The Mental Masturbator

How Would a White Vote?

I’m sick of the way pollsters and news people talk about the electorate. They’re always talking about “the white vote” or “the black vote” or “the female vote” or “the whatever vote.” To me, it seems somewhat absurd and insulting. They look at how poor white people voted in Texas, for example, and then they look at how poor white people voted in PA and they say “politician A is losing the white vote.” My point? Maybe two people in two different states have different opinions even if they’re the same race! No, that couldn’t be it, because they’re poor and white, so they must all think the same. And also, their poorness and their whiteness are the only personal traits that inform their choices apparently.

It’s ridiculous, and it’s prejudiced. The news media, and politicians, view us purely based on whatever superficial group we’re apart of. I thought we were supposed to be judging people based on the content of their character, not on their demographic group. I’m not a statistician, or a sociologist, so I’ll ask: is there any evidence of a correlation between voting choices of demographic groups in one region and demographic groups in another? Sure you could say “Obama has been getting 90% of the black vote so there’s your proof right there.” But that’s too easy, and I think a little skewed. I can see how the first viable black candidate in a country founded on racism and slavery is very appealing to African Americans, and so this is a unique circumstance.

It just seems to me that referring to all white (or whatever) people as “the white vote”
is troublesome and probably misleading. There are so many factors that determine peoples’ decisions that to call it the white vote, as if someone’s whiteness was the only quality that mattered, seems morally and practically wrong to me. Perhaps it explains why these pundits can’t predict anything.

Doesn’t this method also have the problem of overlapping groups? If you’re talking about the white vote, and the educated vote, and the poor vote, and the urban vote, etc, there’s going to be a lot of people who fall into several of those categories. So maybe when Obama does something to appeal to “the white vote” that same action might alienate him from “the urban vote” but what if there’s a white urban person?! Did he gain that person’s vote or lose it? Gah! It’s so confusing! Though I guess they need fodder for their endless chatter, right? Poor news people, they have so much time to fill, we can’t expect them to also be accurate and not-racist.

When they talk about “the anything vote” it just rubs me the wrong way. And it also seems like it’s probably the wrong way to analyze the situation. And it also defines people based solely on their race, sex, or class. I thought we were supposed to be passed that in this country.

BTW: I’m a young educated white male who lives in an urban area. The young, male, educated, and urban parts of me want to vote for Obama, but the white part of me wants to vote for McCain. No part of me wants to vote for Hillary (not even the part that used to intern for her). In the end Obama got my vote. After all, 4/5 of me wanted to vote for him.