You can't blame the cop for shooting him still. The bulge could have been anything and it was a tense situation. He only had so much time to react while the black guy slowly got on his knees and put his hands behind his head
I think is down to semantics then, and we just have different definitions of purple states. I'd consider purple to mean that most elections could realistically swing either way after accounting for standard influences (waves, incumbency, etc), not that it happens sometimes in a minority of positions. For some reason some states like MA and LA have a consistent and deep political leaning for most races but are comfortable with governors from the opposite party sometimes. Similar thing applies to some state legislatures.
If you want to consider that purple that's fine, but in the context of what sort of senators are viable I don't know if that applies.
If the Democrats want to continue touting themselves as the progressive, multicultural party, they have to fight tooth and nail to protect people of visible minority. It's no use to come around "urban" areas, touting how progressive you are, and then a year into office and you forget about us saying "it just can't be done right now".
"You put them first and they put you last." Voters will show up to vote for someone who will show up to represent them.
And yes I'm aware that there's even less luck with the Republicans, but frankly, people of colour don't owe the Democrats anything because they're "not as bad". If anything, the Democrats owe people of colour.
The democratic platform favors marginalized individuals and POC. The people vote for the platform that benefits them (ideally), and the elected reps continue to fight for the platform on which they were voted in.
I don't know that anyone "owes" anyone. The elected official should fight for all people in their constituency - not just those that voted for them. Think of this in terms of the presidency and our expectations of Trump.
"The elected official should fight for all people in their constituency - not just those that voted for them" obviously, but if when you're prioritising issues, don't put last those who put you first.
This. You guys are keeping the ship from sinking by voting for a party that has often taken you for granted. I can't thank you enough. People of color are projected to become, collectively, the majority in the US by 2050 I think. I can't wait, though I might be dead by then.
Yes you are correct but you are looking at it out of context. In this case, during a special election, not even in an off election year its hard to really tell. Its more about % wise. Traditionally yes, the Republicans in Alabama and other places show up to vote in a high % than Democrats do, for many reasons:
Republicans have put forth a massive effort to suppress the vote by purging voters from the rolls, and other shady tactics.
Many Democratic voters feel like there is zero chance in the deep south so they simply don't bother.
The old white person was the majority of voters.
Now things are changing. There are many more voters that are more likely to vote for Democrats in the big cities especially because they are turning 18 and the old white guys are dying. So when you talk about individual numbers, sure what you are saying makes sense, but when you talk about percentages, statistically speaking, its not so. In 2016 Alabama had about a 60% voter turn out. Thats not bad. If 90% showed up, things would look different for state wide races like Senators and Presidents.
Yes you are correct but you are looking at it out of context.
I understand and appreciate what you are trying to say but I think your statement is out of context for Alabama. Its too generic to be true for every state. The more people vote in Alabama, the more likely a Republican wins.
But what's less clear is what percentage of the poor/black population voted historically, whether there was suppression, whether they felt it was hopeless, etc.
I think you're both right. It's an effect of marginalized folks getting out and voting AND an effect of republicans staying home.
How does it default to any party winning? It matters who shows up, right?
Like, say the statistic of being 40% African American is completely true. 30% of the population could show up for the vote and all be African American. (Improbable, but possible)
The reason why is because (and Republicans know this which is why they try so hard to suppress the vote) more people agree with the Democratic Party. Poll after Poll shows majority of people agree with positions taken by Democrats. Old white people are no longer the massive voting block.
Have you not learned anything from high school history? POLL TAXES HURT THE POOR PEOPLE. and Blacks disproportionately fall into that poor people category.
Well a large portion of the 70% that don’t show up are because they’re too poor to take off of work or have some type of similar conflict that prevents them from showing up, like some poll tax. There is of course, a percent that just doesn’t care to show up as well.
Not getting of work shouldn't ever be a reason. That simply means that the polls aren't open long enough. Isn't it like early morning until late in the evening in the us?
The entire fact that Election Day isn’t a federal holiday where everyone has off is a MASSIVE poll tax. It’s easy to see which side this poll tax benefits - Republicans would NEVER support moving Election Day permanently to a weekend/Holiday. Democrats ALWAYS support people voting on a non working day.
To answer your question - it doesn’t matter how late they’re open. Poor people don’t have the freedom you think they do. They take the buses for over an hour just to get to work. They spend their last pennies trying to find babysitters. They get home at 6 from a 9-5 shift if they’re lucky. They have to go home and feed their nearly starving children who have been home alone in the hood all afternoon. They can’t just go straight to the polls after work because they have shit to do. They can’t just go on lunch because it’ll be another 30 minute bus ride each way AND the lines are long as fuck in the city. Plus their jobs aren’t run by nearly nice enough people to give them a bit of extra time to make it happen.
I get all your points. But it could be so easily avoided by having more poll offices so it's never a long travel and the lines will be less long. Out here you have to live pretty far away from everything for it to be even more than a 15minute walk to the poll
Hilarious that people bitch about flags when the real disgrace to the country is low voter turnout when we were founded on representation. If you don't vote don't you dare complain about what someone does with a piece of cloth or a song.
Y'all forget that these states are infamous for doing their best to suppress minority votes. We can't blame people of color for not "saving" the election if the entire system is stacked against them and prevents them from making it to the polls.
Indeed. But the suppression only works to shave off the small amounts needed to win, if people came in droves, we could overcome even those suppression techniques.
I don't get how turnouts in the US are always so low. Out here (the netherlands) we had 81% last election I believe. Your presidential election had 58%. And from what I usually see and read the US population seems a whole lot more politically active than we are
Doug Jones won here because Republicans didn't show up to be frank about it/simply refused to vote at all under the circumstances. Republicans heavily outnumber Democrats here
Here’s the secret. Even if the democrat don’t win, it forces the republican candidate to fight for the black vote and set agenda for those constituencies. If you give up on them wholesale the right moves even further right and the middle moves right.
I know it's not easily done, but turnout is such a large factor. If you know people who do not vote, this is a good reminder that is matters. A 10% increase from a minority group turned Alabama. They may feel small relative to the population but they can feel a bit bigger relative to the voting population.
I agree. People underestimate the power of closer races, even if your candidate loses. My town is two thirds Republican and everyone talks to me as if I am one of them. If the elections were closer, say 55-45, people would be more likely to realize that people they know and respect are Democrats. I believe it would totally change the political dialogue in my community.
Bah humbug. I live in the middle of bumfuck Missouri. I know 0 liberals IRL. Everyone I work with and hang out with is a Trumper. Any progressive vote I cast counts for shit.
I am so baffled by this line of thinking. You realize literally nothing about the value of your vote changes if a high turnout elects a dem in Mississippi? That staying home is exactly what prevents dems from getting elected?
Ill bet you know at least 1 liberal. Everyone is just too afraid to speak up. I'm actually in the exact opposite situation as you. My workplace is filled with liberals except 1 republican who I didn't find out about till recently. She doesn't speak up cause we're always calling repubs idiots at work.
Black people make up a large percentage of people in those deep south states i think. Thry can actually be turned if people just try.
use that experience and empower everyone you know to vote. this is where it starts. I'm sure you know many people who just get discouraged and don't participate. If you got 5 more people to vote, and those 5 got 5 others, you would soon learn that you wield a great amount of power.
Millenials now outnumber the baby boomers. if they can harness that power correctly, they can push out a lot of the older voters who voter against their interests.
Yes you can, neighbor. It takes a lot of hard work and a fair amount of sacrifice, but if y'all take this baton and hit the ground running, we can keep this thing going! As far as I'm concerned, this is the most important movement in the south since 1965!
Same with a lot of southern states. Louisiana, Tennessee, Carolinas, Georgia, Florida all have significant black and minority populations... My thoughts (strictly opinion from experience) is it's harder to get blacks involved I'm politics in the south due to obvious past history but also because so many more live in rural areas where in other parts of the country all the black populations essentially live in.urban areas..
In FL almost a third of our eligible male African American voters are banned for life due to prior felony convictions. Smoke a join at 17, never vote again. Its a travesty.
Even on the west coast, we have an easier time voting, but many black americans just believe it doesn't matter if they vote or not because nothing is going to change.
Preaching to the choir here. I'm from cincy which is ~50% black, I'm black, 29 y/o and the only one of my neighborhood friends to go to college, or even graduate hs in many instances. All of my friends and a lot of family oftentimes complain about the political situation but never vote believing their vote won't change anything. It really fucks with my head and is one reason I left before and will probably relocate again...
Yeah, but I'd be shocked if he had gone over 10% of the white vote there. I may be wrong, but it seems like racism never really died back there.
Alabama had to have a sort of "racist revival" to get back to the point it found itself at 2 months ago.
E: I think that's why you saw some black people vote for Moore. They have non racist but misguided white republican friends(You'd be surprised the contradictory beliefs you can hold if you never examine them.), and they probably assumed Moore was the same way.
