Imperial County: A Case Study
Imperial County, California, might give us a little clue about how elections are won these days. Imperial County is heavily Catholic and 75% Hispanic. Here’s how they voted:
Presidential Election
McCain – 37.3%
Obama – 61.1%
Prop 4 (parental notification)
Yes – 73.2%
No – 26.8%
Prop 8 (restore marriage)
Yes – 70.0%
No – 30.0%
Very high numbers for Props 4 and 8, and yet the county still went for Obama by a significant margin. Why? Why did they vote for a man who is so overtly hostile to their fundamental values? The answer is that presidential elections are not driven by issues anymore, they are driven by image – pure and simple. Barack Obama is an attractive and compelling media figure. He’s good looking, intelligent, articulate, smooth, and appears to be knowledgable and passionate. For many voters, there is also a strong symbolic attraction due to his race. Few voters look beyond image, and it is unrealistic to expect them to.
I have said before that the Obama campaign was more issues-oriented than the McCain campaign, but that’s only because Obama had the image contest totally locked up. Image is priority; issues are luxury.
Imperial County was simply duped. America may have been duped as well. In a media-controlled electorate of 300 million citizens, this is how every presidential election in the future is going to be run. There’s got to be a better way.
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This also goes against all the media saying we have changed into a center left country. I suspect these type of results were also common in Florida, S. Dakota, and Ohio.
Manuel, I suspect you’re right about that. Thanks for the comment.
Obama offered money, and lots of it.
Do you honestly think it doesn’t have anything to do the fact that the Republican party is perceived as anti-Hispanic? I’ve read everything I could find on the Hispanic vote and it continually comes down to Latinos perceiving the Republican party has having a lot of nativists in it. Which it probably does. I know some.
Guess what? Some people are unwilling to give up their perceptions. The Republican party has done every sort of bending over backwards and contortion to prove that it isn’t “anti-Hispanic” and guess what? It’s still “perceived” that way. McCain is one of the biggest advocates of illegal immigrant amnesty we’ve seen come down the pike. It’s been a bigger deal in his political career even than in Obama’s! You may think that’s a good thing or a bad thing but one thing is sure: It should have won him the Hispanic vote, if it were a matter of some sort of perception of being “pro-Hispanic.” In fact, that’s one reason Pres. Bush and the party generally have gone that direction. But it didn’t. Well, maybe this is because some people just think in terms of identity politics and are going to do so no matter what. I heard of a Hispanic girl who was called a “traitor” for voting McCain because “he’s white.” That’s the level of discourse we’re talking about here.