Getting an early start on primary season, Rand Paul stopped by New Hampshire and offered some sage advice for winning elections. According to the article, "Senator Paul Rand urged New Hampshire Republicans to become more diversified."
New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don't know the exact diversity
statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will probably have covered all the statistical bases.
"We need to grow bigger," Rand Paul said. "If you want to be the party of white people, we're winning all the white votes. We're a diverse nation. We're going to win when we look like America."
Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like California. And despite that, Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire in the last election.
Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn't the black vote that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly, despite Rand Paul's optimism, Republicans aren't winning all the white votes in New Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.
Rand Paul's Kentucky looks a lot like New Hampshire. It's 88.9% white. And its white Senator, who did not win all the white votes, decided to visit another white state to tell Republicans there that they needed to look more like America or California. Or someplace like that. Because the white vote was all locked down.
In his 2010 Senate election, Rand Paul won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 86% of the black vote. Two years later, in the national election Romney won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 93% of the black vote. Both men scored the exact same percentage of the white vote.
Some might try to find a silver lining in that Rand Paul won 13 percent of the black vote, but he wasn't running against a black candidate. In 2004, Bush won 12 percent of the Kentucky black vote. Nearly the same amount as Rand Paul. More importantly, he won 64 percent of the white vote and 58 percent of the female vote to Rand Paul's 51 percent. The female vote is far more important, if you're going to win elections, than picking up minority votes in New Hampshire or Kentucky.
While Rand Paul tours as some sort of expert on winning the minority vote, he has never actually won the minority vote. Similarly Rubio promises that illegal alien amnesty will turn the Latino tide for the GOP, when he could not win a straight majority of the non-Cuban Latino vote in his Senate election.
The Republican Party is suffering from a surplus of self-appointed experts in winning the minority vote who don't actually win the minority vote. Their advice is stupid and destructive.
Romney did not lose because he lost the Latino vote. That's a myth which has been discredited again and again, but still rises from the dead to push for an illegal alien amnesty, five times bigger than the last disastrous 1986 amnesty, so that next time around Republicans can lose by even bigger margins. But instead of trying to be diverse for the sake of diversity, the GOP might try doing what the other side did, increasing the turnout for its base by actually appealing to them.
The Republican National Convention in 2012 was a study in diversity. It was possibly even more diverse than the Democratic National Convention. It also didn't work.
Diversity is familiar enough to be met with casual contempt. Every company trots out stock photos overflowing with stock minorities so that they can look like America or some part of America. It impresses absolutely no one. "Looking like America" is slang for racial tokenism which is both patronizing and insulting. And it's the least innovative advice that could be imagined.
Common skin color alone does not win elections. If it did, the Republican Party could just push out countless white Democrats in precarious districts by running black candidates against them. The idea that skin color alone is representation is still the law and its emotional resonance is sometimes undeniable, but emotional identification is also based on more than just race. And representation cannot be reduced to racial diversity as a winning strategy.
The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That tops the Democratic Party in the "Looking like California" metrics but doesn't move the political numbers forward.
“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul said. “We need to look more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to appeal to all segments of the country.”
Let's assume that the Republican Party gets people with hair of all sizes, what then? Talking about appealing to the working class is nice, but Rand Paul lost the under $30,000 vote. He tied for the $30,000 to $49,000 vote. He only broke out with the above $50,000 voters. That was the same thing that happened to Romney. And unlike Romney, race couldn't be blamed for those results. Not when Bush decisively won those same voters in Kentucky in 2004.
Politics does run on reciting truisms, but that only works for winning elections, not for election strategies. Election strategies, unlike elections, require actual solutions. Realistic solutions don't depend on making a play for voters that you rarely get. They depend on shoring up your numbers with the voters that you can get.
In 2004, Bush tied Kerry among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. McCain had lost them by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama's biggest margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median household income is $41,962. That's well below the median household income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.
In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can't win the Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America, by margins almost as bad as the ones that they hope to win the Latino vote by.
Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.
Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low- income white voters. In 2011, Republicans had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012 election is what happened to those numbers?
The amnesty sellout is not really about winning elections. Its odds of accomplishing like that are nil. It's about a larger divide between Nationalist Republicans who believe in America as a country and Transnational Republicans who believe in America as a set of economic and political principles that can be applied equally well anywhere in the world.
The Transnational Republicans backed the Arab Spring because they believed democracy could work anywhere, because it worked here. They support open borders, because they believe that economic freedom, like political freedom, can turn any population into Americans. Americans being defined solely by the ability to sell things without government regulation.
Transnational Republicans are a disaster because they don't really accept the concept of American Exceptionalism. Their foreign policy is a disaster because they think that every country will be better if it runs by American rules. Their domestic policy is a disaster because they believe that the entire world would be American if it just got a chance to move to America.
Transnationalists of the left and the right don't view America as a country, but as a political experiment. The American system may be an experiment, but the country isn't. And confusing the two is destructive and dangerous.
Republican Transnationalists keep trying to marry fiscal conservatism with liberalism on most other fronts, sometimes even including foreign policy. Their liberal social policy prescriptions make the country more liberal, even as their fiscal conservatism alienates those same voters. Amnesty is a perfect example of this stupidity in action, legalizing voters in the name of diversity who will reject them on economic grounds.
The TR's might be defensible if their liberal social policies at least won over voters. They don't. Instead they give us the worst of both worlds. Liberal and Transnational Republicans keep insisting that we should do a better job of reaching out to non-traditional voters. But they never succeed in actually doing it. Instead they blame the "radicalism" of the Republican Party for their failures.
The Republican Party does not need to "look like America." That's a Transnational Republican charade. It needs to actually look at America and start trying to relate to the voters that it used to have. And if it can do that, if it can actually find common ground with low-income voters, then it will find that it has increased its share among minority voters as well. It worked for Reagan. It might just work in 2016.
New Hampshire is 94.6% white, 2.9% Latino and 1.3% Black. I don't know the exact diversity statistics for New Hampshire Republicans, but if they get a half-black and half-Latino guy in a wheelchair to run for something, they will probably have covered all the statistical bases.
"We need to grow bigger," Rand Paul said. "If you want to be the party of white people, we're winning all the white votes. We're a diverse nation. We're going to win when we look like America."
Looking like America is common advice these days. What does America look like? For now it still looks more like New Hampshire than like California. And despite that, Democrats scored some big wins in New Hampshire in the last election.
Obama won New Hampshire 52 to 46 and it probably wasn't the black vote that put him over the top. He picked up over 100,000 votes in Hillsborough County, which is 90 percent white. Clearly, despite Rand Paul's optimism, Republicans aren't winning all the white votes in New Hampshire. Or in Kentucky.
Rand Paul's Kentucky looks a lot like New Hampshire. It's 88.9% white. And its white Senator, who did not win all the white votes, decided to visit another white state to tell Republicans there that they needed to look more like America or California. Or someplace like that. Because the white vote was all locked down.
In his 2010 Senate election, Rand Paul won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 86% of the black vote. Two years later, in the national election Romney won 59% of the white vote and his opponent won 93% of the black vote. Both men scored the exact same percentage of the white vote.
Some might try to find a silver lining in that Rand Paul won 13 percent of the black vote, but he wasn't running against a black candidate. In 2004, Bush won 12 percent of the Kentucky black vote. Nearly the same amount as Rand Paul. More importantly, he won 64 percent of the white vote and 58 percent of the female vote to Rand Paul's 51 percent. The female vote is far more important, if you're going to win elections, than picking up minority votes in New Hampshire or Kentucky.
While Rand Paul tours as some sort of expert on winning the minority vote, he has never actually won the minority vote. Similarly Rubio promises that illegal alien amnesty will turn the Latino tide for the GOP, when he could not win a straight majority of the non-Cuban Latino vote in his Senate election.
The Republican Party is suffering from a surplus of self-appointed experts in winning the minority vote who don't actually win the minority vote. Their advice is stupid and destructive.
Romney did not lose because he lost the Latino vote. That's a myth which has been discredited again and again, but still rises from the dead to push for an illegal alien amnesty, five times bigger than the last disastrous 1986 amnesty, so that next time around Republicans can lose by even bigger margins. But instead of trying to be diverse for the sake of diversity, the GOP might try doing what the other side did, increasing the turnout for its base by actually appealing to them.
The Republican National Convention in 2012 was a study in diversity. It was possibly even more diverse than the Democratic National Convention. It also didn't work.
Diversity is familiar enough to be met with casual contempt. Every company trots out stock photos overflowing with stock minorities so that they can look like America or some part of America. It impresses absolutely no one. "Looking like America" is slang for racial tokenism which is both patronizing and insulting. And it's the least innovative advice that could be imagined.
Common skin color alone does not win elections. If it did, the Republican Party could just push out countless white Democrats in precarious districts by running black candidates against them. The idea that skin color alone is representation is still the law and its emotional resonance is sometimes undeniable, but emotional identification is also based on more than just race. And representation cannot be reduced to racial diversity as a winning strategy.
The Republican Party has two Latino senators and one Black senator. That tops the Democratic Party in the "Looking like California" metrics but doesn't move the political numbers forward.
“We need to have black people, brown people, white people, we need to have people with tattoos, without tattoos, with long hair, with short hair, with beards, without beards,” Rand Paul said. “We need to look more like America. We need to appeal to the working class; we need to appeal to all segments of the country.”
Politics does run on reciting truisms, but that only works for winning elections, not for election strategies. Election strategies, unlike elections, require actual solutions. Realistic solutions don't depend on making a play for voters that you rarely get. They depend on shoring up your numbers with the voters that you can get.
In 2004, Bush tied Kerry among the $30,000 to $49,000 voters. In 2012, Romney lost them by 8 percent. McCain had lost them by 7 percent in 2008. Grafton County, the site of Obama's biggest margin of victory in New Hampshire, is 95% white and its median household income is $41,962. That's well below the median household income in the country, but that only hovers a little above $50,000.
In 2000, Bush nearly tied Kerry in Grafton County. In 2008, Obama won it by 63 percent. Instead of looking to see why Republicans can't win the Latino vote, it might be a good idea to see why Republicans have begun losing Grafton County; which looks a whole lot like America, by margins almost as bad as the ones that they hope to win the Latino vote by.
Amnesty for illegal aliens will hit low-income voters hardest. It will punish the very voters that Republicans need in order to win and build up demographics of voters who are not going to vote Republican anyway.
Republicans would be foolish to give up on minority voters, but even more foolish to give up on low- income white voters. In 2011, Republicans had pulled ahead among $30,000 voters, going from 37 to 47 percent since the 2008 election. The real question worth asking about the 2012 election is what happened to those numbers?
The amnesty sellout is not really about winning elections. Its odds of accomplishing like that are nil. It's about a larger divide between Nationalist Republicans who believe in America as a country and Transnational Republicans who believe in America as a set of economic and political principles that can be applied equally well anywhere in the world.
The Transnational Republicans backed the Arab Spring because they believed democracy could work anywhere, because it worked here. They support open borders, because they believe that economic freedom, like political freedom, can turn any population into Americans. Americans being defined solely by the ability to sell things without government regulation.
Transnational Republicans are a disaster because they don't really accept the concept of American Exceptionalism. Their foreign policy is a disaster because they think that every country will be better if it runs by American rules. Their domestic policy is a disaster because they believe that the entire world would be American if it just got a chance to move to America.
Transnationalists of the left and the right don't view America as a country, but as a political experiment. The American system may be an experiment, but the country isn't. And confusing the two is destructive and dangerous.
Republican Transnationalists keep trying to marry fiscal conservatism with liberalism on most other fronts, sometimes even including foreign policy. Their liberal social policy prescriptions make the country more liberal, even as their fiscal conservatism alienates those same voters. Amnesty is a perfect example of this stupidity in action, legalizing voters in the name of diversity who will reject them on economic grounds.The TR's might be defensible if their liberal social policies at least won over voters. They don't. Instead they give us the worst of both worlds. Liberal and Transnational Republicans keep insisting that we should do a better job of reaching out to non-traditional voters. But they never succeed in actually doing it. Instead they blame the "radicalism" of the Republican Party for their failures.
The Republican Party does not need to "look like America." That's a Transnational Republican charade. It needs to actually look at America and start trying to relate to the voters that it used to have. And if it can do that, if it can actually find common ground with low-income voters, then it will find that it has increased its share among minority voters as well. It worked for Reagan. It might just work in 2016.
Comments
Anybody still think we're going to survive until 2016?
