Third of Electoral College Majority Might Say No
Few pundits we know of are talking about it yet, and we'd prefer not to either, but even when he is leading in the polls, Barack Obama is facing a daunting task in this election.
The United States has come a long way in giving women and blacks something approaching equality with the ruling white males, but anyone with a realistic bone in his or her body has to acknowledge sex- ism and racism are still present in our society.
Women may be able to surmount the prejudice against a woman in the White House by their sheer numbers--a slight majority of the U.S. population, a large majority of the voters.
But can blacks and a man of their race win a national election today?
Remember that map of the United States with states colored blue if they voted Democratic and red if they voted Republican? In 1964, the southern states would have been painted a solid blue (except Arizona, home state of the GOP candidate). Now the same states are quadrenni- ally painted a solid red. What happened? Racism.
That's right. More than 40 years after the Civil Rights Act that sin- glehandedly changed the South from a swatch of blue to one of red, ra- cism still abounds in the country. Racists and people with biases in that direction tend to vote Republican. And southern states vote Republican these days. All of the southern states voted for George W. Bush in the extremely tight 2000 election and have done so since the Democratic party and President Lyndon Johnson, an ironic Democratic son of the South, engineered the rights act.
Yes, Obama won six primaries in southern states--Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina. But those were Democrats voting, giving a large number of delegates, enough to give him the edge over Hillary Clinton and thus the nomination.
Twelve states considered southern or that usually vote with south- ern states next door, plus Utah, have 171 electoral college votes. That number is just two-thirds of the 270 total needed to elected a president. In a close race in the fall, automatically losing a third of the majority of electoral votes could be disastrous for the Democrats.
Yes, many Republican women strangely retain a hatred for Clin- ton, but since there are far more women voters than men voters in the United States, that hatred is not likely to be able to swing a sexist bias to an entire state.
(Utah is important in the calculation because while several south- ern states split away from red to vote for Jimmy Carter of Georgia and/or for Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Utah has been consistently red. The state is overwhelmingly Mormon, a religion that discriminated officially against blacks until 1978. Many members subscribe to the founders' strange idea that brother-killer Cain was black, even though, according to the same Bible that discusses the slaying, only two other people existed on Earth when Cain was born--Adam and Eve.
