Hope Yen, AP, July 20, 2009
For all the attention generated by Barack Obama’s candidacy, the share of eligible voters who actually cast ballots in November declined for the first time in a dozen years. The reason: Older whites with little interest in backing either Barack Obama or John McCain stayed home.
Census figures released Monday show about 63.6 percent of all U.S. citizens ages 18 and older, or 131.1 million people, voted last November.
Although that represented an increase of 5 million voters—virtually all of them minorities—the turnout relative to the population of eligible voters was a decrease from 63.8 percent in 2004.
Ohio and Pennsylvania were among those showing declines in white voters, helping Obama carry those battleground states.
{snip}
According to census data, 66 percent of whites voted last November, down 1 percentage point from 2004. Blacks increased their turnout by 5 percentage points to 65 percent, nearly matching whites. Hispanics improved turnout by 3 percentage points, and Asians by 3.5 percentage points, each reaching a turnout of nearly 50 percent. In all, minorities made up nearly 1 in 4 voters in 2008, the most diverse electorate ever.
{snip}
Blacks had the highest turnout rate among this age group—55 percent, or an 8 percentage point jump from 2004. In contrast, turnout for whites 18-24 was basically flat at 49 percent. Asians and Hispanics in that age group increased to 41 percent and 39 percent, respectively.
Among whites 45 and older, turnout fell 1.5 percentage point to just under 72 percent.
Asked to identify their reasons for not voting, 46 percent of all whites said they didn’t like the candidates, weren’t interested or had better things to do, up from 41 percent in 2004. Hispanics had similar numbers for both years.
Not surprisingly, blacks showed a sharp increase in interest.
{snip}
The figures are the latest to highlight a generational rift between younger, increasingly minority voters and an older white population.
{snip}
Last November, voters under 30 cast ballots for Obama by a 2-to-1 ratio. Still, because of their smaller numbers—in population and turnout—young voters weren’t critical to the overall outcome and only made a difference in North Carolina and Indiana, according to Scott Keeter, Pew’s director of survey research.
The census figures are based on the Current Population Survey, which asked respondents after Election Day about their turnout. The figures for “white” refer to the whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity.
Original article
(Posted on July 21, 2009)
Comments
Someone older and wiser than myself once said of voting and elections that, if you didn’t have a dog in the fight, you might as well not go to the track.
White middle aged to elderly voters outside the South had no dog in the fight, as you now see. Whites in the Deep South did have a dog in the fight in that their states are heavily black, and they knew the storm, so to speak, they’d be in if Obama won.
That is exactly what I suspected happened. The GOP lost when they nominated McCain and slighted Ron Paul.
I didn’t need to wait for the results after they nominated McCain. America doesn’t need another G.W., which is what McCain would have been.
Exactly right. Give us someone worth voting for and we’ll send him/her to Washington. It sure as hell wasn’t McCain.
There is no fix for the GOP. None. The GOP could return to its roots and stand for something as it once did under Goldwater and Reagan, but it still could not win.
Many on this board have said culture and society are determined by race. Well, as the racial composition changes in America, so will society, politics, and culture.
Freedom of association and freedom of speech used to be pillars of our society. Now political correctness is the foundation and the government will dictate what is acceptable speech and thought.
The voter turnout for 2010 is absolutely impossible to forecast, let alone forecast by tribal group. There are so many variables that will enter into the equation we will have to see what happens with this economy, because if many of the experts are correct we will be knee deep in much physical turmoil.
I do know it would be an excellent opportunity to start a third party or expand on one already in existence. Perot almost established a permanent third party but it fizzled when it was taken over by multicults. He wasn’t really a viable candidate any way, because of his social liberalism. We need a solid social conservative that will be satisfied with a senator perhaps and a couple of Congressmen to begin wih, but nobody wants to do anything but start a third party in order to run someone as president, which is probably unreachable for a third party candidate.
