The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    Just some numbers

                 Presidential popular votes                    Elected to state assemblies                                                                   in millions

     

                  Dem          Rep                                     Dem       Rep

    2007                                                                2964       2399

    2008         69.5        59.9                                      ?                                                                                  

    2009                                                                 3058      2334                                                               

    2010                                                                 3026      2353                                                            

    2011                                                                 2468      2917                                                                

    2012         65.9         60.9.0                                2441       2939                                                              

     2013                                                                 2592       2791                                                                

    2014                                                                  2572       2802                                                            

    2015                                                                  2342       3024                                                              

    2016         65.9          63.0                                   2341       3052

    One other number.  After the 2008 election the democrats controlled 27 state assemblies , 14 were republicans and 8 were split . Now itś  14 dem,32 rep  and the rest split.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Comments

    Do these tell us about what we should do ? No. No doubt we´ll each be reinforced in our existing belief that we ought to

    o move left                                    

    o move right 

    o keep on keep´en on.

    The purely mathematical conclusion is that we´re not the ¨natural majority " . Not since 2011. And in simple minded terms the majority is  ¨every one else.

    But is that the Tea Party -everyone- else or the Bush, Romney , Ryan- everyone- else.?

    Or just Trump? 


    Democrats lost a subset of white voters after the Civil Rights bills passed. Those voters never returned to the Democratic Party. Democrats lost white voters after Obamacare passed. Enter Trump. A major focus of Democrats should be on voter suppression. The Department of Just Us won't be on our side. We will be this on our own with groups like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The DNC can do simultaneous 50-state outreach, but the way back to office will be based in minority communities.

    Edit to add:

    If Trump gets a bump in approval. It will be from white voters. 


    I don´ t get the drop in democrat state representatives in 2011. I know that after the 2010 census the republicans out- gerrymandered us but thought that wouldn´t have shown up until  2012. I  guess the process worked faster than that.

    Yeah, of course if Trump get´s a bump it will be from white voters. And the subset of white voters that left after the Civil Rights bills aren´t coming back.As I recall Obama got 13% of the white vote in Mississippi.

    But Ann Richards carried Texas a couple of times , Gore won Florida.-and therefore the country- if the Supremes hadn't  put a finger on the scales; and Hillary matched Obama´s 2012 vote despite the best efforts of Putin and the FBI. 

    If the numbers are there; if there are more minority votes that can be set free from Sessions/ suppression, of course.But that seems like trying to fill an inside straight. Where I differ from you  is that I look at Obama´s success and think that margin is still there.

    I don´t mean trying to win by appeasing the old Lieberman, now Mancini  wing . That´s  not winning, it ś selling out.But neither do I think we can do it with a ten years younger  Bernie.. It´s time for a 45 year old white guy who didn´t support the Iraq War.and doesn ´t live in  Mamaroneck. 

    And if part of his winning coalition is composed of lower middle class whites who´ve got problems that he

    can solve but are actually voting for him for the wrong reasons, well thanks a lot. They don´t weigh them, they count them.


    Under Prez and Ellison, the DNC will go after those voters. The cynic in me thinks that those white voters are gone. Johnson won the South but there was an abrupt change in voting after he left office.


    I´m in agreement that there are very few white voters worth going after in the South.

    Conversely my South Dakota relatives 

    voted democrat in November for the first and likely last time  but  strictly because of their desire to see a woman president.

    But whites in the  old Confederacy have never accepted  Blacks as their equal. The only reason to divert campaign effort there is to assist the black candidates in marginal districts not so gerrymandered  as to be a sure thing.

     Emotionally I wanted Ellison to win.But practically we couldn´t afford the luxury  of doing the right thing.


    It might bewilder you that I regularly communicate with a number of liberals in the south. 

    Plus there continues to be large emigration from Snow Belt to Sun Belt, while over half of the large number of foreign immigrants settle in California, Texas or Florida - 2 of which I think are often referred to as "The South".

    Perhaps these millions of immigrants become super conservative and racist the moment they step toe in the South, but I'd guess it's more dynamic than that, including a fairly large number of Asians settling in.

    Or we could just give up - that would feel better....


    The South can turn with urban whites and minorities as a unified block.


    Mississippi 2012  vote for Romney

    White men  88% 

    White women 89%


    Democrats tend to carry larger urban areas even in places like Georgia and Texas. 

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/us/politics/kushner-flynn-sessions-ru...

    A deeper analysis from Pew

    http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/21/the-growing-democratic-d...

     


    Under any circumstances there's going to be a democratic presence even in Mississippi and Alabama. I don´t have the facts but it seems extremely likely that as part of their 2010 (or 2011?) Gerrymandering the Reps created democratic ¨seats¨ specifically to have areas  into which to isolate  democratic voters so the surrounding districts will be lilly white. Thus creating something bearing a remarkable  resemblance to what  Trollope would have dismissed as anachronistic ¨rotten boroughs¨.

    My completely un- data- based-hunch is that in spending a limited budget the DNC is more apt to get a return on its´ investment where there was a  Hillary -first woman president-surge in November rather than in  the ¨don'' t throw away you Confederate currency the South will rise again locales.¨ But the DNC will I´m sure will base its decisions on something like the Pew analysis you cite.


    I like the Pew report, but it's optimism about trump's weakness is mitigated by the fact that it was published last July.


    'Mitigated'? I think you meant obliterated by facts.


    You never post facts.