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NancyB's avatar

I enjoyed these musings, especially the take on what has been going on with evangelicals. I never thought about how they have generated a theodicy to disguise a Machiavellian transaction. But now that you float it, it rings true.

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Jesse Ewiak's avatar

So, to your first few questions

1.) The way this has actually been fixed is, to put it politely, changes in the makeup of the electorate.

The actual reality is, and you can see this in looking at polling, is outside of a few issues like gay marriage, most people's views don't actually change all that much. Like, why was there a giant rise in approval of interracial marriage in the mid-80's to early-90's? Because a large chunk of people who were already middle-aged and set in their ways during WWII, and getting Social Security during the Civil Rights Movement died off completely and were replaced by a bunch of people in the body politics, even if they were Reagan Republicans, were also pro-interracial marriage.

So, the sad reality is, we need to stick a few more elections until the actual voting power of Millenial's and Gen Z are enough to totally overwhelm the Boomer's and Gen X, at least at the POTUS level, so the GOP has to shift things. Because that's how parties come back to sanity - losting a lot, by big margins.

2.) So, the problem with the whole 'center-left economic, center-right socially' thing is due to a few reasons -

a.) A lot of those voters aren't just center-right socially, but actually pretty right-wing socially, and vote based on those efforts. They wouldn't be OK with a party that offered say, universal health care, and a 15-week abortion ban. They want the full abortion bans, the gay marriage bans, and so on. They deeply care about, just as there are a lot of people who deeply care about protecting their abortion rights.

b.) Also, there was a good Twitter thread that looked deeper into the data people usually point too, and actually, a lot of those center-left voters were basically supporting of Social Security and Medicare so they get coded as center-left, but against all other spending for poor people.

c.) Another chunk of these voters are older African-American or other voters who may not have 'woke' views on LGBT folks or abortion, but also don't care about those things. Like, some 74-year-old black grandma in exurban Columbia, SC probably codes as center-right socially in polling, but she'd die before voting for a Republican.

3.) A slight point, I thnk a few limited points have led to a somewhat overreaction about the Democrat's losing minority voters and becoming a party of only the college-educated.

First, there's the small matter, as we saw with the Dobbs aftermath, is there are a decent chunk of non-college educated white voters who are actually pretty liberal on abortion, but voted for Trump because of immigration or whatever.

Hell, you can see a more 'educated' version of that in Barstool Sport's founders Dave Portnoy's reaciton to Dobbs and the fact despite being a 'fratboy' site, they're still selling Pride t-shirts.

But, even pushing beyond that, there are several polls showing Democrat's actually did better in 2022 than in 2020 among Latino voters, or at worst, ran even with 2020. Now, yes, for obvious reason, Hispanic's will never be the 90-10 vote that black voters currently are, and appear to be for the time being, because younger black women are not slightly shifting right as younger black men are (and even then, it's getting 20% as opposed to 10%, and I wonder if people who aren't Donald "I was part of culture for 40 years' Trump could get the same support), but because the Florida GOP are really good and the Florida DNC are bad at their jobs does not mean the voting patterns of Hispanic's as a whole are going to look like Miami.

The best exit polling showed Biden winning 62% of Hispanic votes in 2020. I bet he gets around that, give or take a couple of points in 2024.

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