I’m usually not as pessimistic as Richard about electoral politics. My attitude yesterday was “talk about how much Republicans suck tomorrow, tonight is all about watching liberals get what they deserve.” And while the elephants did do about as well as the pundits thought they would, the results out of Nevada can only be described as a crushing blow to the American far right. Politico reports
Luis Gutierrez is pushing Harry Reid today to return to immigration legislation, on the grounds that Hispanic voters saved his hide.
Reid got an amazing 90% of the state's 12% Hispanic voters, according to exit polls; Sharron Angle got just 8%.
Now for years the establishmentarian conventional wisdom has been that Republicans need to improve their numbers among Hispanic Americans. On the other hand, writers at VDare, particularly Steve Sailer, have said that the GOP should forget about minorities and focus on getting a larger share of the white vote (See the Sailer Strategy).
If the Politico article is correct, subtract Hispanics out of the Nevada vote and Angle wins by about 5 percent. Despite Angle hammering Reid on the issue of illegal immigration, not enough whites came out to make up for what was lost among the Latino electorate, as the Sailer strategy would’ve predicted. Not in a relatively conservative state like Nevada, not in a "wave" election year.
Seems that the conventional wisdom may be right after all. Harry Reid’s win was a victory for third world, get out the peasants ethnic politics. If the far Right position on illegals couldn’t work in Nevada this year, where and when will it? (It must be noted that Pew Research contradicts Politico, reporting that Angle actually won 30 percent of Latinos, which if accurate means the Sailer Strategy fails even if it doesn't lead Hispanics to vote like blacks.) Also, in Colorado Hickenlooper not only beat Tom Tancredo but got more votes than the Constitution and Republican candidates combined.
Where to go from here? Sailer has got some other ideas that weren’t tried in the Nevada race, like trying to tell Hispanics to vote like Americans and making the Democrats unappealing by branding them "the Black party." We can call this “Cultural Sailerism” compared to what Angle ran on, which was “Classical Sailerism.” Cultural Marxism proved a more successful strategy in the long run than its intellectual predecessor and hopefully its Sailerist counterpart will have the same fate.
