Electoral results: suppress the vote, bash the queers, and buy the vote
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Yesterdays elections are being written off in the media as unimportant or indicative of nothing. But in fact there are some fairly interesting lessons to be learned in yesterday’s vote:
1. The fewer poor and or Black people that vote, the better for the Republicans. This is the lesson in Virginia where the voter turn out was much lower than last year, when Obama won the state. And African American votes went from 1/5 to about 16% of voters.
This has long been the strategy of the GOP. In 1980, Paul Weyrich, the founder of the conservative movement was saying: “I don’t want everyone to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They’re won by a majority of voters.”
The fight against ACORN is partly a fight about voter suppression. ACORN gets people to register to vote who do not normally register to vote. Kill ACORN and other efforts to get more people to vote and you manage to help the GOP.
2. Denying gays and lesbians the same rights as straight people is still a good strategy for winning. This is a lesson learned in Virginia, where newly elected GOP Governor McDonnell believes, at least according to a 20-year old graduate school thesis he wrote at the evangelical Regent University, that government should strengthen the traditional family by working against gay rights, abortion rights, and even women in the workplace (i.e. working women undermine the family).
It is also the lesson in Maine, where a recently passed same-sex marriage law was overturned by the voters. Ah heck, it’s also a lesson at Obama’s Whitehouse where not a single thing has been done to stop discrimination against gays and lesbians in the military or to support same-sex marriage legislation.
It’s good for the Republicans; it’s good for the Dems; it just ain’t so good for the gays and lesbians.
3. Rich candidates can buy the election. Although the NY Times is trying to spin Michael Bloomberg’s re-election as mayor of New York City as “close,” the truth is he won and he won because he outspent his opponent by 14 to 1. In fact, Bloomberg poured $90 million of his own dollars into the election.
Of course, lesson number 1 also can be applied, since the Republican mayor also won an election where
the turnout appeared to be on track to be among the lowest in modern New York history.
The real lessons to be drawn from this election and every other one is that until there is real reform of campaign finance laws, until civil rights are not decided by a majority of voters, and until the GOP is held accountable for decades of voter suppression, the results of the election are that the best strategy for winning is not to run an honest campaign with good ideas for governance. Instead, the best way to win an election is to suppress the vote, bash the queers, and buy the vote.
Christie Wins in New Jersey, McDonnell in Virginia – NYTimes.com.
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- Ten key election races and results (cnn.com)
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Well at least we had one bright spot, NY’s 23rd, at least that teabagging moron didn’t win. I was also pleased to see that Bloomberg didn’t win by a clean sweep and a great many people were just as disturbed by Mike’s heavy handed tactics as I was in quest for a third term.
So does Governor McDonnel still stand with his the same views he expressed 20 years ago? I didn’t follow that race, so I don’t know, but it seems like McDonnel would have to be bashing gays -now- in order for that to be a lesson learned from the 2009 elections. Although I have no doubt that a research paper from two decades ago might shed some light on McDonnel’s beliefs, it doesn’t actually tell me much about what he believes today, unless that information comes wrapped with something more recent which would imply his views haven’t changed.
Sorry- I think that was poorly written on my part. McDonnel did not distance himself from those views- but he tried to avoid “moral issues’ during the campaign and focus on the economy. In part, because he’s so conservative that the far right didn’t demand that he prove himself as anti-abortion, gays, etc. Everyone knows he is.
Do Virginian voters care? Would they have voted differently had he spoken about “values”?
In response to another comment. See in context »Geez Laurie. Let the ACORN thing go. Their offices in NOLA were just raided as a result of all their scumbaggery. It’s quite clear they have no issues whatsoever engaging in election fraud. To support them, implies that you have no problem with illegal election tactics as long as it gets the result you want. Is that what colleges are teaching now?
Laurie, you also need to let the gay thing go. As I have mentioned to you in previous comments, I am gay myself, so I think I have the right to chime in here. Whenever this issue is put to a vote, it fails – 30 odd times. The voters, even in liberal CA, don’t want it. Or perhaps you know better than people themselves what they want?
I recently heard Middlebury is the most expensive college in the US. Do you expected to be taken seriously writing a “Class Warfare” column when you are at the most exclusive college?