If the Republicans get back they’ll be no more than Obama lite. They’re as corrupt as the Democrats….but not as stupidly liberal…. and the big reason they give for voting for them is that they’ll take us on a slower road to Hell.
No, I fear we’ve run our course with this system and our future is one of disintegration. It’s turned far too ineffective and corrupt. The beltway bunch are on an entirely different wave length than the real world.
The next few months or so will tell us if we should build a bunker right away and stock up on supplies. Maybe sooner, because this deterioration so far has been occurring at a pretty fast pace. On Monday night, O’Reilly actually said the country could collapse completely by the end of the year if this healthcare bill is passed.
Very, very interesting situation. We have front row seats to earth shattering history in the making, at least on a par with WWII.
For a lot of whites, both candidates were mirror images of each other. Whites haven’t had a presidential candidate looking out for their real interests since Barry Goldwater, whether they know it or not.
So whites increasingly are refusing to vote for the pathetic “conservatives” that the republicans run for high office. And what is the reps response to that? They bend over backwards trying to attract minorities (all the while ignoring white’s concerns), while these same minorities have no intention of ever voting republican. If someone doesnt wise these folks from the stupid party up soon, the party will be over.
John McCain never missed an opportunity to spit in the faces of his party’s base of voters on a wide variety of issues. That they refused to vote for the silly old fool says more than the party seems to be able to digest.
I honestly hope the Republican Party has learned a lesson from 2008 and I hope that lesson is that the party base is not always going to vote for the lesser of two evils. Do not count on my vote just because the Republican candidate is only slightly less liberal than the Democratic candidate.
I didn’t vote for Obama but wanted the Republicans to lose. I voted Libertarian.
I voted for Barr(libertarian). I don’t like him that much, but he is against govt; so I am I. I could not vote for McCain and his get along attitude with the Democrats. Also I oppose the Iraq War, something conservatives like me and Buchanan can do, believe it or not.
We need to pound away at strong third party alternatives. I may not live to see the day, but I want to know my kids can vote for a viable White Nationalist ticket over a socialist diversity soaked “democrat: ticket.
Republicans? Let them dissolve and sell real estate.
I’m one of those voters who voted for neither John McCain nor Barack Obama. Instead, I voted for a third-party candidate. Although voting third-party made absolutely no difference, my reason for doing so was to protest the Republican nominee, an offensive neocon who didn’t represent the views of mainstream conservatives but was instead left-leaning on virtually every political subject except perhaps on foreign policy, which is where he was tough, but that’s irrelevant to me because I’m againt the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first place, plus I’m against going to war with Iran, a country that, according to the National Intelligence Estimate, discontinued its WMD program in 2003. Not only that, but I was against John McCain’s pick for vice president, a goofy woman who thinks that Alaska being close to Russia and able to see it from a distance counts as foreign policy experience (according to her logic, anyone who’s used Google Earth is an expert on foreign policy because they can see other countries).
I am still baffled as to how John McCain was able to get the nomination to run for president. How did the party that supposedly represents conservative interests pick someone who by no means represents conservative interests? John McCain even teamed up with the infamous Ted Kennedy to grant amnesty to 20,000,000 illegal aliens who blatantly violated our immigration laws and sovereignty and blatantly abused our generous social services.
Hopefully next election the GOP will wake up from its stupidity and nominate a real conservative candidate, like Tom Tancredo or maybe Ron Paul, instead of left-leaning neocons like Bush and McCain. Furthermore, I believe that the GOP needs to stop pandering so much to minorities by doing things such as offering law-breakers (illegal aliens) amnesty and instead try to attract the stay-at-home and protest voters, like me; doing so would win them potentially millions of additional votes. Nominating the right candidate is a good start.
This article is absolutely true. Republicans had better wake up—if that smirking, Amnesty pushing old man is the best they can come up with,then they have themselves to blame. I am a political atheist but am fairly conservative and have no great love for either party. But watching this last election play out was like some sort of unfunny joke—none of thes clowns represent me.
