Ok folks get ready! The political fiend in me is ready to pound out three political posts in a row tonight (with a dinner break in between) that I hope you’ll find interesting and can add to in the form of interesting comments/debate. First up, in the aftermath of Super Tuesday here is what we learned:
- Women voters break for Hillary
- Latino-American voters break for Hillary
- Older voters break for Hillary
- Asian-Americans voters break for Hillary
- Male voters break for Obama
- Independent voters break for Obama
- Younger voters break for Obama
In the list of observations above, I want to especially focus on the two that I have highlighted, and on the nexus point between the two. Why is it that the Latino population seems to greatly favor Clinton (sometimes by a 3-1 margin), and helped her win in states like California? One possible answer some might suggest is the politically incorrect reason which offers that Latino people see African Americans as competition. They often compete for the same jobs, and many in the African-American community are quick to point out that illegal Latino immigrants depress wages, which works against African Americans seeking similar jobs (this was even a debate question the other night). Cynics would say that African Americans and Latinos would rather have a white person in charge than someone from the other group. Okay, lets assume all that is true for a minute. What about Asian Americans (including South Asian Americans)? Polls from last night showed that they voted for Clinton over Obama in even higher proportions than the Latino population. Here is an excerpt from Salon:
…a self-congratulatory article in the India Express touting the influence of Indian-Americans in the Democratic primary process reveals even greater constraints on the appeal of Obama’s diversity. In California, exit poll data suggests that 69 percent of Latinos voted for Clinton, while only 29 percent voted for Obama. But Asian-American voters skewed even more sharply pro-Clinton: 75 percent voted for her, compared to 23 percent for Obama. That’s almost as high as the percentage of the black vote (78 percent) that went for Obama…Despite the claims of the Indian press, the total numbers of Indian-American voters in the New York and New Jersey primaries were too small to significantly influence the overall results. (The total Asian vote was too small for there to be any relevant exit poll data.) A better case can be made in California. In Santa Clara County, where there are some 115,000 Indian-American residents, Clinton cleaned up, winning 54.8 percent to 39.3 percent — better than her statewide average. (Whereas just to the north, in San Francisco and Alameda counties, Obama was the victor.)…
But that’s just one piece. In California, 8 percent of all Democratic voters identified themselves as Asian — a category that encompasses a vast swath of cultures. Truly, California’s diversity is extraordinary. But it doesn’t appear, so far, to translate into a willingness to vote for a “diverse” candidate for president. [Link]
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p>So why didn’t Asians pick the more “diverse candidate” who seems to have more in common with them? Does this mean that Asians might be influenced by the bigotry against African Americans that pervades much of Asian culture (Anna joked around about this in her post last night)? Let’s just admit it. Many in our parents generation are openly bigoted against blacks. But all this might just be a partial explanation and miss the underlying reasons altogether.
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p>Over at the Huffington Post, blogger Jeff Chang provides one of the most cogent explanations of Asian American voting that I have ever read. It may shed some light on all of this:
Soon we’ll be hearing a number of crackpot theories as to why this was so. Are Latinos and Asian Americans in fact slightly more conservative on immigration issues than everyone previously thought? Ridiculous. Are Latinos and Asian Americans unwilling to bring themselves to vote for a Black man? Get out of here with that.
The reason Hillary won is because the Latino and Asian American votes remain emergent, not yet insurgent.
Emergent voting blocs respond to leaders in their community. If the candidate wins the leader, she wins her followers. Insurgent voting blocs instead respond to calls for change, and may focus more on single issues or agendas. If a candidate stakes out a good position, she captures the community. Hillary played the politics of emergence.
Early, she locked down important leaders in the Latino and Asian American communities. In Los Angeles, that meant securing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s support, and the predominantly Latino unions that have supported him. She also landed the support of Fabian Nunez and Dolores Huerta. In San Francisco, that meant seizing on Mayor Gavin Newsom’s popularity amongst Asian Americans. She also captured a who’s who of Asian American elected officials starting with Controller John Chiang and moving on down. Just as important, Hillary’s campaign locked up a huge number of the leading Latino and Asian American party operatives–the people who actually deliver the voters.
