The short history of the Western Hemisphere is as follows: North America was colonized by Anglo-Celts, Central and South America by “Hispanics.” Up north, two centuries of constitutional evolution and economic growth; down south, coups, corruption, generalissimos and presidents-for-life.
To an immigrant such as myself (not the undocumented kind, but documented up to the hilt, alas), one of the most striking features of election night analysis was the lightly worn racial obsession.
On Fox News, Democrat Kirsten Powers argued that Republicans needed to deal with the reality that America is becoming what she called a “brown country.” Her fellow Democrat Bob Beckel observed on several occasions that if the share of the “white vote” was held down below 73% Romney would lose. In the end, it was 72% and he did.
Beckel’s assertion — that if you knew the ethnic composition of the electorate you also knew the result — turned out to be correct.
This is what less enlightened societies call tribalism: for example, in the 1980 election leading to Zimbabwe’s independence, Joshua Nkomo’s ZAPU-PF got the votes of the Ndebele people while Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF secured those of the Shona — and, as there were more Shona than Ndebele, Mugabe won.
That same year America held an election, and Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory. Nobody talked about tribal vote shares back then, but had the percentage of what Beckel calls the “white vote” been the same in 2012 as it was in 1980 (88%), Mitt Romney would have won in an even bigger landslide than Reagan.
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