11.8.12 Links Roundup
- How The Asian American Electorate Shaped Election Night 2012 (Reappropriate)
As we knew for weeks leading up to the election, Governor Mitt Romney’s path to 270 electoral votes — the number he needed to win — depended upon victories in a handful of swing states. I blogged earlier yesterday a table of numbers that included a rough estimate of registered Asian American voters in many of these swing states and other states where we might be influential; these numbers would be useful, I wrote, in identifying states where — if the margin of victory is small — Asian American voters may swing the election in favour of one candidate or another.
Over the course of the night, I updated the table with returns as precincts reported in, keeping a close eye on the number of voters that differed between each candidate’s vote totals. In a few important states, President Obama is likely to eke out a narrow victory of less than two points: Florida and Virginia (the former remains to be called for Obama as of this writing). These swing states are also significant in that they are winner-take-all states that represent a large number of electoral votes: 29 electoral votes for Florida and 13 electoral votes for Virginia. These swing states are also notable in that the small margin of victory combined with their relatively populous Asian American communities means that Asian American voters could have helped deliver both states to the Democratic side. And, with Romney’s flagging numbers in Ohio, most analysts last night agreed that Romney needed a victory in one or both of these other states to win.
And, frankly, the numbers bear it out: Asian American voters helped deliver both states to President Obama. In so doing, Asian Americans helped seal the president’s second term.
- Ain’t Your Father’s Southern Strategy: Whiteness As Mass Appeal (The Huffington Post)
The consequences and context of a campaign based in racism, based in a thirty-year racial assault on the civil rights movement is fully visible in AP’s recent poll, which found that both explicit and implicit racial bias against African Americans and Latinos is on the rise. According to the AP, “51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes,” which was a 3 percent rise since 2008. When examining implicit bias, “the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.” Should we be surprised?
The likes of John Sununu and Donald Trump, the sight of racist t-shirts and posters at GOP rallies and elsewhere, and the explicitly racist discourse point to the strategy of racist appeals and the consequences of such appeals. The impact of racism isn’t simply voters picking Mitt Romney because of their anti-black racism, or even the ways that the accusations against President Obama as a “food stamp president,” as “lazy” as a “socialist” and as “anti-White” resonate because of an entrenched white racial frame, but in the yearning and appeal of a white male leader.
Race doesn’t just matter in why whites are voting against President Obama but also why they are voting for Mitt Romney. Tom Scocca, in “Why Do White People Think Mitt Romney Should Be President?” argues that anti-black racism, dog “whistles” and prejudice isn’t the only reason why white males are casting their vote for Romney-Ryan but because they are white and because white masculinity is associated with toughness, leadership, intelligence, and countless other racial stereotypes. “White people — white men in particular — are for Mitt Romney. White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense. Without this narrow, tribal appeal, Romney’s candidacy would simply not be viable. Most kinds of Americans see no reason to vote for him.”
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