Today's News For White People

(I haven’t used this pic for a little while, and I’ve been looking for an opportunity, so…).

Dick Polman recently posted the following here at his site, “The American Debate”…

White guys, who compose roughly 36 percent of the electorate, are potentially a major impediment for the party seeking to recapture the White House in 2008 - as they have plagued Democrats in virtually every presidential election since 1968. Yet you may not have heard much about this, because, in our political discourse, "gender gap" is typically defined as the GOP's chronic inability to win the women's vote.

Considering the havoc white guys have wreaked on the Democrats' presidential prospects over the last 40 years, it's clear that the white-guy gap deserves equal time - and that Democrats would be foolish to assume they can win decisively in 2008, or win at all, simply by maximizing their appeal to female voters.

The stats speak for themselves: In 2004, John Kerry, who lost a tight race, attracted only 37 percent of the white guys; in 2000, Al Gore, who lost an even tighter race, won 35 percent; in 1988, Mike Dukakis won 35 percent; in 1980, President Carter won 32 percent; in 1984, Walter Mondale won 31 percent; in 1972, George McGovern won 31 percent; in 1968, Hubert Humphrey, who lost a tight race, won 33 percent. Not even the rare winners - Carter in 1976, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 - managed to craft white-guy majorities. Clinton never even broke 40 percent.

…

I'm…persuaded by political commentator David Paul Kuhn, whose new book, The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, argues that white-guy clout remains "the most durable reality of American politics."

Reading this post from Polman reminds me once again how glad I am that I no longer subscribe to the Inky. This is just more meta data and reframing that has nothing to do with the issues that matter (and again, I’m assuming all of these numbers are accurate; as far as I’m concerned, life is short and I’m not going to waste my time checking up on an avalanche of pointless statistics).

However, regarding Kuhn, I should note that he’s an old hand at spinning the “divided Democrats” yarn between the “moderate, anti-abortion wing” and the “liberal, ant-war wing” (as noted here; h/t Atrios). Yes, to a point, the Dems are divided (as are the Repugs), but not in this fashion.

More to the point, though, is this fine post from DemFromCT at The Daily Kos which notes the growing divide between the white vote and the evangelicals (funny in a way that the fine piece by David D. Kirkpatrick cited in the post appeared in the New York Times magazine the same day as Polman’s talking point rehash appeared in the Inky)…

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

True, but independents are trending Democratic versus Republican (though I’m sure we can expect a column from Polman any day now about how this is still “good news for the GOP”).