PhDeac
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I didn't think Pete's speech was as great as people are saying it was. It was a good speech, but we've heard much of it before.
I think Townie is way off on a few points. First of all, Pete's Douglass plan for tackling institutional racism has been out for awhile. He has a bunch of plans available on his website. The whole "Pete doesn't have plans" meme was dumb anyway because obviously US senators and their staffs are going to have more fleshed out plans ready to go within the first few months of a campaign. It's really dumb now. Second, the speech obviously played well with high information voters because it played very well in the room of people who showed up to volunteer in Iowa. Third, the basic story on Pete with minority voters is (1) they don't know about him, (2) when they find out about him they like him, (3) but they're worried that other people will have a problem with a gay candidate. All of those bode well for Pete if he performs well in Iowa which the latest Quinnipiac polling suggests he has a good shot at doing. Nobody else besides Biden and Sanders is doing well with black voters and that's because they've run before. Again, black voters tend to stick with the safest option before the primaries. Biden and Sanders should be concerned because they didn't do that well with black voters in their previous runs. The same people counting out Pete with black voters are the same people who are adamant that a white nominee has to have Kamala, Castro, or Booker as a VP even though they aren't doing great with black voters either.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20926701/black-voters-democratic-primary-2020
The political elitism out there seems to assume everybody has been following this primary. In my circle of suburban moms and dads, people are vaguely aware of what's going on but they've mainly checked out of the news for their mental health and to rest up for 2020. There's a strong sense of "let me know who actually has a chance to win."
I think Townie is way off on a few points. First of all, Pete's Douglass plan for tackling institutional racism has been out for awhile. He has a bunch of plans available on his website. The whole "Pete doesn't have plans" meme was dumb anyway because obviously US senators and their staffs are going to have more fleshed out plans ready to go within the first few months of a campaign. It's really dumb now. Second, the speech obviously played well with high information voters because it played very well in the room of people who showed up to volunteer in Iowa. Third, the basic story on Pete with minority voters is (1) they don't know about him, (2) when they find out about him they like him, (3) but they're worried that other people will have a problem with a gay candidate. All of those bode well for Pete if he performs well in Iowa which the latest Quinnipiac polling suggests he has a good shot at doing. Nobody else besides Biden and Sanders is doing well with black voters and that's because they've run before. Again, black voters tend to stick with the safest option before the primaries. Biden and Sanders should be concerned because they didn't do that well with black voters in their previous runs. The same people counting out Pete with black voters are the same people who are adamant that a white nominee has to have Kamala, Castro, or Booker as a VP even though they aren't doing great with black voters either.
https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/11/4/20926701/black-voters-democratic-primary-2020
In other words, there isn’t a single black vote. There are many. A seemingly monolithic black electorate often coalesces onlyafter individual black voters make decisions based on a nuanced set of political calculations.
“Black voters today are behaving in a very smart and strategic way that they’ve always behaved in, but no one ever really lets us be smart,” says Keneshia Grant, an assistant professor of political science at Howard University. “Black voters get viewed as sheep who are being told where to go, and I think that’s wrong and the data shows that this is wrong.”
Black voters, much like other voters in the electorate, have varying ideologies. Some are more conservative than others. Some are far more progressive. And there other splits as well, along lines of age, gender, income, and geography. This has always been the case, and yet, it is rarely discussed in mainstream political conversations about courting black voters.
Take, for example, the aforementioned 2008 Democratic presidential primary. While then-Sen. Barack Obama’s success over Hillary Clinton is often remembered — as is the fact that black voters began to overwhelmingly support him after the Iowa Caucus — what often isn’t as readily acknowledged is that for months before this, there had been a noticeable split in the black voters backing him and the black voters who weren’t. Early in the contest, Obama was supported mainly by younger black voters, as older voters and many black politicians backed Clinton, pointing to her established history in the black community, her work during her husband’s presidential administration, and for some, their belief that Obama wasn’t well-known enough to be electable.
But when a majority of this group flipped to Obama in 2008, they helped him advance further, propelling him to a win in South Carolina weeks later. Obama also won every primary held in a state where blacks were more than 20 percent of the population, and in some states, he managed to win over as much as 90 percent of black voters.
That primary offers a lot of lessons. For one, it shows that the margin of victory for a candidate among black voters matters almost as much as the victory itself, meaning that it’s in a candidate’s best interest to push their support among black voters as high as it can possibly go. The 2008 primary also provides one example of how black voting power has worked in recent elections: showing how a presumed frontrunner who was banking on black support (Clinton), and actually did have a lot of support from specific groups of black voters and the black political class, saw much of her lead evaporate after a different candidate proved they could also get votes from different portions of the electorate.
The political elitism out there seems to assume everybody has been following this primary. In my circle of suburban moms and dads, people are vaguely aware of what's going on but they've mainly checked out of the news for their mental health and to rest up for 2020. There's a strong sense of "let me know who actually has a chance to win."
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