Election Demographics: It's Not Your Father's Country Anymore: Never Was

Augustus Sherman, Photographer, Ellis Island. New Americans, getting off the boat.


When Republican analysts pronounced the reason for their convincing shellacking on November 6, it was not a failure of policy, or a problem with their own core values. What beat them, the pundits opined,  was not a better candidate, but a worse electorate, or, put in politically acceptable trope:  Demographics.  

Everyone from Mike Hukabee to Mitt Romney to Karl Rove, shook their heads and said dolefully, this country and its voters just ain't what they used to be, and that's a damn shame.

That white, male, Christian, Anglo Saxon stalwart of THE AMERICAN DREAM, was no longer in the voting majority. 

Instead, you got the working woman, single or divorced, who tended to vote Democratic. (Married women tended to vote Republican, for reasons we can only imagine.) Blacks, Hispanics voted overwhelmingly Democratic, despite their deeply conservative views on gay marriage, despite Hispanic Catholicism, which tends to impose a predilection toward authoritarianism. 

In fact there was  only dependable group for Mitt Romney:  the white male. This is supposed to be something we ought to all understand and accept as the world as it ought to be.  Mitt Romney, after all is white; if he were  any more white, he'd be transparent (to steal a line from The Wire) .

The white male, whether he was voting from the deepest, darkest reaches of those stinky swamps of ignorance--Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North Florida--or from middle Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Montana or Idaho, the white male could be counted on to vote against the Black man. Which is as it ought to be, we are told.

Of course, Bill Clinton used to say, with a misty look in his eye,  and a dreamy smile on his face,   in our lifetime the country would become majority non white. In electoral politics, that may have already happened.

Somewhere in the badlands of Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, there are, no doubt, white supremacists who are retreating to woodland redoubts, stockpiling AK 47's and grenade launchers, and maybe even tanks painted to look like Sheriff Joe Arpaio's tank, preparing for, anticipating with some glee,  the imminent racial Armageddon. 

But, the fact is, there are important, densely populated parts of America which always have been a chimera--where very different looking peoples from very different parts of the world with very different belief systems have always lived together, with greater or lesser success, but with remarkable harmony, or at least in a working relationship and with tolerance.  Images of Cossacks, Africans, little Dutch children coming off the boats at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th attest to this visible diversity. 

We are not the only nation in the world which has made this sort of flux and variety work, but we are probably the biggest. 

That much romanticized Ozzie and Harriett past the Huckabees and Roves dote on is delusion. The variety has always been there, or at least it's been there for the past 150 years; it was  just never promulgated. I well remember, in the 1960's, when people first started pointing out there were no Negroes on T.V., not even in advertisements, and certainly, beyond the exceptional character in Spanky and Our Gang, or the characateurs of Amos and Andy,  there were no real people of color on any of the three networks our country tuned into at night. It's not that colored world did not exist in this country; it's just that those people were invisible in polite company, and they could not vote and they could not work freely. 

What has happened over time is not some new invasion--people who are not from Britain, Ireland, France and Germany have been coming for generations; there have been Eastern Europeans, southern Mediterranean types, Northern Africans, Sub Saharan Africans, Asians, Pacific Islanders,-- but, finally, what is new is there is a recognition these people now count.