White identity politics doomed 2012 Republican effort
Fellow Lizard Obdicut noticed this trend as well; see Obdicut’s post here.
Of all the surprising and revealing results from Tuesday night, there is one relatively small bit of exit polling data that I think is the key to understanding the entire evening.
You’ve probably heard by now that Mitt Romney won white voters by a sizable margin, while Barack Obama ran up huge margins among African-Americans and Latinos.
In fact, he won Latinos by 71% to 27%, an even wider margin than in 2008 when he won them 67% to 31%. But almost no one has noticed what to me is the most shocking result, and that’s how the two candidates did with Asian-American voters.
Now, Asian-Americans made up a very small sliver of the electorate, just 3%, so a presidential candidate’s performance within that group doesn’t necessarily carry with it massive electoral consequences.
But Asian-Americans are also, according to the latest census, the fastest growing racial sub category in America. In fact, the census projects that by mid-century they will make up 9% of the country. And as it happens, Asian-Americans are also the nation’s highest earning ethnicity, with median incomes even higher than those of whites.
So you might have predicted that Mitt Romney would do well with them, since he won among voters making more than $100,000 a year.
But he did not. He got creamed, losing Asian-American voters 73% to 26%. This is a shocking result not only because just 20 years ago George HW Bush carried Asian-Americans comfortably, or because the margin is so wide,but because the entire category of Asian-American is so obviously a construction there’s little reason to suspect members of the group would vote with each other in any discernible pattern.
Also see Digby’s post here.
There are also acres of archives running back to 2006 here of Charles and other lizards warning the right about openly allying with white supremacists and nativists. Think they will run away from them now? Not likely, because they are now too embedded, they have graduated from underbelly to the core of the GOP.