You'll see interracial couples and groups of friends here if you just walk outside. There's no way they're all dems.
If the democrats ran with a African American candidate, I don't see why not. Otherwise hell no. 10 African American senators.... 10 since the dawn of time, 10. Not from any one state. In the history of congress, 10 African American senators. That number is too damn low.
The only reason trump chose Strange was because Strange probably met with him and said he would be loyal in some way. It wasn’t based on ideology or personality.
Is there a voter ID requirement like there is in Alabama? A lot of people in the African American community don't own proper ID and that held back thousands of voters last night. Getting people proper ID to vote needs to be a core theme for the Democrats in the south. Minorities can turn an election as we saw on Tuesday in AL.
Well, okay, for Congressional seats the state lines are drawn so that the largest part of the black population is all within the 2nd Congressional district. The other parts of the state that have large black populations (Jackson and the Coast) are put with counties that will almost definitely vote Republican. So, that is one reason.
There are plenty of white Republicans, so it wouldn't ever be totally blue, but in theory, if drawn a certain way you could have two blue congressional districts and two red districts, if you look at the map.
That only explains the Representatives though. We're still dealing with around 60% of a white population, in a very conservative state that tends to vote from 53-57% for Republicans in national elections. You're also dealing with a very poor population in general, and this is exacerbated for minorities in the state. So, voter access can definitely be a problem. The issues surrounding getting the African American vote out are usually the ones cited by black, political leaders in MS, which actually does have a lot of African American elected officials in smaller, local offices, but have a harder time getting national or state-wide positions.
Also, this totally draws on the assumption that African Americans will vote Democrat, which while it is currently typically the case, may not always be true.
Louisiana has a Democrat for Governor (the election was a similar scandal situation much like Moore/Jones), and had a Democratic Senator from 1996 to 2014. Every state is absolutely in play!
I really hope this shows the African American community everywhere how important their vote is and that it inspires a higher voter turnout in all future elections. ESPECIALLY in the deep south.
Mississippi Republicans is being held up mostly by over 65 yr old white voters who are republican by Stalinist margins.
If the white vote in mississippi ever depolarizes (which is likely because over 65 voters exit the electorate faster than younger voters), the state flips blue.
Mississippi is definitely possible. The NAACP specifically spent a lot of work getting black voters in Alabama to get out and vote. And postcards to voters did a lot of work too, though not specifically targeting black voters.
As you note, there's a lot of black people in Mississippi and if they will go to the polls and vote they can likely make a change.
We'll need to help because Mississippi has a lot of vote suppression laws and a great many of the black rural poor in Mississippi don't have the ID needed to vote because they literally can't afford the fees and the time off work.
You'd have to end rampant disenfranchisement in the deep south, but, no one was expecting this level of turnout in AL. I think that sort of question is no longer off the table.
Gosh I hope so. I've always thought the southern states should be bluer considering their ethnic makeup. Voter suppression must really be holding a lot of people back. The GOP is terrified of black voters.
That would be awesome. The fact is that only a small percentage of America is fooled by the current administration. Unfortunately most of America is apathetic when it comes to actually voting.
We could so easily turn this around if people would just vote.
I'm not trying to flip States I just want the best person for the job and that isn't always a democrat (definitely wasn't Roy Moore) I'm glad Roy Moore lost though.
I hope that Alabama showed Democrats that they could win the south. If Democrats lost Michigan and Wisconsin for a generation (no way that Republicans flipped Pennsylvania for good, I can tell you that), then they could regain those votes by winning the south. Seriously guys, Democrats just fucking won in Alabama! They won against a gun-wielding, Bible-thumbing, horse-riding religious nut who glorifies pre-Civil War America! And their candidate was a pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-immigration, pro-racial justice, pro-gun reform liberal Democrat! He wasn't even like the socially conservative Democrat Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia.
Democrats will have to focus on two things: (1) Serving black and latino voters; (2) ending voter suppression. The legal profession is known for its liberal bent, and Democrats can easily find lawyers to volunteer as poll watchers in black districts. They need to get their asses moving NOW!
Check the actual numbers, roughly half of the republican base stayed home instead of voting for Moore, while the democrats stayed at roughly the same numbers. It was as much about the republicans not voting as it was about anything else.
The RNC and president endorsed a candidate who was opposed to the abolition of slavery. He lost, but that's on the record forever. I think a lot of people need to ask themselves if that party is in line with their "solid conservative" beliefs.
3.1k
u/JustGotOffOfTheTrain Dec 13 '17
You know, Mississippi is nearly 40% African American. Can we flip Mississippi?