Predicting From An Aberration

The Lexington column in the November 12th issue of The Economist opined on a political analyst's theory that the 2008 US presidential election is a harbinger of an unstoppable Democratic-friendly demographic.

The crux of the piece is a contention by Ruy Teixiera that minorities including blacks and Latinos will comprise 54% of the American electorate by 2050 so, QED, they'll just elect Democrats as president til the cows come home.

Teixiera evidently provided many two-way analyses of the 2008 vote, cited in the Lexington column, to cement his conclusions. For good measure, a Pew Research Center report is cited supporting the prior contentions of Democratic sweeps of the newly-emerging majority of voters.

To provide a cautionary view, though, the piece cites Brookings Institute's Bill Galston, a former Clinton aide, believes that Obama's campaign team is making a serious mistake in relying on newly-Democratic states like Colorado, while running away from Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

What I find almost laughable is that nowhere in the column does the editor's voice observe that the 2008 presidential election was singular for having an electable black candidate. And a voluble debater, at that. There's a half-hearted comment that 'Obamanania is over.'

But it's much, much worse than that.

Perhaps only an external-to-the-US editorial board or reporter could fail to understand how many whites voted for Wonderboy out of misplaced guilt over prior racial discrimination which occurred prior to their even being born. It's amazing that the popular vote spread was only about 6 percentage points.

Add to that one-off victory Obama's choice of failed New Deal-style liberal spending and business-bashing tactics and programs, and you have a sure-fire loss of votes in 2012.

The bottom line is that you'd have to be a complete idiot to base any long term voting pattern changes on the 2008 presidential election which featured the first viable black candidate from either party.