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The Great White Wave

On November 2, 2010, voters took the Democrats to the woodshed. The party of Barack Obama lost at least 63 seats in Congress and six in the Senate. By the time you read this, they may have lost more because as this issue went to press, there were still two undecided congressional races. Whatever the results, the Democrats will have suffered their worst defeat since 1938, when voter anger against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal cost them 72 House seats. When the new Congress convenes in January, the Republicans will enjoy their largest House majority since 1949.

How did this happen and what does it mean for whites? Back in 2008, after Mr. Obama drubbed the hapless John McCain, the left proclaimed a new era of ascendancy. Former Clinton retainer James Carville even wrote a book about it, called 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. John Judis, writing in The New Republic, hailed the election as “the culmination of a Democratic realignment” that reflected “a [fundamental] change in political demography and geography.”

Such claims seemed plausible. Mr. Obama won 28 states with 365 electoral votes (he needed 270 to win), including such formerly reliable Republican states as Virginia, North Carolina, and even Indiana. Many looked at the voters who put Mr. Obama in power and saw a permanent majority: a brown-Red coalition of non-whites and white liberals. As expected, 95 percent of blacks voted for Mr. Obama, but so did two-thirds of Hispanics and 62 percent of Asians. Mr. Obama won among young voters, first-time voters, suburban voters, Catholics, college graduates, and women. He even managed to win a plurality of men (49 percent to 48). John McCain won only among whites, the elderly, and voters living in small towns and rural areas — a combination Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg derided as “a relic of the past . . . an aging and frayed bunch, living off the fumes of a day and politics gone by.” More than one liberal pundit chortled that it was the destiny of the “white” GOP to become a regional party of the South and parts of the Midwest.

Wishful thinking

The liberals were wrong. We do not yet have a permanent brown-Red governing coalition, but given the demographic trends, with non-whites — already a third of the nation — predicted to become the majority around 2040, it may be only a matter of time. Liberalism and innumeracy tend to go hand in hand, so the media lefties fail to understand that many in their brown coalition are not eligible to vote because they are illegal aliens, non-citizens, or too young. 2010 will probably be the year births to non-whites outnumber those to whites, and some future Congress may yet amnesty all illegals. Demography is destiny, and numbers will eventually tip the scales. But for now, and for the next several elections, the majority of voters will be white, and as the 2008 and 2010 elections proved, their votes matter most.

The 2008 vote was the most “diverse” so far, with a record non-white turnout. Blacks (13 percent of all voters), galvanized by the chance to give the top job to one of their own, flocked to the polls. Black women, at 70 percent, actually had the highest turnout of any demographic group. Whites accounted for 76 percent of the vote (despite being only 66 percent of the population), down from 79 percent in 2004, and 85 percent if you got back to 1988.

White turnout was also lower than in 2004, 66.1 percent vs. 67.2 percent, reflecting the miserable choice whites faced: either a black Democrat or John McCain. The Arizona senator was a strong supporter of amnesty for illegals and was closely associated with the policies of George W. Bush, who left office under a very dark cloud. A majority of whites — 55 percent — still voted for Sen. McCain, however, a figure that suggests some racial bloc voting even among whites. Until recently, Sen. McCain’s 55 percent of whites would have been all he needed to win. Even now, despite the shrinking white electorate and Mr. Obama’s huge success among non-whites, if Sen. McCain had made a strong pitch to whites and had captured just five percent more of them, he would have won handily.

This year, Republicans won more than 60 percent of the white vote — the figure that would have put Mr. McCain in the White House. Whites accounted for 78 percent of the vote (blacks, 10 percent, Hispanics, 8 percent), up two points over 2008, and 62 percent of them voted Republican.

John McCain in 2008

The result was a landslide. In addition to historic gains in Congress, Republicans gained six seats in the Senate, seven (possibly eight — Minnesota is still counting) state governorships, at least 680 seats in state legislatures, and took control from the Democrats in six (possibly seven) state senates and thirteen state lower houses. Sixty-nine percent of white Protestants voted Republican (up from 63 percent in 2008), but so did 54 percent of all Catholics (42 percent in 2008). Fifty-seven percent of men went for the GOP (a 9 percent jump over 2008), as did 51 percent of woman (an 8 percent rise). Apparently it is the Democrats who now face a “gender gap.” They’re facing an age gap too. Fifty-eight percent of voters aged 65 or more voted GOP (10 percent more than in 2008), as did 54 percent of voters aged 45 to 64 (up 5 percent).