Obama won because he has charisma, and after watching Bush stumble through the simplest of press conferences for 8 years, Obama was a relief to most of us. That, along with Bush’s disastrous Iraq war, and the failure of the Republican party to present a VIABLE candidate, is the real reason we have a Democratic president right now. If I hear one more crybaby Republican whining about how the Republican party is dying, I will throw up. It doesn’t HAVE to die—it just needs a good, swift kick in the rear to jumps tart a revival.
If it deserves to be revived.
Republicans will not only survive—they will flourish
We live in a youth culture. Even the old people thought McCain was too old. Mitt was the one they should’ve run.
POW McCain was the Manchurean Candidate who did not want to become President but only wanted to destroy the GOP and Bush. He backs Obama and all of Obama’s programs. A vote for Obama was a vote for John McCain. Without Palin McCain would have gotten 2 percent of the popular vote.
McCain betrayed the USA just as he did in the Hanoi Hilton POW camp. He plunged his dagger into the the heart of the GOP.
A last laugh so to speak, will be on those minority pandering politicians when they find themselves VOTED OUT of office, and one of their beloved minorities VOTED IN in their stead. The agenda of minorities isn’t to keep friendly politicians in office, the agenda is to REPLACE THOSE SAME WITH THEMSELVES!
#4 — Anonymous wrote:
“Freedom of association and freedom of speech used to be pillars of our society. Now political correctness is the foundation and the government will dictate what is acceptable speech and thought.”
And so dies America. The older, pre-1960s America had Anglo-Saxon elites. Love of freedom and tolerance for other people’s opinion was a manifestation of that Anglo-Saxon culture.
And now the new America of today: Increasingly Bolshevik in character and marked by intolerance of and marked disrespect for the people of Euro-American stock. The new elite value “inclusion”, “diversity”, and a long list of other euphemisms for diluting what used to be the Majority people and culture. It values the candy-coated destruction of the older America. Obama is their man. Sonia Sotomayor and Eric Holder too.
The GOP ignored Tom Tancredo, so I ignored John McCain. If Sarah Palin had run for President, I’d have voted for her.
Just as well; she doesn’t belong in the phony Republican party, who wound up blaming her for their loss! She just signed a resolution confirming Alaska’s sovereignty. Let’s hope she starts an independent, USA first party.
Three factors account for Obama’s win.
1) Thomas Sowell announced last Summer that the choice in the election would be between disgust (McCain) or disaster (Obama). Apparently many older Whites could not stomach either one and stayed home.
2) As I continue to notice in my 99% White suburb SW Chicago suburb, this perverted fascination for Obama closed the difference in what is usually a 65-35 Republican area to 52-48 GOP. I have received terrible local forum responses throughout the last 15 months from young Whites who call me every name in the book because I’ve tried to warn them of “what” they were voting for.
3) ACORN even tries to recruit voters in this area. Incredible! If they do it here, one can only imagine how it is in towns with substantial minority populations.
Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, John, “Americans wouldn’t pick lettuce for fifty dollars an hour”, McCain, couldn’t inspire a gnat. The man is one of the best things that ever happened to the Democratic Party.
I’m astonished by all the wishful thinking of white conservatives who’ve been abandoned by the Republican Party, but still hold out hope for a Republican political recovery.
The Party’s response to all its recent catastrophic reverses has been to emulate the Democrats by choosing a black liberal as its spokesman.
The new leader, Michael Steele, is among those neocons who believe Republicans need to “reach out” to a broader, more diverse base rather than adhere to principle.
For the life of me, I don’t see what middle-aged white conservatives, young black hip-hoppers and newly-arrived immigrants will ever have in common, but this is the size of the “tent” being envisioned by the new party leadership.
Folks, it’s time to quit kicking the dead elephant and start circling the wagons.
I know a lot of true, paleo-conservatives over 40, all registered Republicans, and NONE of them voted for McCain. I have been a registered Republican all my life, and I haven’t voted for the Republican nominee since I made the tragic mistake of voting for George Bush the Elder in 1988. I’d like to think the easily discernible fact that the Republican Party’s woes are due to their willful repulsiveness to a great swath of sensible, mostly-white Americans who actually work and pay taxes would now dawn on them (Steve Sailer has documented this fact exhaustively), but that just doesn’t seem to be happening.
