I’m not a data geek like Nate Silver. Look at his little joke, a play on the Romney campaign’s (purloined) slogan ‘Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.’
Clear algorithms. Full spreadsheets. 91% chance of winning.
— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) November 9, 2012
Tee hee.
Anyway, so I’m not a data genius, nor do I pretend to be one. I’m an enthusiast, a dilettante. But even I can see the Republican Party has a problem:
Big difference! (image: Slate - click)
This visualisation from a Slate article by Tom Scocca: Eighty-Eight Percent of Romney Voters Were White — The GOP candidate’s race-based, monochromatic campaign made him a loser issues a challenge for the GOP to get relevant. And quick.
The Southern White constituency (conspiracy?) we’ve talked about here before appears to be seen as racist and sexist and homophobic. Fiscal conservatism and social conservatism are not the same thing.
Unlike some, I don’t have the energy or interest in pulling together wrong-headed predictions and gloating over their humiliation. (Not even those of Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Donald Trump.)
I’m sure the Republicans will take lessons out of this defeat and regroup.
It seems to me a ‘more of the same, only harder, faster’ approach won’t work.
This article by Nate Silver writing in his fivethirtyeight blog at the NY Times is worth a read:
As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage
– P
I think your observations are a little nieve in the extreme.
These demographics have a lot to say … if you have the ears to hear.
Obama won … this time … a man who has done NOTHING … despite what michael moore says about his (obamas) need to stop compromising with the elite (which is true)
You are like many Pete … a player of video games .. an IPad generation … playing with the possibilities inbetween tweets and mocchacinos on the boulevard.
You just dont see what is coming.
That Demographic analysis should be cause for alarm on all sides of the equation.
So, tell me: what’s coming?
Take a look at Spain and the rest of europe.
I was being bullying and unfair to you personally for which i apologise (i like picking on you).
Look at the late 1920’s and the 1930’s and you will see what is coming.
Only this time – it will be much worse and it will span the globe top to bottom
Another interesting breakdown – Bush had more Mormon votes than Romney.
Magic underpants? Yeah, right!
Got a link for that? A breakdown by religious affiliation …?
Of course.
http://www.pewforum.org/Politics-and-Elections/How-the-Faithful-Voted-2012-Preliminary-Exit-Poll-Analysis.aspx
Thanks. In the meantime I saw the fewer-Mormans-voted-for-Mitt stat referred to in this rather incendiary interchange On Bill Maher’s show where Andrew Sullivan clashed with SE Cupp.
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/andrew-sullivan-and-s-e-cupp-clash-over-gay-marriage-mormonism-on-real-time/
James Carviille’s line about the GOP copping a ‘pine on skull’ moment which WILL get their attention was colourful, too.
A very different take on the voter breakdown here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9668774/America-has-become-an-Old-World-country.html
“The United States has now acquired an electorally powerful liberal bourgeoisie who are convinced, as their European counterparts have been for several generations, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that public spending is inherently virtuous, that poverty can be cured by penalising wealth creation, and that government intervention can engineer social “fairness”. But just when some of Europe’s political class has begun to appreciate the dangers of this philosophy – that taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to economic stagnation and social division – America seems to have decided that it is the quintessence of enlightened sophistication.
This is precisely the model – the Gordon Brown vision of government as omnipotent benefactor and purveyor of “social justice” – from which we in Britain are attempting to escape, and in which the EU is still hopelessly trapped. But it should run deeply against all the traditional American values of ferocious self-reliance and personal aspiration. How does the resentment of the rich, which Obama’s campaign fostered so successfully, sit with the old American dream that the United States was a place where anybody who had talent and worked hard could become rich – even if he had arrived as a penniless immigrant? The idea of “the rich” as an unreachable and undeserving class apart is an Old World concept rooted in the landed, hereditary wealth of an established aristocracy. Almost all wealth in America was, traditionally, self-made.”
Indeed, I have argued that the elitist liberal bourgeoisie are very dangerous – perhaps more dangerous than the militant left.
Be careful what you wish for!
Rgds,
*p*
Thanks for sharing.
Oh dear. Talk about sour grapes and filtering reality
Ms Daley chirps about ‘class hatred’ — who was it that wrote off 47% of the US population as ‘lacking personal responsibility for their lives’ etc?
Ms Daley, who in early November was writing “Romney can still win – and he deserves to” appears to be dealing with her partisan grief. I don’t say this cruelly — I daresay I would be facing similar feelings had the result been reversed.
She is completely correct, as far as I can see, in her view that the election was about ‘identity’. The GOP has allowed itself to be diminished by its ginger group Tea Party into a socially-intrusive, reality-denying dinosaur. (Not that it is condemned to remain so.)
But this: “this philosophy – that taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to economic stagnation and social division”
How is THAT ‘the logical conclusion’?
And the section before that, alleging President Obama has “polarised the nation racially in a way that it has not been for half a century, reversing what had been the progressive trend toward real social integration and colour blindness in American political life.” is, surely, a joke?
Perhaps it’s just a POV thing, but as I see ii, it’s been the opposition-at-all-costs, the racist element of the GOP and their determination that ‘this president fails’, the ‘normalising’ of exploiters like Glenn Beck ignorantly spouting that ‘this president has a deep-seated hatred of white people’ — generating this sort of dumb racist hate:
http://gawker.com/5959209/woman-who-called-for-nigger-obamas-assassination-in-viral-facebook-post-confronted-by-news-crew-is-officially-the-worst-person-in-the-world
And as for Ms Daley’s comment:
But if non-white ethnic groups are choosing to segregate themselves electorally – quite often with little regard for their actual economic or social interests – white voters are not. Only 59 per cent of them supported Romney: a majority but not an overwhelming one.
Words fail me.
She appears to think, as she is entitled to, that the GOP lost because they put up a poor candidate. Fair enough. Isn’t that another way of saying the better candidate on the day won? … which is what we got to here:
http://www.thepaepae.com/four-more-years/26422/comment-page-1/#comment-20629
Peter,
On the partianship issue, I suspect that Janet is no more partisan than the multiple NY Times articles that you link to. Perhaps she is arguably less partisan (not being American).
With respect, I sense that you miss the main point of the article. Perhaps this is because you live in New Zealand, rather than Europe…
What we see here is countries that previously led the world declining at a terrifying rate, with no bottom in sight. It is conceivable that Greece could become a 3rd world country. Portugal and Spain could follow. Even former old world giants such as France and Britain are not immune from risk of wholesale economic collapse.
The question is – how did these shocking circumstances come to pass in Europe?
I agree with Janet.
It has happened because Europe had a vision of government as omnipotent benefactor and purveyor of “social justice” – the policy of welfare for all. Government has risen in size and scope in unrelenting fashion for 100 years, as sickly liberals have insisted that all the problems in the world could be solved by more and more fat bureaucrats.
Asia and the US have traditionally relied upon, as Janet says, “ferocious self-reliance and personal aspiration” to drive economic growth.
Obama’s US is copying the European big government model. Given enough time, this would end one way (look at the misery in Greece).
The fortunate point is Obama only has four more years. We can but hope that the American culture of “ferocious self-reliance and personal aspiration” survives the ongoing assaults of big government.
If not, the West is lost?
Rgds,
*p*
Thanks for your comments.
What about the theory that the ‘decline’ of world-leading Europe (and a parallel with the USA) has more to do with greedy capitalists selling out – ‘out-sourcing’ – their creative/productive industries to Far East sweatshops, throwing ‘uncompetitive’ workers (and whole regions) on the scrapheap while paying mere lip service to patriotism?
The naked, myopic, self-interested pursuit of profits has led to repeated decisions which have seen the industrial power of Europe (and the US and other parts of the world) wilfully, rationally migrated to low wage economies.
Surely, that is a concrete factor in Europe’s loss of economic competitiveness (and employment!) every bit as relevant to the discussion as your and Janet’s purported concerns about ‘big government’, ‘fat bureaucrats’ and ‘entitlement mentality’ on behalf of the undercut workers.
I’m no Marxist, as you know (neither is President Obama, as I read him) but it seems to me that at least in part Europe’s economic collapse is a result of decisions made by European capitalists and their bean counters disregarding the social costs of gutting local industries with their ‘expensive’ workers to pursue a lower unit cost via slave-type workers in Asia.
Are stupidly unrealistic public service pensions and worker conditions a factor too? Yes, of course.
The other ‘social decay’ aspects often cited by hand-wringing small c conservatives: multiculturalism, women’s lib, abandonment of religion, even intellectual property theft — are small change compared to this greed-fuelled trend-turned-into-tidal-wave, in my view.
Could, for example, Apple electronic products be made ‘economically’ in the USA today? Like Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard calculators were made in the 1970s? Not for the same price, no … but the same quality? At what cost to the country’s well-being do American capitalists outsource its productive sector?