All of them–from Villaraigosa to the Asian American precinct captain–were responding to what might be called aspirational politics. The individuals become proxies for the community. You hear them say in their campaigns, “When I win, you win.” Clinton’s main advantage is that she has the access to power and the party structures that deliver promises to officials and operatives. Obama doesn’t. Emergent politics favors individuals seeking power. Think of it this way: Hillary, the woman candidate, is bringing Latino and Asian American leaders into the old-boy’s network.
These leaders, in turn, deliver votes via their community’s structures of power: business groups, labor unions, voter groups, community organizations. Those groups tend to deliver an older voter who is already “in the game”, who can directly benefit from the opening of the old-boy’s network. “Experience” really is a cover for “access”. [Link]
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p>Hours after first reading the above post I am still impressed by Chang’s explanation. It also allows me to properly articulate something that I haven’t been able to do in the four years that Sepia Mutiny has been on the air. “What does the ‘Mutiny’ stand for in Sepia Mutiny?” we often get asked. I finally know how to answer that question. I want Sepia Mutiny to be one of the insurgent voices of South Asian American community (i.e., voting icebergs). I want to lend my voice to help limit the influence of emergent groups that claim to speak for all (see USINPAC). I want leaders to speak to my issues and not suck up to who they see as my “leaders.” The idea that Asian Americans would play follow the leader is not very surprising. Many Asian immigrants come from cultures where dynastic or strongman rule is the norm (think Gandhis of the Congress Party, or Modi in Gujarat for example). The people will vote how the revered leader or the influential local party official asks them to. The same is true in many Latin American countries. This is one aspect of the campaign where Clinton clearly showed her experience as superior to that of Obama’s. She knew exactly what to do to lock down the votes she needed.
So given that Chang’s analysis is correct and that the trend in Asian American voting continues, how will this play out? The Hill has an idea:
In Washington state, which caucuses Saturday, Asian Americans outnumber blacks. In Maryland, which votes in a primary Tuesday, both Asian Americans and Hispanics account for 4 percent of the population. And in Hawaii, which votes Feb. 19, they make up nearly 41 percent of the population, more than any other demographic…<
p>”They’ve seen the Clintons over the last 12-13 years,” said Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus. “Obama, they’ve just come in contact with him in this last campaign. If Obama were to have a little more time, I think his exposure would have been greater.”
Asian Americans still remember that President Clinton appointed an Asian American, Norman Mineta, as his Transportation secretary, said Honda, who has not endorsed a candidate. Hillary Clinton tapped Gary Locke, the first Asian American governor of the lower 48 states, to co-chair her Washington state campaign. [Link]
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p>Seems like the tea leaves favor Clinton going into the next month of primaries.
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p>I discuss politics over email at length every day with a group of my UMich buddies. I often use some of our discussions in my posts. One of them voiced his frustration today like this:
But here’s where it starts to get tricky and darker. Latinos and Asians aren’t gonna vote for a black guy unfortunately. Thats why BO was never going to win Cali. Part of the working class vote for HRC is definetely a “not gonna vote for a black guy vote.” And part of the whtie male vote is a “not gonna vote for a woman, esp Hillary” vote.So poitively or negatively, IDENTITY POLITICS is ruling the day. If there’s ever been a question about how much identity politics has dominated progressive thinking, this is a strong indication that its completely corrupted us.
So how is BO staying in? He’s getting the 18-25 post identity politics people, and he’s causing more people to come to the polls.
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p>There is a silver lining in this for all those who (like me) want to see the end of emergent politics and the begining of insurgent politics. 18-25 year old Asian Americans voted just like 18-25 year old non-Asian Americans. That leads many to believe that the children of immigrants may be breaking the reliable habits of their parents. That will suck for politicians as it will make our larger demographic more unreliable, but good for us because they will have to listen to more of us.
