Tuesday, April 11, 2017

A Changed Score Won't Change The Blame Game

Oh, my, so much of the angry stuff written from right after the election till now would seem to have been based on false reporting of phony figures from the polling people.   A non-instant analysis of what I would imagine is somewhat less bad data has been done.

A more accurate analysis of the 2016 presidential election than the preliminary exit polls shows that Hillary Clinton won the Catholic vote, so now I’m waiting for the spate of stories about how the Democratic Party should stop worrying about courting religious voters and hold strongly to its pro-choice position.

Clinton won the Catholic vote by 48% to 45% for Trump, according to an analysis of data from the nonpartisan American National Elections Studies by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. That’s compared to exit poll data that suggested Trump won the Catholic vote by 52% to 45%.

I am not waiting for all of the blog babblers and anti-Christian, anti-Catholic commentators to do a correction.   If they correct any of the stuff they spewed out back then, let me know because I'm not going to waste any time looking for it.  I don't expect it will be there.

What there is in further analysis of their data shows that the generally Democratic character of "the Catholic vote" will likely continue to be and maybe will be more Democratic.

The only age group that overwhelmingly voted for Trump were Catholics age 75 and older, who went for Trump 57% to 44%. The age groups roughly corresponding to Baby Boomers and Gen Xers split narrowly, with Boomers favoring Trump by two points (49% to 47%) and Xers favoring Clinton by two points (46% to 44%). But Millennial Catholics favored Clinton by a whopping 31% (59% to 28%), by far the largest split of any age group.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the white Catholics who heavily favored Trump in 2016 are what the gerontologists call the “old old.” With life expectancy hovering around 81 for white females and 76 for white males, it doesn’t take a math wiz to figure out that many of these Trump voters won’t be around in 2020 and most will have gone to that great election booth in the sky by 2024.

Whew!  I narrowly missed out of being with the goats instead of the sheep on that one, I'm old but not "old old" though none of the "old olds" among the Catholics in my family I'm aware of voted for Trump.  One of my oldest Catholic cousins seldom says "Republicans" without the word "dirty" placed before it.    Depending on how you cut the crap to find someone to blame I would insist that I am not one of the "white men" who are a more obvious group to pin the blame on because I'm not a "straight white man" but am "LGBT" If not "LGBTQ" though old enough so I will never find the "Q" word acceptable.

Anyway, the fastest growing cohort of Catholics went decisively for Clinton:

Similarly, the Hispanic vote went overwhelmingly for Clinton at 74% to 19%, for a massive 55% advantage. Of course, at least some of this can be accounted for by Trump’s hostility toward Hispanic immigrants and may not carry over to future Republican candidates. But young voters have a tendency to stick with the party they first vote for, so it’s likely that Trump has created a generation of Democratic voters among the fast-growing Latino population.

The election of 2016 also shows that contrary to some predictions, the pro-choice stance of the Democratic Party isn’t a turn off for Hispanic voters. And appeals to some “abortion lite” position is unlikely to sway those white Catholics who are committed to the Republican Party. As Mark Gray, polling director for CARA, noted of the results:

Party comes first for many Catholics and they then try to make that fit within their faith. I don’t mean that in a way that being a Democrat or being a Republican is more important to them than being Catholic. But I mean that at the ballot box, partisanship trumps their faith when they make their choice.

All of this suggests that the election of 2016 was somewhat of a demographic outlier, the last gasp of old white Catholics if you will. Millennials and Hispanics are the future of the Democratic Party. It doesn’t need to contort itself with appeals to conservative religious voters on abortion. Time truly is on the Democrats’ side.

I haven't looked at the figures about what other religious groups slimed in the wake of the election might show.  I wonder  if the figures considered more reliable will be different from those that everyone was whining about for the past four months.

What isn't on our side is FOX and cabloid news and the Republican-fascist hold on the states and the Supreme Court where they are reinstituting Jim Crow even in places that hardly if ever had it before. The Republican Party is the party of white supremacists, overt fascists, actual Nazis and such folk in places like Michigan and Wisconsin who are a throw-back to the crypto-Nazism of a perversion of Calvinism that produced South African apartheid.   But it is, probably most dangerously, the party of the sociopath billionaire boys and girls club and their billions and ability to buy what they want from our corrupt system.  They and foreign dictators like Putin have a fleet of hireling lawyers and advisors to allow them to game the stinking corpse of the 18th century Constitution that idiots are paying to worship on Broadway these days figuring lying up make believe history has of the kind that got us here has got something like civic virtue.

But, hey, why let those complicated issues get in the way of a good old fashioned hate-fest like the ones all over the blogs right after the election, based on those phony exit-polls?   I'll tell you why, it's dangerous and hard to fight against the real enemy, they're really powerful and a lot of the real things that got us here are the idols of American materialism and lore.  It's a lot easier to place the blame on safer easier targets.  Like those Trump voters who blamed Black people and Latinos for the billionaires shafting them.  People can be such cowards.

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