Afterthoughts

White winning Democrats get about the same percentages of voters, by race, as Obama has.

Losing Republicans do about the same among the races as Romney has.

The race of the candidate doesn’t actually seem to matter much, if at all, to voters, despite what liberal propaganda might suggest.

But that is not to say that the races of the presumed beneficiaries of the parties’ agendas don’t matter to those same voters.

But even that is questionable, at least in the case of non-white voters.

Blacks, for example, voting overwhelmingly and repeatedly for Democrats of any race or sex makes perfect sense on a simple class basis, given the class circumstances of black people in the US.

It could easily be that the high, but less high, proportion of Latinos who vote for Democrats are equally voting their class rather than their race.

For some other groups it's not so clear.

Too many Asians vote Democrat for that commitment to reflect their own class interests, surely.

Likewise Jews who, according to an old joke, have incomes like Presbyterians and vote like Puerto Ricans.

And the clear truth is that far more whites vote for Republicans than can be accounted for in class terms.

According to liberal propaganda, that excess, comprised largely of working class and poor people but in any case of definitely not rich people, is based at least heavily if not only on racial hostility toward non-white beneficiaries of Democrat-sponsored social democracy.

But to the extent that the conservative, Republican sucker-bait to get non-elite voters to support plutocrat interests against their own, based very heavily on the party's commitment to Christian clericalism, is a clue then liberal propaganda exaggerates the importance of race in the political choices of those white voters.

And at the same time it completely ignores the importance of such cultural issues not only to non-elite voters supporting Republicans but also to elite voters on the other side of the culture war supporting Democrats.

But if liberal propaganda exaggerates the importance of white racial hostility to non-whites, how far does it do so?

Hard to say.

And it's hard to say, anyway, how reliable is that clue, given the strong sanctions against openly racist expression in contemporary America.

Hence the plausibility of the dangerous and slippery notion of the "dog whistle."