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During the standoff after election day in 2000 Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore really was not all that close at all. In fact, Limbaugh explained, if you just took out all of the black votes, Bush won by about 10 percentage points. In other words, if you just count regular old white votes, Bush won the election handily, and hence his claim to the presidency is much more legitimate than Al Gore's.
This interested me. I was motivated to then ask what would happen if white men (who make up 38% of the electorate) could not vote in the 2000 election. Who would win, and by how much? How would American politics be different if just one election were held where white men had to sit out? Being the aspiring political scientist that I am, I decided to do some number crunching out of the 2000 exit polls. I removed the votes of white men and found that under such circumstances Al Gore would have won 56% of the popular vote to 40% for George W. Bush, with about 4% going to third party candidates. Calculating the electoral vote would have been time consuming, as there are radically different racial makeups in each state, so I did not do it, but surely Gore would have won the Electoral College handily under such a scenario.
What if white men were disallowed from voting (but still allowed to run for office) in one, just one election? Keep in mind that white men excluded non-whites from voting for at least a hundred years, and I'm only suggesting one corrective election as a reparation for that. Imagine all the progressive legislation that could be pushed through Congress: national health care, gay marriages, a sensible drug policy, a fairer tax system, and a real effort to eradicate poverty in the United States. We could have full funding for stem cell research, a sane and rational foreign policy, re-regulation and de-corporatization of the news media, an end to corporate welfare and increased financial aid for higher education. I'm there's much more that I am missing.
I myself am a white man and I would be happy to sit out one election if this was the political outcome of it.
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