If there's any sign that Democrats will not learn from the 2021 election, just read this piece from FiveThirtyEight. It feeds into the ongoing narrative that white supremacy was the reason for the Democratic Party's drumming, not that the party has gone way off the deep end on—everything. We all know that it's about the narrative, not the facts. We know this from past false liberal narratives that have been torched to death. On this, Democrats have known for years that they need to reach out better to rural voters. They can't ignore small-town America. You can't just win with just the cities, and suburban voters can and will vote for Republicans when Democrats become insane. They actually did a deep-dive into racist white voters and their preference for black Republicans (via FiveThirtyEight):
Republicans are increasingly more likely than Democrats to hold prejudiced views of minorities, so Black Republicans like Sears often draw especially strong support from white Americans with otherwise anti-Black views simply because they draw most of their support from Republican voters.
A clear example of this was in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, when Ben Carson made a bid to become the GOP’s first African American presidential nominee. Support for Carson was positively correlated with the belief that Black Americans have too much influence on U.S. politics, according to data from Washington University in St. Louis’s American Panel Survey (TAPS) in late 2015…
Whites who thought African Americans had “far too little” influence disliked Carson and preferred Hillary Clinton by 60 percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup. Meanwhile, Carson was very popular among whites who were most concerned about African Americans having “too much” influence in politics. So much so that whites who thought African Americans have “far too much” influence preferred Carson to Clinton by 45 points.
Again, much of that relationship is down to partisanship — Republicans are more likely to hold prejudiced views and also more likely to support a Republican candidate. But that’s the point: For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.
[…]
Finally, voting for Black Republicans may also be especially appealing to racially prejudiced whites because it assuages concerns of being seen as racist by enabling them to say, in essence, “I can’t be racist! I voted for a Black candidate!” Psychologists call this “moral credentialing,” and there’s even some evidence that voters who expressed support for Obama shortly after the 2008 election felt more justified in favoring white Americans over Black Americans. Electing a Black Republican like Sears, who railed against critical race theory during the run-up to the election and supports voting restrictions that adversely affect racial minorities, is similarly used as a symbolic shield by the entire party from inevitable charges of championing racist policies. As we mentioned earlier, conservative media outlets and politicians are already weaponizing her victory against anyone who would dare suggest so.
Why the whole “they voted for a Black candidate, so they can’t hold racist views/beliefs” argument doesn’t make any sensehttps://t.co/z8aqcoWrzT https://t.co/7PXLJGEFGy
— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) November 10, 2021
Yes, yes, voting for the wrong black person is racist
— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) November 10, 2021
You laugh, but behind the scenes managing editors are secretly competing to see who can most humilitate their media outlet — and FiveThirtyEight’s just won a free dinner at Outback. https://t.co/9f0AkB512Z
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 10, 2021
There it is. There it is. They know that the Virginia GOP drumming of Terry McAuliffe and the statewide slate undercuts their narrative about politics and race. Two of the three statewide candidates the GOP had were people of color. The Republican Party now holds the honor of having the first Latino attorney general and the first black woman lieutenant governor occupying those offices. That's big.
Virginia LG-elect Winsome Sears came here from Jamaica, joined the Marine Corps, and made a better life here. It's a classic American tale that the far-left says does not exist because America is racist. This is more about muffling historic GOP gains that shred the progressive left's ongoing narrative about this nation and its founding than it is about white voters. Also, how are racist voters gauged? It's not like this is something that someone wears with pride. Second, the number of them is grossly overblown by the left. Last, the piece assumes that the GOP is more prejudiced than Democrats. Which party birthed the Ku Klux Klan? Which party established the system of racial segregation and Jim Crow? Which party now has a vicious and underreported anti-Semitism problem? It's the Democrats. This is classic, grade-A liberal bubble content that seeks to do nothing but allow the far-left to freebase itself into a moral superiority stupor.
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