Javi and Chita

 

You know how I've been screaming at the political punditry for a few years now over their theory of the Latin voting bloc becoming more Republican over time as the community's inherent conservatism asserts itself, because

1. It's not a bloc, and
2. that's hiding what's happening

—and hiding from it, of course—it's about race. As with Allan Sherman's upwardly mobile young Jews in the early 1960s who

Traded their used MG
for a new XKE
switched to the GOP
that's the way things go

it's about the social construction of whiteness.

But I didn't really have any data for it, or know how to find it or whether it could possibly exist, until I saw this message from Jonathan Chait: 

Biden's Base

This bit is about the Biden college debt forgiveness program,though it takes its time wandering over there:

She's got an impressionistic understanding of something sort of real, but the thing it overwhelmingly runs on is pretending that nonwhite Democrats don't exist or aren't really part of the polity.

— Woke Mob Just Want to Have Fun (@Yastreblyansky) August 29, 2022

That is, to the extent Democrats seem richer to Catherine Rampell, it's because she can't remember there are any Black ones. Although she's also completely wrong either way, as Bouie points out.

It's the same pattern you see in the commonplace picture of American Christians as consisting of a deeply rightwing majority dominating a rump of liberals in what used to be called the mainline churches. It's based on ignoring the existence of a large Black church overwhelmingly committed to the social gospel; when you count those, most Christians are actually on the left. This is still truer since 2020, when the number of (conservative) white evangelicals dipped, at 14%, below the number of (liberal) white mainliners, at 16%. Add to the latter the 7% of the population who are (liberal) Black Protestants, and divide the total 22% Catholics (white, Hispanic, and other "of color") between the two (more Catholics identify as Democrats than Republicans but it's not a huge number), and you get a total of something over 34% of Americans on the relative Christian left compared to something under 25% on the Christian right—far more, with the Christians "of color" making the main difference.  

You read it here first.

Via PRRI Research.

With Democrats and Republicans, I'm not going to try to do the real numbers, but the argument would go like this: 

If the Creek Do Rise, What Else Will? Protect Yourself!

 

Lindsay Graham, in his hypothetical, is fully armed, watching all his neighbors get killed by a gang. https://t.co/vlbEWUn0Gt

— A.R. (Ancient Router) Moxon (@JuliusGoat) March 28, 2021

Central, South Carolina (pop. ca. 5,385), home of Senator Lindsey Woolsey Graham, isn't in central South Carolina, but up in Pickens County in the state's far northwest, and not exactly in a hurricane zone, or prone to earthquakes or volcanoes

Pickens County, SC, via Wikipedia.

but that doesn't mean it's without its perils, as people learned last year in nearby Easley, and and all along the Calhoun Memorial Highway (Route 93) pretty much every year, when the spring rains come and the creeks rise.

Demographics

Something I've been saying for quite a while now about the 2016 presidential election: that the Trump "base" isn't exactly like that pathetic picture of the bewildered "white working class" left behind by globalization. Yes, they're white and don't have college degrees, but the real core are financially pretty comfortable, typically owners of small businesses, with sufficient leisure to eat breakfast out every morning and give interviews to The New York Times pretending to represent the working class, while their abject and underpaid employees (who rarely vote at all) open the shops. That's who made the party what it is today, which is strangely similar to what it used to be, back when it was the party of the wealthy.

So now there's some relevant information, surfacing in the column of the Times opinionist nobody ever notices because he's too interested in reality, Thomas B. Edsall ("We Aren’t Seeing White Support for Trump for What It Is"), reporting research by Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, and I can report that the numbers don't exactly support a strong version of the theory, but they do confirm that there's something there:

Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic.