The Widening Rift? - Page 2

Furthermore, as I've written before, Jewish voters have a strange habit of supporting people who don't support them, or who even treat them with contempt. I don't claim to understand it. But I'm not the first to notice it.

Beyond all that, history shows that, despite what anyone may think, party identification for most people seems to be largely a matter of inertia. Most voters are Democrats because they've always been Democrats, as have their parents and grandparents (with maybe an apostate in the family here and there). Republicans tend to pick up some upwardly-mobile or disillusioned voters (like myself), but as historian Kevin Phillips has observed, the vast majority of people vote party first, issues second, and will tend to support the same party they've always supported. As astounding as this sounds, with the exception of the startling shift toward Republicans in America's rural areas over the last 30 years, voting patterns in most areas of the country have barely changed since Lincoln was President.

That's right, I said Lincoln.

Want some even more startling proof? Historian Stephen F. Hayward recently pointed this one out: in the 1960s, in some congressional districts, Democratic House and Senate candidates who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 often got as much as 90% of the black vote. George H.W. Bush, a lifelong NAACP supporter and the son of the most reliably pro-civil-rights member of the Senate, lost his 1968 bid for the Senate to a Democratic opponent who had voted against the Civil Rights Act--and 90% of the black vote went to the segregationist, not Bush. As it happened, in Texas, 90% of black voters at that time were registered Democrats--and still are.

In short, then: despite the infighting between Jews and blacks, and the weird, schizoid effect all this has on the Democratic Party, don't expect much to happen. A sea change in black or Jewish voting habits is unlikely. It might contribute to low voter turnout in some congressional districts, but not much else is likely.

(Thanks to DC Thornton for the news article link.)

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