Right after the GOP's tepid showing in the 2000 election, I wrote an article "GOP Future Depends on White Vote" that got VDARE.COM in general and me in particular banned from FreeRepublic.com, the self-proclaimed "Premier Conservative News Forum."
JimBob and his enforcers apparently thought it was "racist" of me to point out the indisputable fact that whites cast 81% of the 2000 vote. I heinously added:
"Here at VDARE, we've discussed repeatedly how dire will be the long-term impact of immigration on the Republican Party. It's crucial to understand, however, that the long-term has not quite arrived. The GOP [can] save itself by changing the immigration laws. This can be seen by examining the 2000 election results closely. The reason George W. Bush struggled so much to eke out a 271-267 win in the Electoral College…is not that he got crushed in the minority vote 77% to 21%. No, it's that he commanded only a measly 54% of the white vote."
In 2002, I estimate that voters chose Republican over Democrats last Tuesday by a 53%-47% margin in the two-party vote. But the meltdown of the Voter News Service exit polling monopoly left us without national demographic breakdowns. So there's a lot of 99% fact-free spinning aimed at establishing the conventional wisdom.
Here's what really happened: the Republicans, perhaps in spite of themselves and no doubt benefiting from 9/11, followed the Sailer Strategy. They raked in the white votes.
All the official talk about the necessity of GOP minority outreach was in effect a smokescreen for the Strategy that Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Now start banning Dubya, JimBob.
Here's what I've pieced together.
Fortunately, the Los Angeles Times conducted a full scale exit poll in California. It explains, as I reported at length for UPI, why, after Democrat Gray Davis crushed popular Republican Dan Lungren by 20 percentage points in the 1998 gubernatorial race, the hapless Bill Simon lost by only five in 2002.
The key to this surprising near-miss, in the LA Times' words:
"Extrapolating from the exit polls, the number of votes cast by minority voters in California plummeted almost to half of their 1998 level, from 3 million down to what should turn out to be 1.7 million or 1.8 million when all the absentee and provisional ballots are counted. Meanwhile, the total number of white votes probably will roughly equal the 5.4 million cast in 1998. The minority share of the California electorate dropped from 36 percent in the 1998 to 24 percent this year. In turn, the white share rose from 64 percent to 76 percent."
The Hispanic share reportedly fell from 13% to 10%.
Further, Lungren lost to Davis in the 2000 election by 6 percentage points among whites. But Simon beat Davis among whites by 3 points.
The Republicans picked up no ground among Hispanics, despite George W. Bush's much-vaunted popularity with them. Lungren won 23% of Hispanic voters. Simon won 24%.
In the rest of the country, there's only anecdotal data. But it provides clear evidence that whites turned out in large numbers and voted enthusiastically for the GOP, while minority turnout was down.
Thus the New York Times (November 7) reported that in Georgia,
"the rural white voting base was mobilized this year as never before….
"While 13,000 fewer voters turned out in the county with the most black voters, suggesting problems with the Democratic base, Republicans in Georgia piled up insurmountable leads in predominantly white rural and suburban counties. Mr. [Ralph] Reed said Republicans had to overcome an enormous spending advantage by [Democratic Governor Roy] Barnes, who spent more than $19 million, and turned to a huge grass roots effort. He said the party had enlisted 3,000 volunteers and 500 paid workers who knocked on 150,000 doors in 600 target areas around the state."
(Significantly, this turnout was largely because of a National Question issue - the Confederate battleflag.)
In the rest of the South, the New York Times recounted
"In [Alabama and South Carolina], Democrats had counted on reprising the heavy black voter turnout that carried [Governor] Siegelman and Gov. Jim Hodges of South Carolina to victory in 1998. But…while blacks voted at about the same rate this time in South Carolina, Democrats said, white voters came out in greater numbers than expected in suburban and rural areas for Representative Mark Sanford, the victor in South Carolina's gubernatorial contest. "We got 4 out of 10 white votes in 1998," said Dick Harpootlian, the South Carolina Democratic chairman. "Yesterday, we got 3 of 10 white votes….
"[In Texas] Democrats had predicted that minority voters would turn out in droves for their diverse ticket. Minority turnout was up, but turnout in largely white, Republican suburbs were even higher…
"[Republican Governor Perry] also aired two controversial advertisements about a 1980's scandal in which a savings and loan controlled by Mr. Sanchez was used by men later identified as Mexican drug dealers to launder money. Another commercial, released in the final days of the campaign, linked those drug dealers, and implicitly Mr. Sanchez, to the murder of a federal drug agent. Hispanic political leaders and Democrats assailed the advertisements as racially motivated and too extreme, but the Perry campaign defended them as factual. And today, Ms. Weddington, the party chairwoman, said Mr. Perry's willingness to be so "aggressive" late in the campaign helped energize core Republican voters."