Younger Latino and Asian American voters were energized by Obama, and formed a visible and crucial part of his GOTV ground troops. They had an impact. Roberto Lovato notes that Obama was able to bring down Hillary’s overall 4-1 advantage among Latino voters to a 3-2 advantage by Super Tuesday. It could be argued that Obama’s bottom-up machinery hasn’t yet taken full advantage of the pent-up energy amongst young Brown and Yellow voters.
When that power is unleashed, it will be unpredictable. The 1.5 generation, young Latino and Asian Americans from the ages of 16-40 who were born elsewhere but raised multilingual and multicultural in the U.S., represents a massive demographic bulge in those communities only beginning to feel itself. Before long, they will turn their communities’ emergent vote into an insurgent vote. And then the country will really discover not just the necessity of the Latino and Asian American vote, but what it is that they really want. [Link]
but rather a desire to be popular and not rock the boat,
cough authorization for military force 2002 cough
The argument in comment # 91 makes sense to me…I think the Hillary support from desi-Asian Americans is (A)because the 90’s were the ‘golden age of indian immigration to the US’, what with the Y2K panic and the dot-com boom, etc. It was a great time to be a young indian moving to/working in the US….unlike in the last few years…
and (B) we, like the Latinos, are much, much more used to women leaders than the typical American is….even though our women leaders are often piggy-backing on male relatives, there’s the odd Mayawati / Phoolan Devi who succeeds, too. Of course, we still treat women as Madonna/whore, so our women leaders have to necessarily have to be single (Jayalalitha) or quasi-single (Indira Gandhi), not have a normal human life. Their power can be rationalized easily, then….
right, we also have our Black leaders, Obama is white compared to our “captain” vijayakanth. (people outside tamilnadu might not know him). we have a special “praiseword” in Tamil for people who are as dark as coal. “karuppu vairam” translates to “black diamond”.
BTW, I like this presidential campaign. It feels like home. What “race” votes what candidate instead of what “caste” votes what candidate. 🙂
Obama’s change will be the equivalent of changing Madras to Chennai, Bombay to Mumbai, Calcutta to Kolkata, etc. It doesn’t amount to much in the end.
99 · Rahul said
The Bill Clinton presidency was the high water mark for jewish political influence in America. They got the lion’s share of presidential appointments, including both Supreme Court Justices (the most important and long-lasting presidential appointement). Bill must have felt that he deserved the sexual services of the jewish Monica Lewinsky after all he had done for her tribe 🙂
Tribe? Bill had a favorite out of the 12? Which was it? Judah? Levi? We must denounce such blatant tribe-ism!
I’ve read that he was born in Hawaii which isn’t exactly typical of most of American states when it comes to race. I’ve also read somewhere that he spent his formative years in Indonesia, and has a stepfather from that country as well. As you may know his biological father was from Kenya, definitely black, but not the same ‘culture’ as an American who is black. Some of us black people think of “black” as our racial designation, not our ‘culture’, but I digress. Not to surprising there quite a bit of information in the public sphere (try google) on his background.
Do you think voters would be more suspicious of someone who didn’t grow up in freedom loving,Christian America? You may have heard/read on this blog about attempts to insinuate that he’s actually a Muslim(gasp!). Personally I think his broader view of the world, and his post baby boom “world view” would be an asset.
From the Atlantic.com Goodbye to all that
At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a moĂ‚Âmentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.
The traces of our long journey to this juncture can be found all around us. Its most obvious manifestation is political rhetoric. The high temperature—Bill O’Reilly’s nightly screeds against anti-Americans on one channel, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” on the other; MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” on the one side, Ann Coulter’s Treason on the other; Michael Moore’s accusation of treason at the core of the Iraq War, Sean Hannity’s assertion of treason in the opposition to it—is particularly striking when you examine the generally minor policy choices on the table. Something deeper and more powerful than the actual decisions we face is driving the tone of the debate.
