Bill Maher Zeroed In On Who Is Really Dividing America...And It's Not Trump Republicans
Matt Vespa|@mvespa1|Posted: Apr 26, 2021 7:45 PM
Yeah, it’s an older interview, but as long as the ‘woke’ and educated white liberals continue to make trouble when none exist, it’ll be an issue. It’s already an issue, but only Democrats can fix it. Why? Well, it’s because these voters are their people. Democrats have lost support in demographics that make up nearly 75 percent of the electorate in the past ten years. They have surged with white liberals in urban areas. Is it sustainable? Hell no. There are a host of issues. For starters, white liberals have a mindset that is not in keeping with a majority of voters that includes black and Hispanic voters who do not classify themselves as “liberal.” The defund the police antics were killer. From coast to coast, black and Hispanic voters left Democrats, Hispanics especially. It wasn’t just a blip; Trump quintupled his support among Hispanic-majority counties along the Texas-Mexico border. The call for open borders and gutting law enforcement heavily contributed to that.
In March, Bill Maher had 2012 Obama campaign veteran and pollster David Shor on his show to talk about the ‘woke’ Left and traditional liberal Democrats, the people who we might disagree with but aren’t communist.
Shor is a data scientist and went into a deeper dive into the mindset of liberal America. How they thrive on new stimuli whereas most Americans are exhausted by it. He appears to note that there is a snobbiness with these people, which is true. Before the ‘woke’ era, he aptly noted that Democrats reached out to other voters to find intersections where they shared some values. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama won that way, both managed to get healthy numbers of white working-class voters as well—a group that has become anathema to progressive Democrats. With Obama, it wasn’t great numbers, but it was good enough to win him two presidential elections. Clinton failed miserably on that front. Biden did better.
White, college-educated liberals are defining the Democratic Party and their values are not that of the country at large. It’s a fact. Maher asked what are values that the rest of us don’t share with this group and Shor listed off trust in government, living in cities, attitudes towards gender, and racial resentment being the top ones. He mentioned the latter part in his interview with New York Magazine. The gulf between how white liberals feel about racial resentment issues and that of Black Americans is substantial, to say the least. White liberals are in fantasy land on that one, which has led to insane policy proposals, like defunding law enforcement.
Maher also added that the rush to re-segregate the country is based on the far left, with race-specific-only college graduations and dorms that are only for people of color. Shor reiterated points he made in NY Mag, which is that most nonwhite voters do not consider themselves as liberals. And as more white college-educated liberals dominate the agenda of the Democratic Party with narratives for which the data doesn’t exist, like Hispanic voters being overwhelmingly for a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens, the party is bound to lose a lot of support with this core group. Here’s what he said about the shift in the publication:
…as Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.It might take an absolute shellacking for the Left to realize it, or not. They still need to reach out to white working-class voters, who the current crop of Democrats think are no better than Nazis at this point.
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…if you look at the concrete questions, white liberals are to the left of Hispanic Democrats, but also of Black Democrats, on defunding the police and those ideological questions about the source of racial inequity.
Regardless, even if a majority of nonwhite people agreed with liberals on all of these issues, the fundamental problem is that Democrats have been relying on the support of roughly 90 percent of Black voters and 70 percent of Hispanic voters. So if Democrats elevate issues or theories that a large minority of nonwhite voters reject, it’s going to be hard to keep those margins. Because these issues are strongly correlated with ideology. And Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.