I voted for Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party. But never again. They’ve put a Black Mormon as head of their Idaho Party. This man denied Edgar J Steele membership when Steele wanted to run gor governor even though Steele has been active at the national level for years. None of the higher ups including Baldwin would take Steele’s calls. Almost certainly all of this is because of Steele’s outspoken views on race and that fact that he has defended “racists” in court. So if the Constitution Party is going to be indifferent or hostile to White concerns, how are they any different than the Republicans? Or the Democrats for that matter? Same product but a different target group so therefore a different marketing strategy with different promises and buzz words. Nothing more. So to hell with them.
Judging by the first 6 months of Obamamania, I’d say the alternative of McCain doesn’t sound so terrible. The lesser of two evils may not be good, but it beats pure stupidity.
Freedom of association freedom of speech
Now, political correctness
Come to think of it, viewed through the wisdom of hindsight, this should have been foreseeable back in 1965, when the civil rights bill and the immigration bill were passed. These were about to re-make America. Although we hadn’t a clue as to their full significance, we were on the verge of being transformed.
When you change the population, you change everything.
9 — Anonymous wrote:
We were doomed to suffer an Obama president from the moment the Republicans nominated the doddering old ninny who is John McCain, just as the nomination of Bob Dole (Dolt?) in 1996 brought us four more years of the risible spectacle that was the Clinton administration.
I always suspected that McCain ejected through his canopy over North Vietnam, then suffered a lot of additional head knocks in captivity. Even with his father and grandfather being four-stars, I simply cannot believe a man as stupid and unfocused as McCain could have survived four years at the Naval Academy.
The corporate Globalists own and control both parties, ergo it doesn’t matter to them which candidate “wins” in their rigged “elections”. They anointed Obama to punish and humiliate the American public for challenging their rule. How else do think an illegible foreign Muslim Marxist minority unknown made it to the Whitehouse?
I have always liked these quotes from Howard Phillips of the Constitution Party:
“The main difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats would take us over the cliff at 80 miles an hour; the Republicans would stay within the speed limit — but we’re still heading over the cliff”
or
“the choice voters face is between two evils, adding that the Republican Party -is the greater of the two evils, because it flies a false flag”
Here is my quote:
“There is no difference between the Republicrats and the Demoncans, its members have betrayed their oaths of office and are hereby declared TRAITORS to the US Constitution and the cause of liberty.”
I proudly voted for Chuck Baldwin I don’t feel bad at all
I was one of those over-45 Caucasians who stayed home. I would never vote for Obama under any circumstances, and I despise McCain because of his signature legislation, the McCain-Feingold Act, which squelched freedom of speech in the USA, and deliberately targeted the NRA. McCain spent all that time in the Hanoi Hilton for wahat- so he could sponsor legislation to muzzle free speech in America? His favoritism toward illegal aliens didn’t help either. I didn’t know Baldwin, and i was unimpressed with Barr, other than he’s pro Second Amendment. So I stayed home.
Depending on who the Republicans select in 2012, I might just cast a write-in vote for Anthony Soprano. Tony is a racial realist, if you’ve ever seen “The Sopranos”.
This was the first election I voted in, and to me, the only difference between Obama and McCain were the difference in color. To me there views on issues were about 95% the same or similar. A true conservative with White-Western values cannot be elected anymore. Never in the name of Marxist “diversity”. I mean a Republican conservative defending gay rights, c’mon??
I did vote in the last election. I had to stand in line for over an hour while a group of Blacks argued that they had a right to vote in this precinct without proof of residency. For someone of my age and in my health that was not easy, and I was ready to keel over by the time I did vote. Next election I will definitely get an absentee ballot.
