White America
It has been called an “earthquake” or a “tsunami” by various political pundits. I don’t like either of these natural disaster metaphors. An earthquake is a rare event that leaves nothing but destruction in its wake. A tsunami quickly recedes, creates enormous temporary havoc, but leaves the contours of the natural landscape relatively unscathed.
The 2010 midterm elections can be more accurately described as an “avalanche.” The White vote was unquestionably the cause of the burial of Heartland Democrats we saw on Tuesday. Non-White turnout was down 4 percent. As I predicted, youth turnout was down 8 percent from 2008. In contrast, the White vote in the House went a record 60 percent for Republicans, a 13 percent swing from 2008, with White working class voters (most of them in the Midwest) going Republican by an incredible 29 percent.
Like an avalanche, the consequences of the midterm elections will stick for a decade because of the census and redistricting. In the South, the 2010 midterm election was a realignment election like 1994, which saw the demise of veteran incumbents like Ike Skelton of Missouri, Chet Edwards of Texas, John Spratt of South Carolina, and Gene Taylor of Mississippi, not to mention the historic Republican capture of state legislatures in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Those seats won’t be competitive in the future.
In the Midwest, which is losing congressional seats, redistricting will be even more important. Republicans won the governorships of Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They came within 1% of winning the governorships of Illinois and Minnesota. They already control the governorship of Indiana.
At the state level, the election is even more revealing: Republicans captured 14 state house chambers and have unified control over 26 state legislatures many of which are in the South and Midwest. They picked up 680 state legislature seats which is more than the Democrats picked up after Watergate.
Far from being a loser, the Sailer Strategy (which Republicans only indirectly benefited from) just handed the GOP its biggest victory in the lifetime of Republican political analysts. It was the biggest Republican victory since the backlash against FDR in the Great Depression.
Cui bono
Who benefits?
“I’m not sure there has been a Congress since 1924 — and certainly not in the last 50 years — that had a membership more interested in reductions in overall illegal and legal immigration than will be the one that was elected yesterday.”
The most restrictionist Congress since 1924. Doesn’t that really say it all?
IN THE HOUSE
1. They wiped out a net of three dozen More-Immigration seats in the House.
2. They knocked the number of More-Immigration seats down to about 170, far below the 218 majority needed to pass legislation, seemingly eradicating any possibility of “comprehensive immigration reform” being considered in the next Congress.
3. They didn’t just go for mild enforcement types. They filled about two dozen of those current More-Immigration seats with Less-Immigration candidates who made explicit promises not only to push stringent enforcement measures but also promised to work to eliminate several categories of legal immigration.
4. The number of elected Less-Immigration candidates promising stepped-up immigration enforcement looks like it will fall just short of the 218 majority. But most of the final 50 elected candidates classified as Uncommitted appear likely to lean toward more enforcement if presented opportunities and requirements to vote on it. There is no question that a solid pro-enforcement, bi-partisan majority will exist in the new House.
IN THE SENATE1. Five or six of the Senate’s most aggressive More-Immigration Members were replaced by Less-Immigration candidates.
2. That shift puts the More-Immigration bloc about 10 votes short of stopping a filibuster and creates a virtual 50-50 deadlock in the Senate.
This was a victory for us. It wasn’t a total victory, or a pretty victory, but it was a victory nonetheless. It is a foundation that we can build upon. In 2012, we have a real shot at putting a restrictionist in the White House and restrictionists taking over the Senate.
Within the next ten years, it is conceivable that we could secure the border, start deporting illegal aliens, and take advantage of hard economic times to end legal immigration. In the meantime, this guy will be in charge of the House immigration subcommittee.
Disappointments
The three big letdowns of Tuesday night need to be addressed: Angle in Nevada, Tancredo in Colorado, and Manchin in West Virginia.
First, Sharron Angle lost in Nevada because 65 percent of ballots were cast before election day when Reid was ahead in the race. The Hispanic vote rose from a paltry 12 percent to 15 percent. According to the CNN exit polls, the Hispanic vote in Nevada broke only 68 percent for Reid, which is about the national average.
