Obama and the Super Delegates.

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

...And then we step into the 1960's, where almost 100 years previous the 14th Amendment basically guaranteed the right of blacks to vote, certain folks in the southern U.S. decided that blacks either had to pay a poll tax or take a test to be able to vote...

And those "certain folks in the southern U.S." were................Democrats!

I'm still mystified why there is such universal support among blacks for the party that spent so many years trying to suppress them?

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

Oh, and everyone who thinks I'm advocating retaining the Electoral College needs to go back and re-read my posts. Never do I say whether I am for or against it. I'm merely pointing out what I believe will be some of the results if it were eliminated.

Of course that isn't likely to happen any time soon since it would require a change to the Constitution.

[slugshooter]

And those "certain folks in the southern U.S." were................Democrats!

I'm still mystified why there is such universal support among blacks for the party that spent so many years trying to suppress them?

Because Southern Democrats were the one's responsible for this. Northern Democrats were pushing for equal rights. Different ideologies in different regions. Once equal rights was established by pressure from Northern Democrats, those Southern Democrats became Republicans.

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

I think your history on civil rights legislation is a bit muddled. If any southern Democrats switched parties, it certainly wasn't because they thought they were joining a bunch of racists.

Here are the facts as they happened:

May 22, 1856: Two years after the Republican Party’s birth, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (R., Mass.) rose to decry pro-slavery Democrats. Congressman Preston Brooks (D., S.C.) responded by grabbing a stick and beating Sumner unconscious in the Senate chamber. Disabled, Sumner could not resume his duties for three years.

July 30, 1866: New Orleans's Democratic government ordered police to raid an integrated GOP meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150.

September 28, 1868: Democrats in Opelousas, Louisiana killed nearly 300 blacks who tried to foil an assault on a Republican newspaper editor.

October 7, 1868: Republicans criticized Democrats' national slogan: "This is a white man's country: Let white men rule."

April 20, 1871: The GOP Congress adopted the Ku Klux Klan Act, banning the pro-Democrat domestic terrorist group.

October 18, 1871: GOP President Ulysses S. Grant dispatched federal troops to quell Klan violence in South Carolina.

September 14, 1874: Racist white Democrats stormed Louisiana's statehouse to oust GOP Governor William Kellogg's racially integrated administration; 27 are killed.

August 17, 1937: Republicans opposed Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Supreme Court nominee, U.S. Senator Hugo Black (D., Al.), a former Klansman who defended Klansmen against race-murder charges.

In 1865, Congressional Republicans unanimously backed the 13th Amendment, which made slavery unconstitutional. Among Democrats, 63 percent of senators and 78 percent of House members voted: "No."

In 1866, 94 percent of GOP senators and 96 percent of GOP House members approved the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans equal protection of the law. Every congressional Democrat voted: "No."

February 28, 1871: The GOP Congress passed the Enforcement Act, giving black voters federal protection.

February 8, 1894: Democratic President Grover Cleveland and a Democratic Congress repealed the GOP's Enforcement Act, denying black voters federal protection.

January 26, 1922: The U.S. House adopted Rep. Leonidas Dyer's (R., Mo.) bill making lynching a federal crime. Filibustering Senate Democrats killed the measure.

May 17, 1954: As chief justice, former three-term governor Earl Warren (R., Calif.) led the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation of government schools via the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. GOP President Dwight Eisenhower's Justice Department argued for Topeka, Kansas's black school children. Democrat John W. Davis, who lost a presidential bid to incumbent Republican Calvin Coolidge in 1924, defended "separate but equal" classrooms.

September 24, 1957: Eisenhower deployed the 82nd Airborne Division to desegregate Little Rock's government schools over the strenuous resistance of Governor Orval Faubus (D., Ark.).

May 6, 1960: Eisenhower signs the GOP's 1960 Civil Rights Act after it survived a five-day, five-hour filibuster by 18 Senate Democrats.

July 2, 1964: Democratic President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act after former Klansman Robert Byrd's 14-hour filibuster and the votes of 22 other Senate Democrats (including Tennessee's Al Gore, Sr.) failed to scuttle the measure. Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen rallied 26 GOP senators and 44 Democrats to invoke cloture and allow the bill's passage. 82 percent of Republicans so voted, versus only 66 percent of Democrats.

June 29, 1982: President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Republican Party also is the home of numerous "firsts." Among them:

Until 1935, every black federal legislator was Republican. America's first black U.S. Representative, South Carolina's Joseph Rainey, and our first black senator, Mississippi's Hiram Revels, both reached Capitol Hill in 1870. On December 9, 1872, Louisiana Republican Pinckney Benton Stewart "P.B.S." Pinchback became America's first black governor.

August 8, 1878: America's first black Collector of Internal Revenue was former U.S. Rep. James Rapier (R., Ala.).

