidential elections for which even far flung and predictable states like Alaska and Hawaii got in on the action.

With that option off the table, a few observations will have to suffice:

- The racial polarity of the two parties continues to become starker. Whites, who comprise three-quarters of the total electorate, only narrowly constituted a majority of Democratic voters this election, with 55% of Obama's votes coming from non-Hispanic whites and 45% coming from Hispanics and other non-whites. In contrast, whites cast over 89% of Romney's votes this time around. In 2008, 60% of Obama's support came from whites and in 2004, 66% of Kerry's did. If not in 2016 then almost certainly by 2020 the majority of Democratic voters will be non-white.

- While it seems inevitable that non-whites will soon become the majority in the Democratic party, are we justified in confidently asserting that whites will continue to dominate the GOP? After all, young white voters were a key part of Obama's 2008 coalition, with whites under 30 breaking for him 54%-44%. Putting aside the fact that the answer must be "yes" if for no other reason than non-whites will not vote Republican in under any circumstances, Romney swung the young white vote by an impressive 17 points, winning it 51%-44%, tripling the improvement he was able to boast among whites aged 30 and older.

- The wealthy shifted back to the GOP in 2012 from 2008 in a substantial way. Romney improved over McCain by 16 points among those earning more than $200,000 a year, winning them 54%-44% where McCain had lost them 46%-52%. Among those making under six figures, Obama held his ground, however, ceding only 2 points to Romney relative to McCain in 2008. Obama won the five-figure majority 54%-44% this time around, virtually unchanged from his 55%-43% advantage in 2008.

- The question of whether or not self-described white evangelicals would turn out to support a socially moderate Mormon appears to have been answered in the affirmative. In both 2012 and 2008, they comprised 26% of the total electorate, indicating no dampened enthusiasm relative to other voters this time around. While McCain garnered 73% of this solidly Republican group, Romney did even better, winning 78% of their support.

- In a conversation I had last week, the question of whether or not the Catholic Church's public opposition to aspects of Obamacare mandating that it include contraception in health care it provided to its beneficiaries would compel Catholics to repudiate Obama was raised. After pointing out that lay Catholics in the US don't seem to care much one way or the other about what the Church says about anything, I emphasized that Catholicism needs to be separated into two groups, one white and the other Hispanic, if analyzing it is going to tell us anything meaningful. Well, while Romney won among white Catholics 60%-40%, he had his clock cleaned among non-white (read Hispanic) Catholics by a staggering 11%-89% margin. While the latter is extrapolated from exit polling data and consequently might be corrupted to some extent by fitting the exit polling figures to actual vote totals after the returns were in, the fact remains that as the Catholic population becomes increasingly Hispanic, Catholics as a whole will continue to move decisively to the left.

- What characteristic in a president is most important? Among those who answered "shares my values", "is a strong leader", or "has a vision for the future", Romney won by a bit less than a 60%-40% margin. But among the one-fifth of the electorate who answered "cares about people like me", Obama absolutely crushed it, 81%-18%. Yep, in 21st century America, this is what a leader does to win hearts and minds: