got another postcard the other day, how the Election Commission is trying out ranked choice voting on this race and another one...

Related and VERY well said:

This too, great point:

Dump of  mixed interesting commentary on woke related issues that these kind of people don't like, and which I found thought-provoking (Keep in mind woke theology is mostly a creation of the educated liberal elites):

see thread:

Why Democrats Are Losing Non-White Voters Politics – and our political assumptions – are changing, from Britain to America

Includes intriguing comparison with Labour Party and minority vote across the pond at the end. My underlining of what I think are well-said points.

By Faisal Al Yafai @ Newslines Magazine, March 8. Faisal Al Yafai is the executive editor of Newlines

[....] Glance across the Atlantic: The experience of white, working-class communities in the United Kingdom with Brexit shows that even voting blocs that have endured for decades can be broken apart. It just takes the right issue.

The idea that voters of color could really desert the Democrats might seem extraordinary. The two major non-white groups in the United States, Black people and Hispanic/Latinos, overwhelmingly voted for Biden; in the case of Black people, 87%, in the case of Latinos, 65%. (“Hispanic” and “Latino” are contested terms, and polling companies often use them interchangeably.)

That the Republican Party could completely peel away such support is fanciful. Certainly, in the case of Black voters that would appear impossible: Would the Black community really turn its back on the party that gave the country the first Black president and may well field a Black female presidential candidate in four years?

But voting blocs can fragment. Peeling away an entire voting bloc may be difficult, but splintering one may be possible. Of course, individuals will often vote based on their personal circumstances, and successful Black doctors or Hispanic entrepreneurs may well hesitate over the Democrat box if it meant higher taxes on their wealth.

But wider voting blocs can also fragment, depending on which part of their identity the group ranks higher at a particular point or which aspect of the candidate’s record is highlighted. Black voters, for example, may well have been pleased to see Biden continue President Barack Obama’s legacy – but in a different political context, they might have focused more on Biden’s own legacy of supporting tough criminal justice legislation in the 1990s, which fell disproportionately on communities of color.

The fragmentation could also come over which political values are emphasized and whom the Democratic Party is perceived to be for because a lot of Black and Hispanic voters who vote Democratic don’t automatically see themselves as liberal.

An intriguing survey of Pew Research Center data published at the start of 2020, but based on surveys in 2019, found that more Black Democratic voters called themselves moderate (43%) or conservative (25%), than liberal (29%). It was similar among Hispanic Democratic voters: More described themselves as moderate (38%) or conservative (22%) than liberal (37%). (The ratio was flipped for white Democratic voters: There a majority (55%) called themselves liberal.)

What does that mean? Taken together, it means that the majority of Black and Hispanic voters who voted for the main liberal party do.n’t even see themselves as liberal. It means they are voting for the Democratic Party for reasons other than its perceived liberalism

Perhaps the starkest example of these shifting demographics was the change in the Latino vote for Trump. Yes, Biden took the majority of that vote – but almost exactly a third, 32% according to the New York Times’ exit poll, went to Trump. The numbers fall differently depending on the pollsters, but the overall conclusion is stark: Not only did a third of Latinos vote for Donald Trump – but more Latinos, after four years of his presidency, voted for him in 2020 than in 2016.

In seeking to explain this, Geraldo L. Cadava, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote in The Atlantic after the election that “Trump understood what motivated his Latino supporters – economic individualism, religious liberty, and law and order – and he made sure they knew he did.”

On many significant topics, the Republicans speak the language of voters of color better than the Democrats.

This is what Democrats should be most afraid of. Far from voters of color having no home in the Republican Party, in fact on many significant topics, the Republicans speak the language of voters of color better than the Democrats: on family, faith, and law and order; on individual responsibility; on small government.

These are political topics that Republicans are currently associated with – and they are topics that matter a great deal to many communities of color, especially immigrant communities.

There are many millions of Arabs, Africans, and Asians who immigrated to America for whom family is at the core of their identity; many Christians and Muslims from immigrant backgrounds would consider their faith an essential identity.

Individual responsibility – that most unalluring of political subjects – matters a great deal to those who left their own countries behind, came with very little, and worked hard to get an education and a career or a business. These issues should not be underestimated, and Democrats should be wary of leaving the field clear to Republicans – even if, as seems likely for the foreseeable future, the opposition party appears mainly focused on arguing among itself.

Even terms such as socialism can be weaponized, appealing to one demographic but repulsing another. For many young, white liberals in the U.S., socialism is not associated with the authoritarianism of the Cold War era but with Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, giving workers a greater stake in their companies, fighting for a Green New Deal, and creating a fairer society.

But for people who have lived in socialist countries, socialism means something different. There were actual socialist governments in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. Many of those who fled those governments came to the United States. They remember the sharp end of socialism: the queues and bureaucracy, the confiscation of their businesses, having the schools of their children decided for them. Most of them have no wish to return to socialism, however agreeable the messenger, however embellished and adorned the policies.

Liberals who don’t believe such a political pole reversal could happen among voters of color need only glance across the Atlantic to the experience of socially conservative, white, working-class voters in the U.K., especially in England. This is a political bloc that for decades voted staunchly in favor of one political party – until they didn’t.

In 2019, the Conservative government won a resounding victory, in large part by taking seats from Labour across its “red wall.” (The color of the Labour Party’s logo is red.) These were solidly Labour-voting seats in the Midlands and the north of England, mainly, though not exclusively, working-class communities that had rarely or never in their history voted for a Conservative government. And yet they flipped – and flipped so comprehensively that just a year later a study by the Labour Party into those seats it lost concluded they may have been “lost for good.”

What changed? Inevitably, many things. But while there was a “long retreat” over many years in those seats from the Labour Party, the final straw was an issue that came out of the blue: Brexit, the departure of the U.K. from the European Union. That was one specific issue, but for voters in these seats it crystallized many of their concerns and fears over many years.

In northern seats, there was a sense that the Labour Party was too London-centric, too concerned with the issues of the metropolis in the south, too little connected to the values of family, patriotism, and aspiration – issues that these northern voters cared about and which coalesced around the topic of Brexit. Suddenly, a vote for that party, long thought inevitable, became impossible.

Can the Democrats hope a similar issue won’t appear? That a similar “long retreat” from communities of color might not one day – suddenly – become apparent? That the issues on which left-wing Democrats are most vulnerable – faith, the military, and a sense that some in the party value questions of identity over hard questions of the economy – might not one day crystallize, and the party’s own “red wall” made up of communities of color might not crumble? That the Republicans – whisper it – won’t one day stop talking about race?

Such hope would be profoundly dangerous. The Republicans are now locked into a narrow conversation. But one day, the party will no longer be a mere vehicle for Donald Trump. It could reemerge as a dynamic, modern party that speaks to young people and communities of color. On that day, the political consensus might be overturned, as it was in the U.K. by Brexit, and a Republican wave might punch holes in the Democrats’ own “red wall.”

A Morgan Stanley ad I just ran across. Just because: it's the kind of stuff I see all the time:

Democrats Are Anxious About 2022 — and 2024 The fretting starts with the party’s declining share of the Hispanic vote, but it doesn’t end there. IMPORTANT RELATED ARTICLE COPIED IN FULL FOR FAIR USE PERSONAL RESEARCH

By Thomas B. Edsall @ NYTimes.com, March 10

In the wake of the 2020 election, Democratic strategists are worried — very worried — about the future of the Hispanic vote. One in 10 Latinos who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016 switched to Donald Trump in 2020.

Although the Hispanic electorate is often treated as a bloc, it is by no means a monolith. It is, in fact, impossible to speak of “the Hispanic vote” — in practice it is variegated by region, by country of origin, by ideology, by how many generations have lived in the United States, by depth of religiosity (and increasingly denomination), as well as a host of other factors.

From 1970 to 2019, the number of Latinos in the United States increased from 9.6 million to 60.6 million, according to Pew Research. The number is projected by the census to reach 111.2 million, or 28 percent of the nation’s population, by 2060.

Public Opinion Strategies, which conducts surveys for NBC News/Wall Street Journal, provided me with data on presidential voting from 2012 to 2020 that show significant Republican gains among the roughly 30 percent of Black and Hispanic voters who self-identify as conservative.

From 2012 to 2020, Black conservatives shifted from voting 88-7 for the Democratic candidate to 76-17. Black conservative allegiance to the Democratic Party fell by less, from 75 percent Democratic, 9 percent Republican to 71 percent Democratic, 16 percent Republican.

The changes in voting and partisan allegiance, however, were significantly larger for self-identified Hispanic conservatives. Their presidential vote went from 49-39 Democratic in 2012 to 67-27 Republican in 2020. Their partisan allegiance over the same period went from 50-37 Democratic to 59-22 Republican.

The 2020 expansion of Republican voting among Hispanics and Asian-Americans — and to a lesser extent among African-Americans — deeply concerns the politicians and strategists seeking to maintain Democratic control of the House and Senate in 2022, not the mention the White House in 2024.

The defection of Hispanic voters, together with an approximately 3 point drop in Black support for Joe Biden compared with Hillary Clinton, threatens a pillar of Democratic competitive strength, especially among Black men: sustained high margins of victory among minority voters whose share of the population is enlarging steadily.

The increased level of support for the Republican Party among minority voters has raised the possibility that the cultural agenda pressed by another expanding and influential Democratic constituency — well-educated, young activists with strongly progressive views — is at loggerheads with the socially conservative beliefs of many older minority voters — although liberal economic policies remain popular with both cohorts. This social and cultural mismatch, according to some observers, is driving a number of minority voters into the opposition party.

Joshua Estevan Ulibarri, a partner in the Democratic polling firm, Lake Research, argues that a substantial number of Latinos do not view themselves as people of color, reject a political alliance based on that bond and “want to be seen as white or as part of the mainstream.”

Ulibarri emailed me to say that he believes that “Hispanics see what white America has done to Black America, and the backlash leads to more G.O.P. votes.”

In shifting their vote from Democratic to Republican, Ulibarri contends, “it is not just partisan identity they are shedding, but also some racial identity as well.” In the past, “they may have been conservative and Latino, but you were Latino first and the way you were treated as a group and discriminated against trumped some ideology. Now, less so.”

The Democratic Party, Ulibarri said, is responsible in part for the losses it has suffered:

It is not just conservative men who have drifted away from Democrats. More and more younger people are identifying less with my party not because they are Republican or conservative, but because Democrats do not keep their word; Democrats are weak. And who wants to align with the weak?

Ian F. Haney López, a law professor at Berkeley, who wrote about the danger to the Democrats of Hispanic defections in a September 2020 Times oped, expanded his argument in an email on the Lake Research study of Hispanic voters, which found most Latinos fell into three categories.

The first, roughly a quarter of the Hispanic population, is made up of those who self-identify as people of color, according to the study, “as a group that, like African Americans, remains distinct over generations.”

The second, roughly a third, are Hispanics who see themselves “as a group that, like European Americans, over generations become part of the American mainstream.” By a margin of 38-14, “this cohort is almost three times as likely to believe that ‘people of color who cannot get ahead are mostly responsible for their own situations,’ ” according to the report.

The third Hispanic constituency, nearly three in ten, is made up of “bootstrappers” who “perceive Hispanics, not primarily as people of color or as white ethnics, but as a group that ‘over generations can get ahead through hard work.’ ” These voters tend to be “slightly more conservative regarding race, class, and government, and are the most likely to be Republican.”

The Lake Research survey produced an unexpected result: Latinos were more sympathetic than either white or Black voters to Republican “dog whistle” messages.

The dog whistle messages tested by Lake Research included:

Taking a second look at illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs, is just common sense. And so is fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.

And

We need to make sure we take care of our own people first, especially the people who politicians have cast aside for too long to cater to whatever special interest groups yell the loudest or riot in the street.

The receptivity of Hispanics to such messages led Haney-López to conclude that “those Latinos most likely to vote Republican do so for racial reasons.”

What matters most, Haney-López continued, “is susceptibility to Republican ‘dog whistle’ racial frames that trumpet the threat from illegal aliens, rapists, rioters and terrorists.”

Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, offered a distinct but similar explanation for the increased Hispanic support for Republicans.

“What may be changing is how certain ethnic and nationality groups within Hispanics perceive themselves with regards to their racial and ideological identities,” she wrote by email:

If Latinos perceive themselves more as white than as a person of color, then they will react to messages about racial injustice and defunding the police as whites do — by using their ideological identity rather than racial identity to shape support.

Wronski reports that

there is also a burgeoning line of research on the role of skin tone among non-Whites. Nonwhites who perceive themselves as having lighter skin tone feel closer to whites and tend to be more conservative than their darker-skinned peers.

Wronski made the case that conservative Hispanics who voted Republican in 2020 are not permanently lost to the Democratic Party:

Identifying as a conservative and supporting conservative policy positions are not the same thing. This is especially true for economic issues, such as unemployment benefits and minimum wage. If you know that a group of Latinos tend to be symbolically conservative and economically liberal, then you can make appeals to them on the shared economic liberalism basis and avoid pointing out diverging views on social issues.

Marc Farinella, a former Democratic consultant who helped run many statewide campaigns in the Midwest and is now at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, wrote in response to my inquiry that the fraying of Hispanic support is emblematic of a larger problem confronting Democrats:

American politics in recent decades has become increasingly democratized. Historically-marginalized groups have been brought into the political process, and this, of course, improves representation. But democratization has also, for better or for worse, been highly disruptive to our two-party system.

Traditionally, “party leaders tend to support centrist polices and candidates; they are, after all, in the business of winning general elections,” he continued:

However, the ability of party leaders to set the party’s priorities and define its values has been eroded. They must now compete with activist factions that have been empowered by digital technologies that have greatly amplified their messaging.

As a result, Farinella wrote,

It’s now less clear to general election voters precisely what are the Democratic Party’s values and priorities. Last year, Republicans succeeded in exploiting this ambiguity by insisting that the messaging of certain leftist activist factions was an accurate reflection of the Party’s policy positions and, by and large, the policy positions of most Democratic candidates. As far left activists compete with Democratic Party leaders to define party values and messaging, the centrist voters needed to achieve a durable majority will remain wary about Democratic desires for dominance.

On the other hand, according to Farinella, “the lunacy currently underway within the Republican Party” could prove to be the Democratic Party’s ace in the hole:

A party that demands fealty to a single demagogic politician, condones or even embraces loopy conspiracy theories, recklessly undermines crucial democratic norms and institutions, and believes the best way to improve its electoral prospects is by making it more difficult to vote is not a party destined for long-term success. If the Republican Party continues on its current path, center-right voters might decide that their only real options are to vote Democratic or stay home.

Farinella acknowledged that “this might just be wishful thinking.”

Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, is concerned that liberal elites may threaten the vulnerable Democratic coalition:

The question for parties is whether members of their coalition are a liability because they repel other voters from the coalition. For Democrats, this may increasingly be the case with college-educated whites. They are increasingly concentrated into large cities, which mitigates their electoral impact, and they dominate certain institutions, such as universities and the media.The views emanating from these cities and institutions are out of step with a large portion of the electorate.

Many of these well-educated urban whites don’t “seem to appreciate the urgency of the struggles of middle and low-income Americans,” Enos continued:

Most of them support, in theory, economically progressive agendas like minimum wage increases and affordable housing, but they don’t approach these issues with any urgency — even Covid relief and environmental protection take a back seat to a progressive agenda focused on social issues.

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, whose firm, North Star Opinion Research, has studied Hispanic partisan allegiance, wrote in an email that Latinos are far more flexible in their voting than African-Americans:

As a general rule, about 50 percent of Hispanics vote fairly consistently for Democrats, 25 percent vote for Republicans and the remaining 25 percent are up for grabs.

In the Latino electorate, Ayres said, “many are sensitive to charges of socialism because of their country of origin. Many are sensitive to law-and-order issues. And many are cultural conservatives, as Reagan argued years ago.”

As a result, Ayres continued,

When white liberal Democrats start talking about defunding the police, the Green New Deal and promoting policies that can be described as socialistic, they repel a lot of Hispanic voters. In other words, most Hispanics, like most African-Americans, are not ideological liberals.

The current level of concern has been sharply elevated by a series of widely publicized interviews with David Shor, a 29-year-old Democratic data scientist whose analyses have captured the attention of Democratic elites.

In brief, Shor makes the case that well-educated largely white liberals on the left wing of the party have pushed an agenda — from “socialism” to “defund the police” — far outside the mainstream, driving conservative and centrist minority voters into the arms of the opposition.

In the summer of 2020, Shor told New York magazine,

following the emergence of “defund the police” as a nationally salient issue, support for Biden among Hispanic voters declined. We raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on. And then, as a result, these conservative Hispanic voters who’d been voting for us despite their ideological inclinations started voting more like conservative whites.

In Shor’s analysis:

As Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment.’ So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.

In an interview March 3, also with New York magazine, Shor noted that “I don’t think a lot of people expected Donald Trump’s G.O.P. to have a much more diverse support base than Mitt Romney’s did in 2012. But that’s what happened.”

Robert M. Stein, a political scientist at Rice, argued that the 2020 shift to the right among Hispanic voters was driven more by a surge of new voters than by increased ideological voting. Stein wrote by email:

Accompanying the Hispanic shift to Trump and the Republican Party was an increase in Hispanic voter turnout in Texas and in other states with significant Hispanic populations i.e., Florida, Arizona and New Mexico. There is evidence, at least in Texas that a significant portion of new Hispanic voters over 2016 occurred among registered Hispanic male voters over 45 who had not voted in 2016 and 2018. Moreover, it was these older male Hispanics who voted for Trump and down ballot Republicans at significantly greater proportions than all other Hispanics.

These new voters

remembered how strong the economy was before Covid-19 and associated Trump’s candidacy and re-election with a return to a strong economy and their own economic prosperity. Evaluating these new older Hispanic voters through the prism of ideology or even race may be premature or simply wrong.

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, replied to my query by pointing to developments over the long term:

We have known for decades about the social conservatism of Black voters (e.g., they voted against gay marriage when it was on the California ballot) and Latinos (e.g., they voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the recall election even though Cruz Bustamante was on the ballot). What has changed is that the Democrats have become the secular party since Jimmy Carter and the Republicans the religious party. Nonwhite social conservatism kicks in with LGBTQ, transgender bathroom issues and the like.

What is newer, Cain continued, “is the rise of Antifa and the boldness of progressivism.” Cain pointed out that

Now we have Democratic candidates calling themselves democratic socialists, a term which I doubt any but a few voters could define. In addition, the progressive wing has put forward proposals for expansions of spending and government for Medicare for all, free tuition for college, new forms of political correctness and the like, and eagerly embrace unworkable ideas like defund the police.

The real point, Cain concluded, “is that Democrats set themselves up for losses if they do not pay attention to the realities of public opinion.”

I asked a top Democratic strategist — who declined to speak for attribution at the request of his employer — about the argument that as “white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.”

The strategist contends that the argument that “Democrats are alienating voters with their cultural liberalism” is off base. Shor and others, he says,

take for granted that the defecting voters are getting their view of the Democrats from Twitter. In fact, they aren’t. If you look at Democratic advertising in 2020, for example, you’ll see that the overwhelming proportion of Democratic ad spending was not about culturally left issues, and neither Biden nor most congressional or senate candidates ran that way. What’s true is that Fox et al and G.O.P. advertising consists almost entirely of attacking Democrats for being culturally liberal and out of touch or advocating socialism.

His point is well-taken, but that may not matter. Conservative attacks claiming that the Democratic Party has become the home of out-of-control leftists would not work if the party were not in some way susceptible to such critiques.

More important, insofar as the Republican Party is successful in using this critique to peel away minority voters from the Democratic Party, the more Republicans will claim that their party is not just the party of the white working class but that it is the party of a multiracial working class — despite an economic record that resoundingly refutes any such notion.

If such a claim nonetheless gains traction, it will devalue a core, if long distressed, Democratic asset: that it stands for American workers and against their bosses. That image has taken a beating in recent decades, but still resonates among many voters, as reflected in polling that continues to show a Democratic advantage on such questions as “which party better represents people like me.”

In most places, the decline in Democratic support from minority constituencies in 2020 was more than made up by Democratic gains among white voters, especially college-educated whites of both sexes and, more surprisingly, among non-college white men.

A Brookings analysis conducted by William Frey, a senior fellow there, showed that Biden won a smaller percentage of minority voters in the key states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost all three.

Despite this drop in minority support, Biden carried all three states with gains among white voters.

Can Democrats count on a continued increase in support from white voters without Trump on the ballot (or with him on it, if he runs in 2024)? It’s hard to say, but Democratic strategists certainly don’t want to find themselves having to rely on it.

cross-link to related news thread WHY THE GOP'S CANCEL CULTURE PITCH IS GOOD POLITICS

By artappraiser on Sat, 03/13/2021 - 5:36pm | Analysis by Harry Enten @ CNN.com, March 13

In NYC there is a lot of this curriculum already, but a new schools Chancellor is also expected to amp it way up and also go for stripping as many other merit-based criteria as possible

res ipsa loquitor, parents don't want their kids ending up like this, especially immigrants, they came here to become Americans:

quote of interest in this commercial: I don't believe in cutting people slack; you should work for everything you get.

excerpt, an alternative to rapper values: 

[...[ While he's been investing for several years, it hasn't always been his priority. However, an experience buying a car — an item that generally loses value over time — made him re-think his priorities.

"In college, I didn't go out a lot. I spent most of my time at home or at the library, and I didn't eat out much. I was saving a lot of my income, and I ended up buying a Mercedes. That depleted some of my savings," he said. 

The experience taught him just how powerful money can be when put to work instead of spent. "I've learned that it's usually not worth splurging and buying things that you really want in the moment, but more so about thinking long-term," he told Insider.

Over time, he's found investing to be more rewarding than spending, and he's since started teaching others his age the same principles on his website College Money Habits [....]

wishing not to become SF:

lots of bitter comments on the latter

PERFECT description of the Democratic Party Machine in NYC, this really is the way it is, not just for the board of Education, but all city government jobs

These are the people that often treat taxpaying citizens like dirt when they try to get help from the city government, or just don't try very hard to help They do that because they basically have "tenure." Bloomberg put a hold on a lot of this during his reign by installing all sorts of checks and balances on them, like a business would do with employees. (I.E. First he created the 311 phone number to access them all-instead of getting no answer nor voice mail from many departments which was the tradition with many city govt. services before him--then with followup to see if the caller was helped OR ELSE.) But things had basically gotten back to "normal" even before Covid, and 311 has become a joke, just another nightmare voice mail menu with no real options and no answers