Pensieri di un lunatico minore

The impact of bigotry on elections

There has been much talk of whether America is ready for a “black President” or a “woman President”, although strangely not as much about a “old white guy President”, even though recent experience would indicate that the latter is the most dangerous. I would like to introduce a Venn diagram to explain what I feel is the difficulty in assessing the impact of such a thing:

Voting block A is composed of voters who would “normally” vote Democratic and would actually have voted. Voting block A is composed of racist/misogynistic losers. The intersection, C, is the actual negative impact on the race. But this is entirely too simplistic an analysis in the end.

First, it must be analyzed in the context of the model and methodology used to elect candidates: the Electoral College. The relative size of the groups differs from block-to-block, region-to-region, and more importantly, state-to-state, and therefore the impact differs as well. In addition, one must understand whether the sum negative impact of this intersection has a meaningful impact on the race.

In nearly every state, the system is winner-take-all, and therefore the outcome depends on one of several factors:

• The natural advantage/disadvantage of the Democratic party in the specific state.
• The percentage of those voters who would change parties rather than vote for a “distasteful” candidate.

Let’s take California as one example. The Democrats won the state with 54.2% of the vote, to the Republicans 44.2%, leaving an approximate 10% delta. Let’s say that of that, one in 10 of the Democratic voters wouldn’t vote for a black man, and of those, 1/4 would switch parties rather than stay home. In that race, the Republicans would have taken 45.6% of the vote, and the Democrats 48.8% of the vote, still winning. In a different state, stacked the other way, Texas, the results are even more lopsided, and it would have had little, if any, impact.

Does that mean that it doesn’t matter? No. It obviously is a poor statement on anyone in this country that something so immaterial to the decision process as someone’s gender or racial background would be so important as to dissuade them from voting. However, I don’t think it’s a materially important issue in this election for many reasons, which I’ll get into later. More important than that, even, is the fact that making your nomination process contingent on the radical racism and misogyny of some elevates their power even further, and emboldens them with influence undeserved.

If we were never to look past those issues, we wouldn’t be Democrats, and more importantly, we’d never break the historic cycle of old white men that has been the touchstone of American politics for entirely too long. Bringing change requires a change in perspective and that is difficult when electing someone incubated in the same model of privilege as those that dug this hole in the first place. Whether that change comes from a difference in age, gender, race or even—dare I say—class, matters less than the change in perspective itself. More of the same is just simply that: more of the same.