I was listening to the right wing talk radio and they brought up this interesting point. Since this is going to be an identity based election, John Mccain should pick up a good Vice Presidential candidate with solid conservative credentials, should be young and should bring in a state and most importantly someone from the “minority” community. And the speaker was suggesting Governor Jindal. That sounds like a nice idea.
NPR has a breakdown on the remarks/both sides;
BC:“You said in 2004 there was no difference between you and George Bush on the war, and you took that speech you’re now running on off your Web site in 2004. There’s no difference in your voting record and Hillary’s ever since. Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” he said.”…
Obama did vote for funding of the troops which is where I think the Clinton attack came from;
“I don’t see any inclination on the part of those of us in Congress to cut off funding. I think that if we are going to have America’s young men and women there fighting, that we have an obligation to make sure that they’ve got the best equipment, the body armor, the resources they need to come home safely,” Obama said.
The democratic nomination will come down to who is perceived as being more likely to beat John McCain in the general election.
Obama’s corner will claim that he will rope in the independents and even some republicans while all the democratic votes going to Hillary in the primaries will transfer to him in the general election; that his appeal transcends party affiliations; that most americans including republicans are sick of business as usual in Washington and are hankering for change.
Hillary will claim that she has withstood all that the republicans have thrown at her, that there is nothing new that they can tar her with; while Obama OTOH is extremely vulnerable to republican dirty tricks which they are saving for the general election, some of which she and her people have already pointed out: his race, his foreign muslim father and step-father, his muslim name, his connections to the indicted syrian-american slumlord in Chicago, his long term affiliation with a racist black-identity church, his drug use as a young man and so on.
110 · Ponniyin Selvan said
If John Mccain picked up Jindal as a vice-pres., whatever thought I ever entertained in voting for Mccain would then be eviscerated from my memory. I suspect for a lot of right leaning dems, independents or “Reagan Dems”, the same would hold true. I’d actually knock myself over the head till I suffered from short term memory loss so I would forget I even considered Mccain. I would then draw reminders on my body much like in Memento that I had to go out and support any democratic candidate that was opposing Mccain/Jindal. After that, I’d call my parents, my sister, my aunties, my uncles, my jijja’s, my puppards, my thayas, my cousins, my neighbors, my friends, my enemies, my frenemies, my acquaintances, my stalker exes, my lost loves, women I wish I had gone out with and anyone else who I might remotely know in 8 degrees of separation (who has citizenship) and made sure they voted for the democratic nominee, even if I didn’t like who was running for the democrats. I’d even consider bankrupting myself, going to jail, getting disbarred, to buy votes to insure that Mcain/Jindal never won. Truly, I would.
Mccain could pick anyone over Jindal (except for Rush and Allen) and I wouldn’t have this kind of irrational, emotional response.
Mccain’s locked up the nomination. IMO, if he wants to beat Hill or Obama, he’s got to run counter to the neocon’s desires and run toward the middle. I’d like to see a return to the John Mccain pre-Bush election, before he started pandering like a 50 cent hooker on can recycling day at the local brothel. 9 cans gets you a free ride.
Before you think me too harsh on John Mccain, while I am a registered Dem, I am undecided as to where I would vote and I would strongly consider voting for him (despite the pandering). As I’ve said before, my perfect world would have a Mccain/Obama or Obama/Mccain ticket, despite the incongruity in policy positions and parties. Just because Jindal’s got the right last name and is as brown as me, it shouldn’t be the reason any desi should vote for him. That’d be identity politics at its worst. Jindal’s so far right that he makes Ann Coulter look reasonable. (who BTW, according to Wiki, dated Dinesh D’Souza, only affirming that once you go desi, you go crazy…. in love) I don’t think any African-Americans or any immigrant group would look at Jindal and see such commonality that they would claim him as one of their own. Frankly, I have no idea how he won in Louisiana, so what do I know. I think the right wing radio guys are simply going nuts that they maybe losing hold of a republican candidate and are looking to find anyway to stay relevant by placing one of their drones in a position of power.
