The Horserace – September 7, 2016

13 Comments

1. Hillary is so useless, and has so much baggage, that the Establishment essentially has no presidential candidate. This election will show whether or not it is now institutionally/structurally possible for a non Establishment candidate for president to prevail. One way another, the election will clear the air, that’s for sure.

2. If nothing else Trump’s campaign has flushed all the (((rats))) out of their sewer and into the light of day.

3. I wonder whether New Jersey is like Pennsylvania, where, if my understanding is correct, a black city vote overbalances the white vote of the state’s remainder. In Pennsylvania, the black vote is in Philadelphia, which, it seems, can outvote or nearly-outvote the rest of the state when things like government support for Philadelphia schools are being debated in the state legislature. In New Jersey, I’m thinking of, I don’t know, Newark, I guess, probably Trenton, too, which happens to be the state capital. (Actually, Harrisburg, which is Pennsylvania’s state capital, is a black city, too. If there are white workers in the state government buildings, they probably leave the city at the end of each work day.)

   • Here’s what I’m getting at:

     “In the Northeast,” our website-host says, with respect to states including New Jersey, “… Yankees are still being Yankees ….”

     Is that really what’s going on? How many of those “Yankees” in New Jersey are Yankees in any ancestral sense of the term?

     Back at the time of the 2012 election, it must have been, I related here, at Occidental Dissent, my friend’s view (or hunch) that much of the Democrat vote in the Philadelphia suburbs is a Catholic population, product of the white flight of the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we keep hearing those voters spoken of as “college educated”–but what does that really mean at this point? How many of those “college-educated” voters are basically of blue-collar backgrounds? They’re descendants of the white workers whom the Democrats bought off in the 1930s, with the National Labor Relations Board, just as the Democrats bought off the white workers of the South with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The only difference is that desegregation broke the Democrat hold on white workers in the South.

     Well–since I don’t have the political knowledge that is possessed by most other persons here, I can’t back up any of that, with statistics or anything–but it’s my hunch. This Kellyanne Conway, by the way, who is now one of Trump’s team leaders, is New Jersey Catholic, of Italian and Irish ancestry.

     • There are the usual “progressive thinking” reasons why white people in these regions vote liberal democrat, but, and this is a big but, whites vote democrat for financial reasons. This seems to be lost on or at least too downplayed by many. I have for years stressed this point.

       A lot of people’s incomes are directly dependent on legislation and programs democrats push and pass.

       • For White working class, yes. For muds, more “gibs muh.”

     • You have to remember Mr B., that “Yankee” is a generic term for Northerners that expresses the aggravation, dismay and anger Southerners, and sometimes Westerners, feel for Northerners. Saying it lets off a lot of steam.I sometimes think that the pejoratives that Northerners have for Southerners don’t carry near the weight or emotion. But again, we’re dealing with two different worlds.

       • What you say sounds right, James. In this particular case, Mr. W.’s remark that the Northerners were “still” being Yankees made me suspect he was attributing Trump’s inadequate support among Northeastern whites to liberal attitudes, or, in other words, to some kind of lingering abolitionism. I was pointing out that it might be attributable to working-class preference for Democrats, a preference that probably hasn’t vanished in the North.

         • That’s very true. However, the Democratic party ceased to be for working people a long time ago. Most people haven’t figured that out. Dixiecrats maybe did. None the less, I knew old folks when I was a teenager, who would literally vote for, or in honour of, FDR evey four years.

         • Years ago, James, after a funeral, I heard an Irish Catholic man of my mother’s generation quip that he’d been “baptized Democrat.” I’ll guess that was an old joke in that demographic group. Even with desegregation’s political impact, which I mentioned, Democrat loyalty in the South seems to have been a long time in disappearing entirely, as you say. While I watched a Democrat Florida judge, back in 2000, during the recount of the Florida presidential vote, I thought about that.

     • Growing up in the Chicago suburbs I thought every American was either Irish, Polish, or Italian. Never met a “Yankee” in my life up there.

   • Larry Nichols, who worked for the Clintons in Arkansas, said they stole elections in Arkansas by bussing in blacks to vote, multiple times, in Little Rock, and other places outside their normal districts. Bill won the Governorship, but you almost couldn’t find anyone who had actually voted for him. Watch out, Mr B, for busses and BBQ. This is why you’re seeing the push for voter I.D. laws, especially in the Old Confederacy. We know how the Clinton’s operate. As an aside, my barber, R.V. Clinton, is Bill’s first cousin. Bill’s father was a traveling salesman, who’s territory included Sherman. Most of the Clinton’s in Grayson County are related to him. Needless to say, R.V. doesn’t think much of his infamous relatives.

4. Obviously, Trump is ahead in Dixie and the interior West. But Clinton is ahead in the Old Union states, or Yankeedom, where the only votes, excepting California, that count are.