Bluie Collar Populism? Hardly.

"The point is," NBC News remarks, "Donald Trump has brought a different kind of energy and appeal to the 2016 presidential race, built upon populism and blue-collar support."

Voters in Texas seem not to have gotten the memo, for

The surge in early-voting interest in Texas may be linked to how close the presidential race is there, compared with previous elections. Data from RealClearPolitics, which combined five Texas presidential polls, shows Hillary Clinton is trailing Donald Trump by just five points. To put that into context, Texas has not been won by a Democrat since Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976.

“I definitely think Texas is a battleground state. We’ve been working towards this for the past several election cycles,” said  Iliana Holguin, El Paso County Democrats chairwoman.

But it's a battleground state only in the presidential race. Politico quotes Austin-based GOP operative Brendan Steinhauser (who believes Trump probably will prevail in Texas) as recognizing "I think that Texas is competitive this year. I think it'll be much closer than usual. I think it's because of the Trump factor."

And so it is. In 2012, President Obama, en route to re-election by nearly 4 percentage points, was creamed by Mitt Romney in Texas by nearly 16 percentage points. Four years after the Democrat ran 20 points+ worse in Texas than nationally (with Texas included in the national results), Mrs. Clinton is running roughly 7 points worse in Texas than she is nationally.

That's a startling difference- but perhaps no more startling than what is happening in Iowa, which Obama won in 2012 by nearly six points and in which Clinton is said to be trailing by probably two points.

Compared to Obama, Clinton now is +13 in Texas and -8 in Iowa.

The NBC News reporter believes the difference in places such as Iowa is "populism and blue collar support." Spare me:  as Jamelle Bouie tweets, black people "are rarely in the conversation" when  "working class" is mentioned. So, too, are hispanics largely excluded; "working class" has largely become proxy for "not affluent" and "white. Lots of minorities  are blue-collar; most of them are voting for Hillary Clinton.

However, according to the 2010 census, 88.7% of Iowa is non-hispanic whites. In Texas, the corresponding number is 45.3%.  The difference, of course, is not between Barack Obama, as of 2012 a centrist, conventional Democrat and Hillary Clinton, a centrist, conventional Democrat.

The difference is Donald Trump, one of the original birthers, whose word association with "Mexican" is "rapist," and who declared "our great African-American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore." Donald Trump, who calls President Obama "weak," "unfit to serve," and "the worst president, maybe, in the history of our country," who praised FDR's concentration camps; and who referred to a judge born in Indiana as "a Mexican."   Donald Trump, who told a contestant on The Apprentice, "that must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees," called President Obma (and Mrs. Clinton ) the founders of ISIS, and has asked supporters to patrol polling places because he has "heard some stories about certain parts of the state and we have to be fery careful." These are not dog-whistles. They are a pound on the head with a baseball bat.







Although Trump trails Clinton badly among female voters, tens of millions of women are voting for him because they share an ethnic characteristic.  They and the (more numerous) men voting for Trump are not necessarily racist, and the vast majority are not. But they want to "make America great again" and they understand what Grump means when he says that. It is not for a more equitable tax system or for a higher minimum wage, both of which he opposes, or any sort of populism, other than protectionism. This once was a Christian, white, male-dominated America, it's slipping away, and many people will do whatever they can to stop that- even, or especially, by voting for Donald Trump.







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Voter Identification And Lengthy Lines

On Sunday's commentary (video below), John Oliver summarized the problems with requiring voter identification: the difficulty in many states of obtaining I.D.; the disproportionate impact on black and hispanic voters; inapplicability of the remedy to anything but voter impersonation, which a study found occurred at most 31 times of more than a billion votes cast from 2000 through 2014; the evidence that it may be used as a partisan effort to elect more Republicans.

There may be only one pitfall in requiring voter identification which went unmentioned, and that possibly only because of time limitations.  The day before the last off-year congressional election, Stephanie Mencimer of Mother Jones posted an article detailing what she considers the most "subtle" means of disenfranchising black and hispanic voters: "polling places without enough voting machines or poll workers." She found

Nationally, African Americans waited about twice as long to vote in the 2012 election as white people (23 minutes on average versus 12 minutes); Hispanics waited 19 minutes. White people who live in neighborhoods whose residents are less than 5 percent minority had the shortest of all wait times, just 7 minutes. These averages obscure some of the unusually long lines in some areas. In South Carolina's Richland County, which is 48 percent black and is home to 14 percent of the state's African American registered voters, some people waited more than five hours to cast their ballots.

A recent study from the Brennan Center for Justice suggests that a big factor behind these delays was inadequately prepared polling places in heavily minority precincts. Looking at Florida, Maryland, and South Carolina, three states that had some of the longest voting lines in 2012 , the center found a strong correlation between areas with large minority populations and a lack of voting machines and poll workers. In South Carolina, the 10 precincts with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of black voters (64 percent) as the state as a whole (27 percent).