I think the right wing radio host was trying to get conservatives who form the core of the Republican base to support Mccain by getting a good enough VP candidate. Definitely not registered democrats. 🙂
Ponniyin Selvan,
They maybe trying to get core republicans but that strategy may very well hurt them in a general election, especially against Obama. Obama would steal some of those independents who may prove to be the swing in a general election. Against a Clinton, the core Repubs. would all probably stand up together and sing Kumaya with Mccain (no matter who the VP was) if they thought it would beat Hillary.
BTW, thanks for taking my comment (which may have been a tad strong ;)) in such a good natured way. 🙂
93 · Rahul said
To have a legislative record with teeth in the Senate is partly the reason why there have been so few Senators awarded with their Party’s nomination. And, to the extent it matters, Hillary has no legislative achievements of her own.
12 · RandomDude said
I hope I’ll have time to respond to everything in your post, but for now, note that Obama voted FOR the Indo-US nuclear deal. (In fact, a friend who used to work for Sec. Nick Burns at State and who was actively involved in negotiating the deal is now on Obama’s foreign policy advisory team.) People have different opinions on the deal, but it would be nice to base one’s opinions on correct facts.
Well. I think ‘economy’ will be the main issue in this election. In that case, Independents are going to vote for the fiscal conservatives and Mccain / Jindal would fit their bill. I guess they won’t vote for Hillary/Obama.
Actually, I have no bones to pick in this fight, So no worries :-). I can’t vote. I’m technically disenfranchised. I can’t vote in either India or America. I’d actually like a Obama – Huckabee fight. Both those guys seem honest and speak out defending their convictions. Mccain is close. But I don’t believe Hillary.
Thanks for saying this Camille. I also find it very frustrating. Here was a golden opportunity to explore other dimensions that come into play (whether we may agree with the ideas or not) but the thread just devolved into a discussion of race as usual. In fact much of what is touted as racial does not have much to do with race. Koreans’ hatred of the Japanese is not racism. Black/Latino tensions are not racism. Asians’ adulation of the white race at the cost of all others is not racism. Ethnic solidarity is not racism. Old desi folk balking at the thought of a black man as President (or son-in-law) has dimensions beyond racism. The list goes on. This is similar to the caste thing when discussing India so I’m pretty used to it by now. But nevertheless I continue to look up to the SM bloggers and community to have standards higher than those embodied by the commoners that go to form the regular media. Just as terms like fob, abcd, Nazi and others are discouraged, it may be worthwhile to examine the overuse of the R word as well.
I hasten to add, I’m aware that racism exists and may specially be signficant in this campaign.
the author goes into too much here. it is very simple.
hispanics and asian & indian americans have no connection with slavery of balcks – nither as the slaves or the enslaved. so people are not going to vote for him just because of his background and in many cases people wont vote for him because of his background.
hillary may not be change or a clean break with the past. but, obama, like hillary, would be surrounded by advisors who are as inside as anybody else.
and, someone has to fix the economy… sadly romney’s out, leaving just hill to fix bush’s mess.
i’m not a rep or dem fyi… more rep though
For those who think that Hillary will be better against McCain on national defense issues
Think about this hypothetical attack ad Cue shots of Hillary Clinton tearing up (in NH and in Conn) Voiceover: Who do you want as the commander-in-chief someone who cries at the prospect of losing a primary Or someone who withstood torture for five years and never wavered
You decide.
Mean but effective.
I should have added better than Obama to go against McCain on national defense issues.
For many desi’s, Hillary is mo’cushle.
Er, people, Jindal’s not going to be the VP nominee anytime soon. He just got into the governor’s mansion. Would be pointless to leave it after being in the job for like only three weeks.