Quite a high one, it seems to me.
The irony of California or Iowa etc weloming a Toyota plant to the state after the Japanese car industry undercut the US auto workers on every level — cost, quality, efficiency – is jarring.
Italians rightly get steamed about Chinese counterfeiting of their luxury brands, (likewise the French and Swiss – ‘copy Rolex’ is almost a brand of its own). But they’re backing a losing proposition aren’t they?
US tax-evading ‘patriots’ (like Mitt Romney?) gutted the US industry, doing as the UK’s Robert Maxwell did with newspapers — buying companies to get their hands on the worker pension plans and dismembering them for quick profit.
That, or seeking to transfer the nation’s wealth onto private balance sheets through brainless, monopolistic military-related expenditure … or the ‘socialism’ of publicly funded bank bailouts when, oh dear, free market capitalism hits the rocks.
Short term gain for the few, long term, generational loss for the many.
The West is not lost. The West has been sold. (Or sold out?)
– P
Update: I’ve just heard a figure on the radio that 30 million jobs have disappeared worldwide since 2007 as a result of improved technology. Such structural change is overwhelming socially.
I agree with Peter.
The west has been sold.
Sickly liberals morphing into neo-liberal types have successfully accomplished it.
Hi Peter,
I am not a fan of Marxist “race to the bottom” theories.
Firstly, underlying this view seems to me to be a sense of entitlement.
Why should the Third World languish away on $1 a day, while the West enjoys all the fruits of development that capital can provide?
What has actually happened since the capitalist revolution in China circa 1980 is that more people have been dragged out of poverty that any other time in the history of humanity. The do gooders achieved virtually nothing in this respect (Bono et al). The real action with regards to progress in “making poverty history” came from the transition in China / India / rest of asia from being State managed to capitalist run. This fact wounds the sickly liberal, but nonetheless this is the case.
I do not begrudge the opportunity for my fellow members of humanity in Asia to improve their circumstances through hard work. Capital provides opportunity. Let them participate.
The West needs to compete.
Some countries in the West can and do compete and trade successfully with Asia. Others country’s politicians seem to believe they are entitled to first rate health care, top notch education facilities et al, despite the fact that their economy cannot afford to pay for it. To have great social programmes, a country should first earn the income to fund this lifestyle.
If the West’s people won’t work as hard as Asia, why do they deserve the social programmes more than Asian people?
My second issue with the “race to the bottom” theories is that they have a whiff of racism.
The sickly liberal typically loves battling for black rights in the US (this is über trendy!).
However, the poor in Asia are viewed very differently by the sicklies – these inscrutable Asians are supermen workers that will take our jobs and lifestyle away. We can’t hope to compete with them, so shut them out and shut them down at all costs. It is fair game to sneer at Asians.
Public Enemy had an album entitled “Fear of a black planet.” Actually, the fear of the sickly liberal is of a yellow planet.
A culture where the family hasn’t outsourced its responsibility to the State (Westerm “welfare for all” policies) is anathema to the sickly liberal Statist. Secretly, they hope Asia will eventually adopt the big government / welfare for all/ entitlement mentality that has grown popular in the West.
I hope not. The defeatism is not necessary. As Asia grows, so does global demand. All boats can rise.
For the world to enjoy economic boom together, all that is needed is for the sicklies to lose their entitlement mentality, and realise that the world does not owe them a living.
Rgds,
*p*
Gee, this reply from you feels like you’re debating a caricature.
‘sicklies’? Marxists? ‘entitlement mentality’? ‘racists’?
Of course the West needs to compete. My point was the economic stagnation that Europe etc face(s) is not just a result of bloated government and rampantly unaffordable social welfare costs, but also generations of cost-cutting and out-sourcing of production by capitalists seeking to use cheaper, less-regulated (in all sorts of ways) labour and factories elsewhere.
Why for instance is ship-building no longer carried out in Ireland? Because the Irish industry was (rationally) undercut by factories elsewhere with cheaper more compliant labour, perhaps?
How has globalisation helped the West? Really?
I don’t know what the Marxist “race to the bottom” theories actually are. Do you somehow conflate what I’m saying with them? Please explain.
– P
The nuremburg trials were about a “sense of entitlement” too.
The right to life and fair crack at living as it were.
The world does owe something to those that tread its earth .. and china is no example to quote from .. nor is India. Everyone that can – appears to be trying to get out of those countries as fast as they can.
To the decadent west …???
No one is sneering at asians or anyone else .. do you want to live and have a job or dont you.