The only age group won by Democrats was 18 to 29-year-olds, and even among them there was a 14 point swing to the Republicans, and they made up a smaller percentage of the electorate in 2010 than they did in 2008, 11 percent vs. 18 percent. The lefties were right about one thing, however — GOP support remains strongest among Southern whites, 73 percent of whom voted Republican.

As they say, in politics two years is an eternity.

Repudiation

Like the 1938 election, the 2010 Democratic rout was the result of voter anger, with Barack Obama standing in for FDR. The difference, of course, is that voters didn’t turn on FDR until midway through his second term. President Obama’s approval rating is in the low 40s, and the president’s party can expect midterm losses when the numbers are that low.

Voters have a lot to be angry about: persistent unemployment, anemic economic growth, fears of a “double dip” recession, rising fuel and food prices, falling home prices. These would be daunting challenges to any chief executive, but Mr. Obama isn’t just any chief executive. He is the Messiah, the miracle worker who, when he clinched the Democratic nomination, said he was “absolutely certain” that future generations would recognize that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we . . . restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

Given the fawning treatment by the media and the sycophancy of his inner circle, Mr. Obama can perhaps be forgiven for believing that 52 percent of the vote represented a mandate of 1984 Reagan proportions. In fact, Mr. Obama won because of voter disenchantment with George W. Bush and the Republicans, which began with the midterm elections of 2006, when they put Democrats back in control of Congress.

The revolt against the GOP was driven by anger over the war in Iraq, excessive congressional spending, and Mr. Bush’s stubborn push for amnesty for illegal aliens. Democrats won because many whites did not vote at all. Demoralized voters usually don’t vote for the other party; they stay home. John McCain was never going to excite white voters no matter whom he ran against. His only hope was to “racialize” the election by hammering Mr. Obama on his ties to Jeremiah Wright and his other anti-white positions, but Sen. McCain didn’t have the guts to do that.

Ironically, it took Barack Obama himself to light a fire under these voters. Convinced he had a mandate, and assured by the media and his own advisers that America was no longer a center-right country, Mr. Obama governed from the far left. Bank bailouts, a trillion-dollar “stimulus plan,” nationalized auto makers, the so-called Cap and Trade bill, never-ending glitzy parties at the White House, constant travel, deeper and deeper deficits — the sheer excess of it all — alienated many white moderates who had voted for Mr. Obama to expiate racial guilt.

But what most turned voters against Mr. Obama was the centerpiece of his presidency: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare. National health care, socialized medicine, a single-payer system — whatever it is called — has been a major goal of the American left since at least the 1930s. It has also been opposed by the majority of Americans, which is why no president before Mr. Obama managed to get it through Congress. Democrats had the votes to ram it through in the 1940s, the 1960s, the 1970s, and the early 1990s, but before 2010, most congressmen preferred their careers to forcing socialized medicine on a public that poll after poll showed did not want it. Mr. Obama, insulated by his arrogance, convinced Democratic leaders in Congress that his election was a historical turning point that liberated Congress from the will of the American people.

The last failed attempt by Democrats at socialized medicine, so-called “Hillarycare” (named after then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, who helped shape it), was largely responsible for the Republican takeover of the House in the 1994 midterm elections, ending more than 40 years of Democratic dominance. Democrat Marion Barry said he asked Mr. Obama why his plan for government-run medicine would succeed when Bill Clinton’s failed. Mr. Obama reportedly replied, “Because this time you’ve got me.” It was opposition to Obamacare that fueled the anti-tax, anti-spending Tea Party movement in 2009, and the 2010 midterms were the first in which self-styled Tea Partiers were able to express their anger at the polls.

