nimh wrote:georgeob1 wrote:If it was racism that motivated white male voters in the South recently to vote for Hillary (as was alleged here and on other threads, almost without comment or objection)
I am only on page 995 now -- and this thread has meanwhile passed the 1000 mark! -- but I see George has already assailed this straw man at least three times.
I know that I have, for one, repeatedly discussed the role of race in the election outcomes by demographic group, analysed it to death in fact. But if all George took from it was that it was purely and only "racism that motivated white male voters in the South recently to vote for Hillary" and that this assertion was made "almost without comment or objection", he must have had either skipped or conveniently forgotten about half the posts that were written about the topic, in this thread, the Polls etc thread, and the
Old Times There Are Not Forgotten thread.
As in: something can play an undeniable
role, without it being the only explanation and without it being right to pass on without reservations.
Georgeob1 has asserted, the way I read it (correct me if I'm wrong) that there are many other reasons why Southern whites may have voted for Hillary and/or Edwards, and so there's little sense in talking about race as determinator. So it suits his argument to pretend that the people he argued with asserted that it must just all have been racism - that's a silly proposition, can easily be brushed off, and then we can all continue like there's nothing to see here.
The real argument here of course was more complicated. Quite specific regional deviations from statistical trends have shown that whites in the South demonstrated a relatively pronounced unwillingness to vote for Obama. Ergo: just like in any other state, there are many who voted for Hillary and Edwards for all the substantive and superficial reasons that have motivated people elsewhere to do so; but there is a deviation from the trend that becomes specifically more pronounced the further a state is in the South, Deep South. An attendant trend is that John Edwards, who programatically profiled himself consistently as the progressive, populist, leftist candidate, enpoyed a pronounced and consistent support among a larger-than-average minority of white voters who described themselves as conservative or very conservative, and who listed such things as immigration and terrorism as a prime issues -- in short, who had little affinity at all with anything that Edwards the candidate actually said.
Based on such data, the observation has been made that among specific demographic subgroups, there has been a greater than average/usual unwillingness to vote Obama, and a surprising tendency to veer towards the white, male candidate even when the man was a strident liberal, and that these deviations from the overall trend probably point to racial motivations. Of course, we are talking about a relatively small subset even of Southern white voters, explaining only the deviation from the overall statistical trend, rather than somehow the whole bulk of voting in that state. But George (whom I like too, just like Snood and Blatham and, well, pretty much everyone does) apparently has the urge, when this discussion comes up, to dismiss and deride any observation of possible racial motivations playing any role as PC bullshit thats just out to declare every white vote for any white candidate racism. Like I said, that's a drastic simplification of the arguments offered, but it probably allows one to ward off threats to one's ideological dogmas.
