I was speaking with a Republican friend of mine recently about the upcoming 2006 midterm elections. We were looking at a nifty interactive Web site that uses polling data to track what states and districts are leaning in which direction. It also has a feature where you can break down the polling data by income level and other demographics, and it showed that poor minorities by and large support Democrats while rich white people tend to support Republicans.
This is not exactly a shocking revelation in the world of politics, but it is a fact that some like to ignore and others fail to grasp the reasons for.
I pointed the distinction out to my friend, and he just sort of scoffed and rolled his eyes in a way that said, “Oh, if they only understood what the GOP is really about instead of buying into the conventional wisdom, they’d see we’re really on their side!”
Most of the Republicans I know aren’t uncaring, ignorant people. They are genuinely sympathetic to the needs of poor Americans, and they scratch their heads and wonder how exactly the Democratic Party managed to trick all these people into thinking Republicans are stodgy, selfish corporate spokesmen.
It is analogous perhaps to the way Democrats are befuddled over how Republicans have convinced Christian Americans that Jesus would never vote for a liberal. Democrats have an annoying habit of making this complaint immediately after, say, mocking stem-cell research opponents or celebrating how beautifully inclusive the Gay Games were.
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And just as Democrats fail to understand that getting conservative Christians to vote for them requires making some attempt at representing their interests, Republicans fail to see what is right in front of their faces: they don’t provide anything for poor minorities.
Democrats, however, have a halfway legitimate complaint: we care about seemingly Christian values like social justice and responsible stewardship of the planet but get shouted down for defending gays and pregnant women. Republicans, meanwhile, have the almost incomprehensible audacity to, for example, tie an increase in the minimum wage to a $300 billion cut in the tax on the multi-million dollar estates of the 7,500 wealthiest families in the country, as members of the House did in a resolution this past weekend.
So in order for somebody making just over $10,000 a year to earn a wage that’s a little bit less below the poverty line, they must stomach an outrageously irresponsible tax cut for the Walton family (and the Warren Buffet family too, even though they and other beneficiaries of this cut don’t want it and have vigorously campaigned against it).
So to Republicans I say this: if you want to advocate these policies, fine, but believing what you believe means you have to sacrifice a certain segment of the population’s votes: for Democrats, it’s the Christian right; for Republicans, it’s poor minorities. Stop acting confused when the disadvantaged don’t line up to vote for a candidate who treats them with utter contempt.