Similarly, the Associated Press said:
"Tony Sanchez and Ron Kirk carried heavily Hispanic regions of South Texas in Tuesday's elections, but unfortunately for the Democrats' so-called Dream Team, they were routed by Republicans everywhere else. Some analysts said minority turnout fell below Democrats' expectations but that the party's strategy of appealing to minority voters is still valid because of the fast-growing Hispanic population in Texas. Others, however, warned that Democrats are having an increasingly difficult job winning white voters. … The Democratic candidates "were attractive to black and brown voters, there just weren't enough of them," [Professor Stein of Rice University] said."
In Florida, according to the New York Times -
"Voter turnout…was remarkably high for a midterm election: 42.9 percent, up from 36.5 percent in 1998 and 41.5 percent in 1994, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a research group based in Washington. 'Turnout was higher among Republicans and much lower among Democrats,' [Jim] Kane, [director of the Florida Voter Poll] said."
This triumph for the Sailer Strategy makes it even more important for Republican mouthpieces to exude flapdoodle about how huge a help Hispanics were.
Thus Ellen Sorokin, writing in the Beltway-oriented Washington Times reported credulously that
"…Hispanic voters were a driving force behind the Republicans' historic win of both chambers of Congress, party officials and political analysts said yesterday. … Republicans won their seats, with a lot of help from the Hispanic community."
["Disillusioned blacks hurt Democrats" By Ellen Sorokin, Washington Times, November 7, 2002]
Sorokin's article goes on to feature some of the most egregious attempts to deceive I've seen recently. Republican officials must be desperate if this is the best they can come up with:
(1) "Republican Sen. Wayne Allard, of Colorado, won El Paso County, which has about 58,400 Hispanics, by 53,445 votes."
This is silly. Of course Allard won by a mile in El Paso County. It's home to Colorado Springs, one of the most Conservative Christian cities in the country. El Paso County is in Colorado's 5th Congressional district, in which Republican Representative Joel Hefley was re-elected with 83% of the vote in 2000. Only 11.3% of the population is Hispanic, according to the Census, and maybe they cast 5% or 6 % of the votes in El Paso. You can't possibly draw the conclusion that because a Republican won big there, that Hispanics had much to do with it.
(2) "In Georgia, Rep. Saxby Chambliss won Gwinnett County, which has the largest Hispanic population, by 39,346 votes."
Look, Gwinnett County, in suburban Atlanta, is one of most famously white Republican counties in America, the home of Newt Gingrich. Its Republican Congressman John Linder ran unopposed for reelection in 2000. It was only 10.9% Hispanic by population in the 2000 Census. Most of the Hispanics in the South are new immigrants — few are citizens. I'd be surprised if 3% of the votes in Gwinnett were cast by Hispanics.
(3) "In North Carolina, Elizabeth H. Dole won Wake County, the county with the state's second-largest Hispanic population by 22,405 voters, the RNC numbers show."
C'mon! Wake is only 5.4% Hispanic. Almost all of them are newcomers. I doubt if Hispanics cast 2% of the votes in Wake.
Then the Washington Times' Sorokin listed three more substantive possibilities – but they're still wrong:
(4) "In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush was re-elected with more than 60 percent of the Latino vote."
My comments: (a) Who knows? We are being asked to take this on faith. (b) Florida has many middle class, anti-Communist, Republican Cuban Hispanics. There's nothing unusual about Republicans doing well there. (c) If that 60 percent figure is true, Jeb did about eleven points over George W.'s share of Florida Hispanics in 2000. But he did over 13 points better than Dubya among Florida voters overall. So his Hispanic performance was still weaker.
(5) "In New York, Gov. George E. Pataki was re-elected with nearly 50 percent of the Hispanic vote."
"Nearly"? Subsequent estimates put it closer to a third. (NYT Nov 9)
And remember this: Pataki ran so far to the left that he was endorsed by the New York Times!
Is that what Beltway "conservatives" (and JimBob) want?
(6) "In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry was re-elected with more than one-third of the Latino vote, according to figures compiled by the Republican National Committee [RNC]."
Oh yeah? The William Velasquez Institute's exit poll of 800 Hispanic voters in Texas found Perry getting only 13%.
Obviously, both sides are biased. I wouldn't trust either. That said, Perry must have garnered close to 70% of the white vote. So the gap between whites and Hispanics in Texas is still huge.
So the Sailer Strategy worked. All it took was an imminent war – to which whites responded more patriotically. (Interestingly.)
In the longer term, I am uncomfortable with the idea of the two major parties splitting into racial blocs.
But there's a simple solution. If you don't want whites to act like a minority group - e.g. racially-conscious, bloc-voting, biased, prickly, led by racial racketeers constantly proclaiming their group's victimization - then the government should stop making whites a minority through mass immigration.
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
November 10, 2002