When individuals have to wait to vote, they are tempted to turn around and go home, especially because in the vast majority of elections the likelihood of one vote (or even a few votes) deciding an election is virtually nill.  One study, Mencimer found, " suggested that roughly 130,000 would-be voters were turned away thanks to long lines" in Franklin County (home to Columbus), Ohio, in 2004. (Mencimer adds "Those missing votes would not have been enough to swing the state for John Kerry." Wrong. This way, too.)

Long waiting lines, most prevalent in urban and minority areas, discourage turnout, primarily of Democratic voters. Given the most common reasons for those lines, racial discrimination is not the primary motivation, though there is an obvious discriminatory impact.  Mencimer notes

Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied voting wait times, has posited that the problem is likely related to the poor provision of public service in minority areas in general. In other words, if you don't have good trash pick up, your polling station isn't likely to function very well, either.

Blacks and hispanics are those most likely to live in areas plagued by inadequate municipal services. They also are disproportionately unlikely to possess voter I.D., hence especially likely to be harmed by the requirement that identification be presented at the polls.  Additionally, the mere presentation of identification, along with verification (albeit a relatively brief process in most cases), lengthens the time required for voting. Lines inevitably are longer and some discouraged voters will return home without casting a ballot.

The impact on minority voters severely hampers Democratic fortunes. It should be a bigger issue in the presidential race, and would be if only there were a Democrat countering her opponent's campaign with a race-based appeal.

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Cheetos, Really?

Barack Obama must be the luckiest politician in America. When he ran for the state senate in Illinois, he successfully challenged the nominating petitions of all three of his opponents. In the primary for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, he faced off against a candidate engulfed in a personal scandal.  During the general election, his GOP opponent was forced to drop out because of a personal scandal, whereupon Obama had only to defeat the infamous Alan Keyes, an extremist who had been a Maryland resident until, oh, a few minutes earlier.  

We all know that as a presidential nominee, Obama merely had to defeat a Republican with such limited judgement as to believe that Sarah Palin would be qualified to become President in a pinch; as a candidate for re-election, he merely had to defeat a Republican with such limited judgement and irresponsibility as to put Paul Ryan a heartbeat from the presidency. (Admittedly, BO did have the good sense to select Joe Biden as his running-mate.)

Now, after Barack Obama has run his last race, the aggressively pro-immigrant "United We Dream" asks on its website that you "add your name to tell President Obama that we won't tolerate him choosing politics over the humanity of immigrants" because he has "further cemented his legacy as the #Deporter in Chief by delaying the usage of his executive authority to stop the extradition of millions of immigrants."  (Credit United We Dream for eschewing "undocumented workers" in favor of "immigrants"; not so much for failing to note no legal immigrant ever is deported.)

But while Barack Obama is unlikely ever to face the voters again, Hillary Clinton in all likelihood will.  Politico's Maggie Haberman observes Mrs.

Clinton, who has said she will decide on a White House run by early next year, has repeatedly been targeted by Dreamers since she re-emerged in politics as a campaign surrogate this fall. The activists are frustrated with President Barack Obama’s delay in taking executive action on immigration reforms, and they are pushing Clinton to be more outspoken on the issue.

And so President Obama's former Secretary of State gets heat from activists.  But, intentionally or otherwise, it's directed not only against her.  Haberman reports

Hillary Clinton was heckled repeatedly during a rally Thursday in potential 2016 rival Martin O’Malley’s home state of Maryland, when more than a dozen pro-immigrant activists staggered their protests so they lasted throughout most of her speech.

The rolling protests by members of the group United We Dream came during a rally at the University of Maryland for Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown. They also came nearly a week after so-called Dreamers interrupted Clinton’s speech in North Carolina, where she was campaigning for Sen. Kay Hagan; the activists reportedly said they were mishandled by officials at that rally when they were being led out.

The group, frustrated by President Obama's policies, protests Hillary Clinton and, for no extra charge, undermines Democratic gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates.    It's par for the course, though, liberals flocking to the polls (as for Barack Obama, twice) for the Democratic presidential nominee, then lifting not a finger in off-year elections.  Better  to take the advice of Lena Dunham In a video, directed to young women, the actress created to support Planned Parenthood's Action Fund's Women Are Watching Campaign. Beginning at 2:35, she advises

I used to think that all that mattered was to vote for Obama and go back to eating Cheetos and reading gossip magazines.  But the fact is the mid-term elections matter. This is how you keep sexist health care policies from passing.  This is how you keep sexist politicians out of office. This is how you create the change you want.










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Voter Suppression, Indirectly

In March, 2007 Washington Post Writers' Group columnist Marie Cocco lamented the electoral tactics of the GOP, highlighted by the dismissal of federal prosecutors for partisan political reasons. Eight U.S. prosecutors, including David Iglesias were sacked because they reportedly "would not time indictments and investigations favorably for the Republican Party at election time."