I proudly voted for Chuck Baldwin I don’t feel bad at all
I did, too! No one’s going to blame me for the current occupant being in when I had an outstanding choice. McCain wouldn’t have been any better, but the conservatives all would have gone to sleep since we’d have had a Republican in.
The blame for President Obama goes to two groups: Democrats and Republicans. I refuse to accept responsibility for such a sorry outcome when I voted for the best candidate I could find.
As the years go by one becomes more and more aware of the unseen hand controlling American party politics. Its obvious the Establishment controls the top of both major parties. How else would a highly unpopular illegal alien co-conspirator like McCain, or a nobody minority freshman senator like Obama ever wind up on the top of their respective party’s tickets?
The Establishment game drones on like this: When the general public gets disgusted with one party in office routinely betraying their promises, the Establishment fans the discontent, and then select, purchase, and generously finance their new star from the opposite party.
It also helps to make sure of and finance the weakest candidate in the opposing party as competition for their new chosen one. Thus, like carnival owners, the Establishment secures their sure bet, and can run both shows indefinitely - and not even worry about an “upset.”
An entirely new and separate party would be the answer to validly returning unrigged democracy to America, but the Establishment has absorbed too much control over the apparatus by which politics proceeds in this country - and hence, no non-Establishment candidate can likely ever win.
Many whites see that the Republican Party as becoming more and more like the Democrat Party. We are only starting to see what has always been there - both are two heads on the same beast. We desperately need a third party. The two existing parties make it impossible for any independent, libertarian, constitutionalist, or non-corrupted politician to represent them and serve us. I just don’t understand why they haven’t been charged with racketeering. It’s not just for the Mafia you know!
Same problem in Canada.
Conservative and Liberals are the two heads of the same party.
We have a third party but it only serves a spoiler role in some ridings and is totally socialist, gay, minority, etc totally lacks any credibility as an alternative for most people.
As usual most people are led by the main stream media as to what to think and how to vote.
I am with Enoch Powell and I am laughing, with considerable sadness however.
I guess in trajedy there is some humor.
I voted for a third party candidate as a protest vote. I did not want socialist Obama, who favors illegal alien amnesty and anti-white discrimination, and whose choice of a Supreme Court judge was every bit as bad as I feared it would be. I did not want half senile, mad bomber Juan McAmnesty either.
Frankly, it’s frustrating to read all this soul-searching and wringling from die-hard Republicans, after all the bitter experiences and disappointments that they have had by now, and some of them still haven’t learned! They still have hope for a dead party that doesn’t even want them.
To those who boast that they “proudly voted for Baldwin” of the Constitution Party, I considered doing the same, but did not; and am glad I didn’t. I suggest they re-read post #23 by Eric the Red. He says it all.
And GBJ hit the mark perfectly in saying that both parties are just two heads on the same beast. Of course! Why would anybody consider either one?
6 — GetBackJack wrote at 6:26 PM on July 21:
“For a lot of whites, both candidates were mirror images of each other. Whites haven’t had a presidential candidate looking out for their real interests since Barry Goldwater, whether they know it or not.”
Lol, I think you’re more than a few decades off; I would say we haven’t had an openly racialist presidential candidate since before the War for Southern Independence, with perhaps a few hiccups with Teddy Roosevelt and Coolidge. All the rest have been either spineless lightweights, pointless careerists, or incompetents (Bush family, for instance).
Reply to anon at # 37:
It’s true. Both parties are basically the same. Peter Brimelow discusses this at some length in his wonderful book THE PATRIOT GAME. Both parties are controlled by one dominant ideology - modern day LIBERALISM. The same thing is true in the USA. Both parties are basically the same. I call them the REPUBLICRATS.
Just as one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear; one cannot expect an honest election process out of the most evil, crooked and corrupt politicians and businessmen in our nation’s history.
A lot of us went independent last election. I ended a lifetime relationship with the Republican party and signed up AIP (but I voted for Chuck Baldwin). The gentleman that said we didn’t have a dog in the fight was right. So we went off to find one.
