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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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electoralism
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Good article. It’s not the main point but I liked this section:
It never occurred to me - though it’s obvious to me now - that all the accusations of Obama being a Muslim were really just the way white folks were able to launder their unwillingness to accept a black man as president. That’s why they doggedly held on to that belief despite how it was so obviously not true.
Eh, the people who kept bringing up that he was a muslim, born in kenya, etc were always hardcore chuds who had no problem being abhorrently racist.
That was the vast majority, yes. But plenty of Hillary primary supporters didn't vote for Obama in the general. And we know plenty of conservative Democrats have, shall we say, some work to do on racial issues, even if they aren't dressing up in white robes on the weekends. That Venn diagram is a circle.
I think Ta-Nehesi Coates wrote a couple of books about that
His middle name is hussian.
That's why they think his Muslim
You would think the cia would of gave him a different middle name at birth 🤷
I know no one here will want to hear this. But that’s lazy thinking and revisionist history. He got elected twice. The same folks calling him Muslim and asking for his birth certificate are now chanting Let’s go Brandon and doing other horrible stuff.
I’m sure a percentage of people think he’s extra bad for being black, but they were going to hate him just as much for being liberal.
213,313,508 eligible voters in 2008, 131,407,000 voted, 95% of black voters for Obama, 59,948,323 went to McCain (a supermajority of them white) even after eight years of George Bush, when polled conservatives policies are highly unpopular with a supermajority of the population (whites included)
Race, demographics, and cultural identity have far more valence on the outcome of elections than ideological commitments, especially in a country with such poor political education
The supermajority of all voters are white.
The majority of Obama voters were white.
Conservatives in 2008 were almost exclusively white.
Race for sure played a factor, it always does. But it absolutely does not outweigh ideology.
Exactly that's my point, and the supermajority of non-whites voted for Obama, while the majority of white voters who voted went for McCain, if ideological commitment formed the core of election outcomes then that wouldn't have been the case, and we would see a more even distribution among demographic groups
The majority of McCain and white Obama voters voted the way they did because Obama was black, the conservatives voted the way they did because he was liberal and to be liberal is to be black or support black causes, and white Obama voters (aside from the ones who genuinely didn't care he was black) voted for him because voting for the first black president would've been a cultural signifier they could use as social capital in the more cosmopolitan spaces they inhabit
White Obama voters who voted a second time couldn't have cared less about his ideological promises because he betrayed all of them in his first term
Holy shit that’s insane.
Go look at the graphs of the electorate before and after 2008. It is not wildly different.
A majority of people did not vote because of race.
You’re drawing very sweeping conclusions from one and a half data points.
lmao yeah that just strengthens my point, otherwise if ideological commitments swayed voters then YOU have to explain why white Obama voters didn't punish him for betraying those ideological commitments in his first term, it's almost like demographics and cultural signifiers were more important than concrete ideology, and the need for cultural identification among white liberals only intensified between 2008 and 2012 after the mostly cultural conservative backlash against Obama and HIS Democratic Party, a backlash that surprise surprise found its expression in racial politics
What a profound argument, I've now changed my mind