In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 9% victory in Pennsylvania yesterday, it’s being asked all over the Interwebs “Why can’t Obama close the deal? Why does the party not just rally around him as the inevitable winner and move on?” The reason, I believe, is very simple and it’s to be found by looking at just who it is that’s still voting for Hillary… it’s predominantly older white people.
Why are older white people voting for an older white person instead of voting for a younger black person? Gee. I wonder. Hmmm… let’s think about this for a second… erm… because people generally trust other people who seem to look like them more than they trust people who look different. You can call that racism if you like, but I think that’s the wrong word. I believe racism implies a conscious antipathy towards members of another race, a belief that one’s own race is somehow either a) superior or b) unjustly persecuted. Once you have that belief, you can blame the members of other races for whatever you like or just hold them in contempt. Voila, racism. No, I don’t think that’s really what’s happening here. I think that’s what’s happening here is as much an age and culture thing as it is a race thing. Middle-aged white women are going to vote for a middle-aged white woman, their husbands too (barring the option to vote for a middle-aged white man, which they would likely prefer).
In an odd way, the homogeneity of selection among physical characteristics of previous presidential candidates has actually kept this dynamic out of the voting equation until now. In previous presidential elections, you got two of the same box, basically, and you had to do your best to decide based on what was in the box. Let’s look at the last few elections:
George W. Bush – White Christian Man, Born 1946
vs. John Kerry – White Christian Man, Born 1943
vs. Al Gore – White Christian Man, Born 1948
William Clinton – White Christian Man, Born 1946
vs. Bob Dole – White Christian Man, Born 1923
vs. George H. W. Bush – White Christian Man, Born 1924
George H. W. Bush – White Christian Man, Born 1924
vs. Michael Dukakis – White Christian Man, Born 1933
Ronald Reagan – White Christian Man, Born 1911
vs. Walter Mondale – White Christian Man, Born 1928
vs. Jimmy Carter – White Christian Man, Born 1924
Jimmy Carter – White Christian Man, Born 1924
vs. Gerald Ford – White Christian Man, Born 1913
See what I’m getting at here? Same boxes. Slightly different vintages, very different personalities, but the same boxes. So, unless you were a middle-aged or elderly white man you couldn’t vote for somebody like you and you had to pick different criteria for who you would vote for such as whether or not you agreed with their policies or would like to have a beer with them (in the case of W).
This is where Barack and Hillary come in:
Hillary Clinton – White Christian WOMAN, Born 1947
Barack Obama – MULTI-ETHNIC Christian Man, Born 1961
John McCain – White Christian Man, Born 1936
Notice three things about that list. First: three generations are present here. Barack is the first Generation X major candidate. He’s only 12 years older than I am, for goodness sake. Us Gen-Xer’s relate to him the best. Hillary is a Baby Boomer, like Gore, Bush, her hubby, and Kerry. Her generation inherently relate to their own more than they relate to Generation X. McCain, well, I just put him up there for fun because he’s the same old box and in fact is the first pre-boomer candidate to get this far since Bill Clinton beat Bush 41 in ’92. Apparently his generation is referred to as the Silent Generation. I kid you not, look it up.
What this all boils down to is that for the first time different groups are getting a chance to see a choice of people that represent them. You’ve got three different generations, two different genders and two different skin tones. This has brought a deeply ingrained fact of humanity to the fore, our animal tendency to gravitate towards the familiar.
So what does this mean for the election? I don’t know exactly. There are a variety of struggles playing out here. My generation trying to take the reins of leadership over from the generation that preceded us. Women trying to finally be treated on a par with men. Black, brown and racially mixed Americans trying to finally see somebody in office other than a white person. And, well, McCain, trying to be the first President from the Silent Generation and maintain white male hegemony just a bit longer.
Of course Obama is having trouble closing the deal. If it was just about the message, maybe, but this is far stronger juju.
More From Ryan Sutter
- Rude People On the Bus
- The Pattern
- McCain/Palin
- The Obama Bitterness Non-Controversy
- Letter to Barack Obama