By then, the scales had fallen from the eyes of many whites who voted for Mr. Obama because they wanted to make “history,” and the midterm elections were a chance to express buyer’s remorse. Some voters didn’t have to wait that long. In November 2009, voters in two states that went for Obama, liberal New Jersey and formerly conservative Virginia, elected Republican governors. In early 2010, voters in Massachusetts, the heart of American liberalism, elected Republican Scott Brown to fill the remaining two years of Ted Kennedy’s Senate term.

Results

Exactly a decade ago, the late Samuel Francis analyzed the 2000 election results in American Renaissance and concluded that “race and ethnicity are the driving forces in American politics today.” Francis suggested that Republicans “could become and remain a majority party by seeking to raise white racial consciousness.” His analysis holds true today. In 1972 and 1984, Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan won reelection with the support of 67 percent and 64 percent, respectively, of the white vote. This translated into 49-state landslides. The 2010 results suggest that the key to future Republican success is exactly what Francis recommended: maximize the white vote and drastically reduce immigration.

White support propelled Republicans beyond their stronghold in the South to significant gains in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. They did well in the Northeast, picking up both New Hampshire congressional seats, and the governor’s mansion in Maine for the first time in 40 years. After 2008, Republicans were nearly extinct in New York, but in November they took five and possibly six seats from the Democrats. They took five seats from the Democrats in Pennsylvania, along with a US Senate seat. (One of the new GOP congressmen from Pennsylvania is Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazleton, who gained national attention when his city passed a law making it illegal to hire illegals or rent property to them.)

Throughout the South and Midwest, the Democrats who suffered worst were the so-called “Blue Dogs,” a group of 57 self-styled moderates or conservatives, many of whom sought to distance themselves from Barack Obama. Voters didn’t buy it, and more than half the Blue Dogs lost their seats. White “moderate” Democrats in the South were particularly hard hit, losing 19 House seats and one Senate seat. Two 28-year incumbents, John Spratt of South Carolina and Rick Boucher of Virginia have to find new jobs. Missouri congressman Ike Skelton had been in Congress for 33 years before losing to Republican Vicky Hartzler. When Congress convenes in January, there will be only 16 white Democrats (and 14 blacks) among the 105 seats from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

The left’s reaction to the results ranged from delusion to rage. President Obama acknowledged that Democrats had taken a “shellacking,” but claimed it was only because he had failed to convey the benefits of his policies to the American public. He said part of his job is “making an argument that people can understand” and that “we haven’t always been successful at that.” In other words, Americans are too stupid to understand what great things he has done for them. This is the attitude that created the Tea Party rebellion in the first place.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, like so many other lefties, insists the Tea Party isn’t a reaction to Mr. Obama’s policies or his arrogance, but his race. “The first African American president takes office,” he wrote “and almost immediately we see the birth of a big, passionate national movement — overwhelmingly white and lavishly funded — that tries its best to delegitimize that president . . .” Exercising that right all lefties claim — the right to read the minds of white people — he says Tea Partiers don’t like the president only because he is black.

Perhaps the most unhinged reaction came from “anti-racist” activist Tim Wise, who makes a living peddling “diversity” and anti-white bilge to colleges and corporations. He wrote a vulgar and vituperative “Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum:”

For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink. And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, or whatever shitty ass beer you favor . . . You need to drink up . . . Because your time is limited . . . I know, you think you’ve taken ‘your country back’ with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong . . . It is coming, and soon . . . In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart . . .

We just have to be patient. And wait for your hearts to stop beating. And stop they will. And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told. Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.

Mr. Wise later removed the part about looking forward to the deaths of millions of whites, but the letter serves to illustrate just how much some people hate us.

The left knows that for the time being, whites still have the power to take their country back — if they are willing to use that power. For now, whites have chosen the Republican Party to express their interests, but as the Tea Party movement shows, whites can build other organizations. Whether whites will ever build mass movements that express their interests as whites remains to be seen.

As for the Republicans, the 2010 midterms are yet another version of the lesson the GOP refuses to learn, and that is the importance of whites: With them, the party wins; without them, it loses. Of course, it has no long-term future at all if it fails to keep the electorate from turning brown.