ReplyDeleteRand Paul is just another White coward who will do any thing to avoid addressing the major issue. He's like those fools who say Detroit is a smoking ruin because of the "Liberals." Detroit is a smoking ruin because it is populated by nonWhites. To an extent, that is because of the Leftist pathology, but if Detroit was populated by White Leftists, it would still be a livable island of tyranny rather than something that looks worst than Berlin in 1945.
ReplyDeleteThe big obstacle standing in the way of organizing true Americans is that they are overwhelmingly White. Whites have now been demonized by the Left so thoroughly that any effective organization of Whites is doing to be attacked in the treasonous media as being racist. Even organizations that are inadvertently White because of the lack of nonWhite talent or interest are attacked by Leftist goons as being racist.
One of the sources of the Republican Party's impotence has been the fact that the GOP IS the party of White people. That is simply a fact. Since this is almost illegal in today's Leftist tyranny, the GOP spends a huge amount of time and resources trying to appear to NOT be what it is. That means that it is impossible for the GOP to do anything about our biggest problem, third-world immigration. or any other problem for that matter because a lying, traitorous Left has defined every issue in terms of race to the point that our problems cannot even be named.
In order for conservatives to be effectively organized, we are going to have to openly organize as Whites. Openly and unapologetically, we must once again be who we are: The most successful people in history and the inventors of the modern world. Compared to White civilization no one else even comes close; and that includes Asians. We must rediscover that fact and act accordingly.
True. The democrats go into the minority communities and develop relationships. Their supporters then work the neighborhoods for them. This, along with their database makes a big difference. That is the only aspect that I can see that the Republicans emulating. Go find your base and make friends, don't desert them, follow through and get them to the polls. Poll watchers and volunteers seem to be lacking as well. Who will energize them? I like some of Rand's ideas but certainly Ted is increasingly sounding like an American I can vote for. Time will tell. BTW, I am a recovering CA Democrat and not in the 50% tax bracket. Prior to 2008, I did break ranks with the Dems over Prop 187, voting for Buchanan in the primary. Illegal immigration is still a deal breaker for me.
ReplyDeleteAnn
There is a virus going around almost every single developed Western country: we need to side with the minorities. I saw a commentary on the article about Israel you wrote about yesterday: Israel is now one of the few developed countries where the government sides with the majority, and so the majority is thriving. The Republicans need to rid themselves of liberalism and corruption, and stick with their fiscally conservative knitting, the rest will take care of itself.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid the government in Israel doesn't side with the majority... no more than in any other Western country
ReplyDeleteWould be nice if it did
That's too bad. What I meant, and what I think the commentary meant was that they don't go out of their way to scream that the "rights" of the Palestinians are more important than the rights of the Jewish Israelis, and that the "suffering" of the Palestinians needs to be addressed before the survival of Israel can be even discussed. Is that not so?
ReplyDeleteLike most places, Israel is torn between a left that asserts that any minority groups, including and especially Muslim terrorists, are entitled to more rights, etc...
ReplyDeleteAnd a conservative wing that is about as weak and watered down as the Tories or the Republican Party and doesn't do nearly enough to push back
The Israeli public as a whole has one attitude, but it doesn't translate all that far into the government, let alone the bureaucracy, which is as leftist as its European counterparts and makes most of the decisions
Thanks you Daniel. It seems than that the key to the survival of the Western civilization is getting rid of this masochistic desire, at least in the nominally conservative "side of the aisle", to please the minorities as an overriding concern, certainly to the detriment of the majorities. Before it can be fixed it has to be understood. The main thing I can think of is a sort of instinctual recoiling at the kind of destruction that the unabashed nationalism lead to, but it could also be that the deceptive rhetoric of the left calculated to destroy the Western civilization has so seeped into the scenery of the West that it has become hard for even the nominal conservatives to think in a straightforward "we need to serve the majority of the people who elected us" fashion. The Saudi and other corrupt money that makes politicians say and do really odd-seeming things perhaps plays a role as well.
ReplyDeleteIt's a symptom of the left's cultural dominance. Conservatives are largely liberal now. And they accept some liberal ideas as a given. The biggest one that I discussed yesterday is guilt based on revisionist history.
ReplyDeleteEverywhere that the left has penetrated, their ideas have gone with them.
The Republican Party does not need to "look like America", it needs to stand for America. That is, it needs to stand for those principles that made America great. Elected Republican's actions constantly demonstrate that they merely offer lip service to those principles.
ReplyDeleteInclusive yes, compromise of principle, NO!
Inclusiveness is determined by the applicants willingness to embrace the Constitutional principles laid down by the founding fathers.
The left's cultural dominance can only be challenged by superior cultural precepts. The ideals and principles upon which America was founded are those superior cultural precepts.
Cultural assimilation is the key that opens the door to American opportunity.
The left's 'solutions' deny both reality and human nature, thus they cannot in the long run succeed. When they fail, the left always tries to 'double down' and institute ever greater tyranny. The left must react in this manner because the left is essentially a totalitarian movement, its very premises ensure that reality. Only a viable principled alternative that people can turn to has the potential to stop the left.
Yup. Daniel's comments about Israel are right on. Or as an Israeli acquaintance said to me a few years ago during lunch in J-lem, 'there is no right wing here, only left and center.'
ReplyDeleteAnd if you mean by bureaucrats, judges, mayors and also army officials - yes, again. We let Arab nationalists riot for Palestine, and we don't really stop them from beating us up, in some cases...
Larry/Margaliot
Nationalist and Transnational. Succinct and so so true.
ReplyDeleteJerry
Rand and Rubin, a new breed of MoRinos.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff Daniel. Rand Paul should know that there were millions who sat out in 2012. Many of those millions were white. Some were supporters of his father. Many of those supporters of his father that sat it out, were pissed at Romney and the Republican establishment for messing with the rules at the RNC. Many of them were also pissed that the son of Ron Paul would even consider appearing at an RNC for a nominee, whom they believed, cheated Ron Paul out of a nomination. Even though its known to anyone with a thinking mind that Ron Paul helped the Romney campaign and GOPe in securing the nomination. There must have been something in return for that. I think that's where Rand's head is at now. I think he believes that because his father did that for Romney and the GOPe, that he will in fact get the nomination if he just plays good ball with them on some of these hot button issues. Rand Paul isn't foolish, so by him saying all of this about the hispanic vote, that you've demonstrated he knows nothing about, he is clearly doing the bidding of both republican and democrat establishments that want more illegal immigrants in this country so that they can continue on their tax and spend charade on the American people. Therefore Rand Paul, as well with Rubio, is nothing more than a tool of the Beltway establishment and conglomerates such as Microsoft and Google. It makes me think how some on the right still think these men are genuine conservatives or even genuine human beings.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure it's THAT easy to figure out why Rand Paul does anything, but there are several factors to consider:
-He is devious. His contradictory statements about his support for Amnesty and his trip to Israel pretty much prove that.
-He is in a difficult situation. He is trying to appeal to the Tea Partiers, Paultards, Hispanics, Blacks, Jews all at the same time and that can't be done well.
-He seemed to have made a strategic decision to publicly be in the anti-RINO camp. He also often uses fairly harsh, authentic-seeming conservative language against various administration officials. It will be very difficult for him to remain even remotely credible while both doing that and being an obvious tool of the establishment. The conglomerates are only in an alliance of convenience with the real establishment as far as the illegals are concerned, they simply want skilled immigration and supporting Amnesty is a price they have to pay to achieve it. It's not yet clear who exactly is pulling Rand Paul's strings.
I find him too contradictory of a figure to have a good chance for the nomination. He just doesn't seem like a skilled enough actor to fool everyone he needs to fool unlike Obama.
I think it is time for the Republican Party to split up, much as the Whig Party did in 1854. The Republican Party was formed in the resulting turbulence and six years later they had a President in the White House. A Conservative exodus from the Republican Party may be the best thing to happen to America in a long time as, currently, Republicans see little reason to woo Conservatives. They just throw them a bone now and then.
ReplyDeleteThe Right is already disintegrating in Europe. Just look at Britain or France. The division is between internationalist right and nationalist/isolationalist right. Currently, the Republican Party represents just several rich people, looking for lower taxes and illegal labour. And btw these rich guys have quite liberal lifestyle. They dont care about "values","tradition" or "religion", just about low taxes. They are quite happy with gay marriage or open borders. Just see the british "elite" conservatives who are already supporting gay marriage and fighting "climate change". These are just a bunch of decadent rich people who don't give a damn about values, immigration, etc. And why should they care? They live well. I guess thats what it matters for most of them.
ReplyDeleteBut what about the millions with socially conservative values? Who will represent them?
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