Cocco noted that the right's portrait of a vast Democratic conspiracy spearheaded by ACORN to rig elections far and wide

The Justice Department’s own statistics show that of 87 ballot-fraud convictions obtained since the department launched its “voter integrity” initiative in 2002, 17 were for noncitizen voting and another six were for multiple voting. Most of the cases involved vote-buying schemes hatched by local politicians in Kentucky, West Virginia and elsewhere.

The charges against ACORN, of course, were a classic in Republican fear-mongering. Far before that organization was forced to disband, the U.K.'s Brad Friedman commented in October, 2008

Acorn verifies the legitimacy of every registration its canvassers collect. If they can't authenticate the registration, or it's incomplete or questionable in other ways, they flag that form as problematic ("fraudulent", "incomplete", et cetera). They then hand in all registration forms, even the problematic ones, to elections officials, as they are required to do by law. In almost every case where you've heard about fraud by Acorn, it's because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that's been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers. Most officials who run to the media screaming "Acorn is committing fraud" know all of the above but don't bother to share those facts with the media they've run to. None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it's voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.

Even though the ginned-up scandal against ACORN had not yet materialized, Cocco observed

the vote-fraud folklore serves its purpose. It enables Republicans to push through state requirements for photos and other forms of voter identification, rules that depress turnout and impact elderly and minority voters—that is, Democrats—most seriously. This is the real fraud.

And so it is. Rush Limbaugh yesterday commented about

the new Arizona immigration law: It is all about voting. If papers (ahem) are required to vote, the Democrats are finished. It's their only hope. I mean, look, they're the radicals. They are siding against the American people. This regime is siding against the American people. The only hope they have is for fraud and illegals voting, and you can't really get away with that if everybody has to have a photo ID and legal proof (i.e., papers) that they are citizens.

Ironically, Limbaugh, in his own hyper-partisan and fact-free manner, seems to recognize the underlying issue in the new anti-immigrant (or, euphemistically, anti-illegal immigrant) legislation (promoted largely by the state's GOP): preventing the Wrong Kind of People from voting. Greg Palast explains how then-Secretary of State (now Governor) Jan Brewer in 2005 used

a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans' latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party's desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box....

State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, "There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."

How many? Pearce's PR flak told me, five million. All Democrats, too. Again, I asked Pearce's office to give me their the names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I'd happily make a citizens arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn't have five million names. He didn't have five. He didn't have one.

The horde of five million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican website extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote: they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law.

It is a (probably sad) fact about modern American politics: whites generally vote Republican; non-white ethnic minorities, Democratic. Oh, there are a lot of other variables, but racial (if including Hispanics as a separate race) status has become a better predictor than most of one's vote. And holding down the votes of minorities, including Mexican-Americans, is an effective way of getting Republicans elected. And if fearful Chicanos choose to move to California, New Mexico, or Mexico, all the better. Or as Palast concluded

that's the point, isn't it? Not to stop non-citizens from entering Arizona -- after all, who else would care for the country club lawn? -- but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

The Power Of "O"

Craig Garthwaite and Tim Moore of the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland have prepared a study to determine the impact of Oprah Winfrey's endorsement in May, 2007 of Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president.

Garthwaite and Moore reviewed areas with high per-capita circulation of Oprah magazine and of high per-capita sales of books in Oprah's Book Club, reasonably assuming that those are areas in which the talk-show host is most popular. They controlled for various other factors and developed several mathematical models. Analyzing both the effect on voter share and on participation, they concluded that the votes for other candidates "slightly increased" as a result of the endorsement and that the effect on voter participation is greater than that on voter share. Turnout increased by approximately 2,196,300 out of a total of 33,386,184 votes cast. (Forty-five states and the District of Columbia were studied- excluded were Michigan, in which Obama and a few other candidates were not on the ballot; Florida, in which alll candidates agreed not to campaign; Kansas, North Dakota, and Alaska , which do not report county-level voter information; and Texas, in which one can vote in a primary and/or caucus, "creating different incentives in voting behavior.")

But as for the main conclusion: the academics concluded that Winfrey's endorsement "was responsible" for 1,015,559 (net) votes for Obama, with a 95% chance that the effect was from 423,123 to 1,596,995.

One million-plus votes out of a total of thirty-three million-plus votes may not sound like that much. But it was extraordinary and, arguably, pivotal in a race won by the now-presumptive nominee by far fewer than one million votes (and won only if Michigan and Florida are not counted, truly a bizarre calculation given that the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the DNC eventually imparted legitimacy to the vote by accepting partial allocation of their delegates). And in the 45 jurisdictions included in the study, Obama gained only 278,966 votes more than chief rival Clinton.

Unfortunately (given the candidates), the researchers argue that the impact of an endorsement is significantly smaller in a general election than in a primary contest, inasumuch as in the latter (and especially in this contest), the ideological positions of the candidates differ relatively little, with voters more concerned with policy positions in the general.

Still, being responsible for the votes of over one million Americans- far more than any other endorsement could be- is truly impressive and remarkable testimony to the influence of America's paramount celebrity. No surprise, though, that John McCain chose to try to tie Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears rather than the woman known by her first name and, to herself, "O."