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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Thu Nov 21, 2013, 07:28 AM Nov 2013

How the GOP Is Literally Killing Its Voters

http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-gop-literally-killing-its-voters

It isn’t hard to understand why Republican Party strategists have been gloating over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s landslide re-election on November 5: at a time when so much is being written about demographics working against the GOP, they’ll take all the victories they can get (especially in a state as heavily Democratic as New Jersey). But Christie’s victory was an outlier, and Christie—as right-wing as he is—has never been a favorite of either the Tea Party or the Christian Right.

Trends are more revealing than outliers, and one need only attend a Tea Party rally or look at the 2012 election results to see that the GOP base is predominantly white, older and hardly the picture of diversity. But the fact that President Barack Obama, in 2012, won 93% of the African-American vote, 71% of the Latino vote, 73% of the Asian vote, 67% of the non-married female vote and 55% of the overall female vote isn’t the only problem the GOP is facing when it comes to demographics. The GOP’s dirty little secret is that Republican and Tea Party policies are literally killing the GOP’s own base.

Not all of the older white males (and to a lesser degree, older white females) who vote Republican are affluent, and not everyone who is affluent votes Republican (some of the most expensive, ultra-gentrified cities in the United States—including Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and New York City—are overwhelmingly Democratic).

The late journalist Joe Bageant (a self-described “redneck leftist” and author of the 2008 book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War) had a lot to say about white poverty and the fact that the GOP, with its emphasis on culture war issues, has convinced many older whites to vote against their own economic interests. Bageant often stressed that poverty should not be viewed as strictly an urban, black and Latino problem. He was fond of saying that when you’re poor, white and rural in America, you have no choice but to get tough in a hurry. And since Bageant’s death in 2011, the economic conditions for poor whites have continued to worsen.