Extry, Extry, ACORN Steals Election for Obama!!!

Somebody pointed this out in the comments of the last post, it is such a weird result that I wanted to feature it.

You can imagine that after the elections the polling industry sort of takes a break. Well, Public Policy Polling is plugging along, asking people questions and publishing the answers. Of course the party that lost the election is unhappy, but the way they are taking it demonstrates why the people voted against them in the first place: they live in a dream world.

PPP's first post election national poll finds that Republicans are taking the results pretty hard...and also declining in numbers.

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore. Republicans not handling election results well

ACORN was an organization that advocated for lower and middle income families, including registering poor people to vote, which was not good for Republicans, who made the organization a big boogeyman. After a rightwing video hoax portrayed ACORN negatively in 2009, they lost their funding and went out of business.

I am sympathetic with the Republicans' depression. You should have seen me in November, 2004, when the American people elected George W. Bush for the second time. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Senseless war, torture, cronyism, ignorance, the winner stood for all the worst things about our society, and the people around me had voted to put him back into office. I couldn't believe he won a majority of the vote, but there it was. At least something good came out of that -- December of 2004 was when TTF got together and this blog started up.

There is an important transition going on here and we might as well say it out loud. White people are not the majority any more, and where they are their edge is shrinking. As the recent election showed, playing to the fears of white people is not a winning strategy for a politician. Those people who "want their country back" have a point: the generation before mine lived in a world where white people ran everything, the generation after mine does not. They are not going to get their country back, they have to learn to live in reality. And so far they are resisting that.

PPP has a few other interesting findings, too. I kind of liked this one:

Grover Norquist is largely unknown nationally, and among voters who are familiar with him he is generally disliked. Only 15% have a favorable opinion of him to 37% with a negative one, with 48% not holding an opinion one way or the other. Even among Republicans just 18% see him positively, while 23% have an unfavorable view. Only 23% of voters think it's important for politicians to follow Norquist's tax pledge to 39% who think it's not important and 38% who don't have an opinion.

I saw Grover on CNN last night. What a slimeball, that's all I can say.

More survey results were published HERE. For instance, this:

30% of respondents indicated they thought Democrats engaged in voter fraud. 33% of Hispanics, the same percentage as of white voters, believe that Democrats engaged in voter fraud, to only 15% of African Americans.

I can imagine coming from some violent, corrupt Central American country and assuming that voting is fraudulent here, but otherwise I am not sure how to interpret that result. Is there a Spanish equivalent to Fox, by any chance?

Another tidbit (although with screwed-up spelling).

18% of respondents said they would support their state seceding from the union due to Obama’s reelection, to 68% who would oppose the measure. 27% of Hispanics would support secession, compared to 19% of white voters and 12% of African American voters. Young voters were also more likely to support succession. 29% of 18-29 year olds would support succession, while only 14% of voters age 46-65 and only 16% of voters age 65+ would support it.

I am pretty sure that "succession" is supposed to be "secession." But isn't that interesting that more than a fourth of Hispanics would want their state to secede from the union? I would love to see some interviews and learn what is behind that thinking. (There would be some beautiful justice in a future where Texas was a state in Mexico...)

I have been in countries where everyone belongs to the same ethnic group, and the USA is simply not like that, never has been. We are currently experiencing waves of migration from Asia and Latin America, and Caucasians of European descent are losing their stronghold on American leadership. I think it will be good to loosen up that sense of privilege, this is a change that has been a long time coming. You can expect desperate struggles as panicked white Republicans try to hold their place but I don't see any way it will happen. The minorities who are advancing into power will not want revenge, I do not foresee a time when white people are the victims of discrimination, but they have already lost their grip on ownership of the society, and now they will need to adapt.