In Arizona, Jan Brewer was comfortably reelected with 71 percent of the Hispanic vote going for Goddard, with Hispanics 14 percent of the Arizona electorate. Mike Lee and Rick Perry won in Utah and Texas with similar demographics.
Angle had a 4 point lead heading into the election. Even Reid’s own supporters expected him to lose. Angle lost by 5 points because she waited too late to go hard on immigration which surged her ahead in the last week of the race. The Nevada Senate race had already been decided by that point because of the early ballots and Angle’s unwise repeated comments on privatizing Social Security.
If everyone in Nevada had voted on Nov. 2, Angle would have won easily.
Second, Tancredo lost in Colorado because of the dysfunctional Colorado GOP, not in his own right. Maes carried 11 percent of the Colorado vote. The polls which showed that Tancredo had closed on the eve the election proved inaccurate.
The culprit in Colorado was also early voting. Maes performed better than expected because so many ballots had already been cast. In Colorado, 12 percent of voters in 2010 were Hispanic. Tancredo lost because Maes peeled off enough of the White vote (12 percent) to put Hickenlooper over the top.
Third, John Raese was trounced by Joe Manchin because he was a perennial candidate who made a terrible gaffe that cost him the election. After surging ahead in the West Virginia Senate race, John Raese was stupid enough to endorse the ludicrous idea of repealing the minimum wage, in an economically distressed state with more White working class voters than any other in the Union.
Joe Manchin, a popular governor, ran to the right of his opponent and did everything but shoot a target of Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to get elected. A better candidate would have beat Manchin in the midterm elections. We will get another chance in 2012.
Forest/Trees
It is important not to miss the forest for the trees here. As Roy Beck points out, a few big names fell (Tancredo and Angle), but the net gain in Congress (Boozman and Barletta), and especially in the governorships (Deal and Scott) and state legislatures (Alabama and Tennessee) are a positive net for us. Next year, a whole slew of states (including my own, not to mention its neighbors) will attempt to pass Arizona-style immigration reform.
The White vote is coalescing. In Arizona and Oklahoma, implicit Whites are getting bolder and are symbolically striking out (this is several election cycles in a row) at “affirmative action” and “sharia law.” The whole South is on fire with restrictionist sentiment. The Midwest is tilting into the Heartland column. And most importantly, the hackneyed charge of “racism” has less sting than at any other point in recent memory.
If Obama wants to win a second term as president, he will have to win Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. His approval rating is underwater in every swing state he won in 2008 and even in states like Wisconsin, Connecticut, and Maine. With the total collapse of his support among White voters, an economy sinking into depression, and without a legislative record to inspire his non-White base supporters, Obama will likely be a one term president.
The map ahead of us is looking better, not worse.
Foreign policy is not nearly as important as immigration policy. Beyond a general support for European nationalist parties (which alas doesn’t seem to be in the cards), a general anti-war stance, and support for policies that reduce Third World population growth, it hardly matters if we are pro- or anti-Israel, pro- or anti-Muslim countries, or show any other sort of favoritism in our FP. FP issues are usually red herrings that distract us from what is important.
“Working class” is a vague term. Most Democrats when they invoke “the workers” really mean the servant and welfare classes, which are very disproportionately NAM. Most libertarian policies favor Whites and disfavor NAMs, because Whites are more successful than NAMS on a level playing field. Middle-class income tax cuts are very good for Whites. That said, politicians who espouse fringe libertarian positions like lowering or eliminating the minimum wage are just stupid. They are unelectable and thus not worthy of our support as politicians.
“it’s going to have to adopt a populist economic agenda that is designed to reduce wealth inequality.”
They’ll need a populist economic agenda although i’m not so sure it needs to go as far as talking about reducing wealth inequality. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pat Buchanan didn’t already have that kind of economic policy in a file somewhere that he could dust off.
Even the most deluded White leftist has elderly grandparents. Tim Wise wants their grandparents – sweet, nice old people – to die because they are White.
—
Hunter,
The funny thing is that ‘Tiny Timmy’s’ maternal grandparents are White and of Southern, Scottish or Scots-Irish stock — the same people he demonically rails against –
One thing people don’t seem to get when talking about liberalism on the West Coast is that these places are meccas for transplants from accross the country. When I lived in Portland I found most of the extreme leftist types were from other areas of the country and moved there to self segregate. The long term Oregon natives were more blue dog democrat types not nearly so liberal. The homosexuals didn’t just sprout up out of the soil in San Francisco. They left places like Alabama, Kansas, Indiana in an Exodus to seek out their own kind. The West Coast is liberal because it attracts those kind of people from all over the country.
I have to have more than one screenname to get my comments posted because of the heavy handed censorship that has been going on on here and apparently still continues to this day. As far as Ron Paul being oversight of the monetary policy committee, that’s just wait and see if it really materializes before you start tooting your horn. People over at Majorityrights.com are calling your website a joke, something I wasn’t willing to go so far as to agree on, until you started praising Rush Limbaugh and crossed over the line of respectability.
“People over at Majorityrights.com are calling your website a joke”
That was pretty transparent. “People?”
That means you.
Oh, this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/user/sorenrenner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlm5Pd54sEw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofa2WVjDDU8
Yeah, I am really the joke here!
test
Neocons!
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/11/06/republican-resurgence-likely-derail-immigration-reform/
Is this true?
“RKU has left a new comment on the post “My Election Overview”:
Since the commentators on Steve’s blogsite and the others in the HBD-circuit often seem to focus on immigration more than almost anything else, and regard the 1965 Immigration Act as the greatest blow to American survival since the Redcoats, I really should bring a few simple factual matters to their attention…
What most immigration-activists floating around the Internet don’t seem to realize is that the 1965 Act didn’t OPEN the border to large-scale Third World immigration, it actually CLOSED the border. Prior to 1965, America did indeed have very restrictive immigration quotas against Europe (and Asia) but pretty much a de jure “Open Border” policy with regard to Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Basically, until 1965 any Mexican who wanted to legally immigrate to the U.S. just had to pay a small fee (I vaguely recall it was something like $50) and wait a day or two for processing. Then he could come legally. There were no quotas, no restrictions on numbers, nothing! In fact, some of the conservative critics opposing the 1965 Act argued that America had no need to relax immigration controls since we already had an open border with Mexico, and businesses could obtain all the cheap labor they needed from there.
The ironic thing is that the first-time-ever restrictions against Latin American immigration which became part of the 1965 Act were actually added by the pro-immigration side as a very minor sop to the anti-immigrationists, though neither side really cared about Latin American immigration one way or the other. The entire ideological battle was being fought about European immigration, and to a lesser extent Asian immigration. If any of you doubt these claims about the legislative history of the 1965 Act, you need only read the relevant sections of Kevin MacDonald’s CoC book, which discusses the history in detail. They’re also available in lots of other standard sources.
The reason that Mexican immigration skyrocketed in the decades after 1965 was because the Mexican population skyrocketed during that same period. In earlier years, Mexico was relatively underpopulated, hence there was little economic pressure to go North. If the 1965 Act hadn’t passed, and any Mexican or other Latin American who paid $50 or whatever could move to the U.S., legal immigration from South of the border would probably have reached many millions per year, and couldn’t have been curtailed without Congressional legislation, quite difficult since (as you all know) the cheap-labor business interests tend to dominate Congress. So if Teddy Kennedy were indeed a major force behind the 1965 Act, he should presumably be hailed as one of the greatest Restrictionist heroes in American history, and VDare.com should rechristen itself the Teddy Kennedy Memorial website in his honor.
Now admittedly, Asian and European immigration would still be minimal, but I’d think that most anti-immigrationists are probably more concerned with coping with 5 million Latin Americans per year rather than 500,000 Asians and Europeans.
I’ve actually corrected this Internet “urban legend” about the 1965 Immigration Act on quite a number of occasions over the years, but since there are already 100,000 web columns out there ferociously denouncing Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act for all millions of Mexican immigrants since then, I suspect it’s just completely hopeless to get people unconfused about the facts.
Still, there really is a slight difference between “open” and “closed”, and it always annoys me when people get the two completely reversed. Hence my current posting…
Posted by RKU to Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog at 11/07/2010 “
Smokescreen.
The 1965 act changing the basis for *legal* immigration has nothing to do with *illegal* immigration.