October 16, 1901: GOP President Theodore Roosevelt invited to the White House as its first black dinner guest Republican educator Booker T. Washington. The pro-Democrat Richmond Times newspaper warned that consequently, "White women may receive attentions from Negro men." When Roosevelt sought reelection in 1904, Democrats produced a button that showed their presidential nominee, Alton Parker, beside a white couple while Roosevelt posed with a white bride and black groom. The button read: "The Choice Is Yours."

GOP presidents Gerald Ford in 1975 and Ronald Reagan in 1982 promoted Daniel James and Roscoe Robinson to become, respectively, the Air Force's and Army's first black four-star generals.

November 2, 1983: President Reagan established Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday, the first such honor for a black American.

President Reagan named Colin Powell America's first black national-security adviser while GOP President George W. Bush appointed him our first black secretary of state.

President G.W. Bush named Condoleezza Rice America's first black female NSC chief, then our second (consecutive) black secretary of State. But, one-time Klansman Robert Byrd and other Senate Democrats stalled Rice's confirmation for a week. Amid unanimous GOP support, 12 Democrats and Vermont Independent James Jeffords opposed Rice — the most "No" votes for a State designee since 14 senators voted against Henry Clay in 1825.

[wtnhunt]

Oh, and everyone who thinks I'm advocating retaining the Electoral College needs to go back and re-read my posts. Never do I say whether I am for or against it. I'm merely pointing out what I believe will be some of the results if it were eliminated.

Of course that isn't likely to happen any time soon since it would require a change to the Constitution.

Can understand where you are coming from Mike and fully respect your opinion, but I would kind of have to disagree with the idea that those cities you mention would somehow decide the vote for the entire nation if the vote was run by popular vote.

I do agree with you on the last part though, not likely we will see any changes anytime soon.

[wtnhunt]

And those "certain folks in the southern U.S." were................Democrats!

I'm still mystified why there is such universal support among blacks for the party that spent so many years trying to suppress them?

Maybe because it is the party of change Mike.:confused:

Seriously on this I see where you are coming from, and I dont really get how this is overlooked so widely either. Kind of sad some things that are brought back time and time again, but this part of history is overlooked, and for what reason I really do not know, it really makes no sense. Really with looking at what dems are about on the issue of redistribution from the working class to those who chose not to, I guess it is not so hard to see why so many lower class voters support them.

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

Can understand where you are coming from Mike and fully respect your opinion, but I would kind of have to disagree with the idea that those cities you mention would somehow decide the vote for the entire nation if the vote was run by popular vote.

I do agree with you on the last part though, not likely we will see any changes anytime soon.

I just pulled those cities out of thin air to illustrate my point without looking at the actual voter numbers. It could be that it would take the top 30 or so largest cities before the vote totals became insurmountable for the rest of the country.

To get a good idea of this, take a look at one of those red and blue maps from 2004 where it has been broken down by counties. Red counties outnumbered blue counties by a huge margain, but the popular vote totals were much closer.

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

I found a map...

[wtnhunt]

What is deceiving about that though is that you cannot derive the numbers of people who are represented by looking at that. It looks like the red outnumbers the blue by a huge margin, but as you know that was not the case. You got to remember that if you take away the electoral college and go strictly by popular vote, the red and blue(districts won in this case) would not even be a issue as the actual numbers of votes counted would be all that would matter.

What would be more interestng to see rather than the blue/red would be to see actual numbers of voters by districts and see the total tally. Some of those districts were probably won by very small margins.

[slugshooter]

What is deceiving about that though is that you cannot derive the numbers of people who are represented by looking at that. It looks like the red outnumbers the blue by a huge margin, but as you know that was not the case. You got to remember that if you take away the electoral college and go strictly by popular vote, the red and blue(districts won in this case) would not even be a issue as the actual numbers of votes counted would be all that would matter.

Exactly. The Red and Blue map IMO is not an accurate representation in regards to electoral outcome. One vote can swing a county either way, much the same as one vote in regards to state outcomes can swing the vote either way. The 2000 election was decided, indirectly, by the State of Florida. Gore wins the popular vote but loses the election because he failed to win enough electoral votes to make him the president. Not everyone in the red counties voted Republican and not everyone in the blue counties voted Democrat. Take the counties and states out of it and you have a true direct form of election. To me the argument for retaining the electoral college because it gives the smaller states a voice and prevents a large state from deciding the presidential election is moot because in all but two elections has the candidate with the most popular votes lost. If it were the case that states with large dense urban populations who mainly vote Democratic decide the election, then wouldn't all presidents have been from the Democratic Party. The voting age population is so large and diverse that who wins what state to me is largely inconsequential. Plus, the colors of using red and blue to represent parties has only recently been set as far as Rep.Red and Dem.Blue. In 1984, Reagans victories against Mondale were represented as blue.

[slugshooter]

I am not entirely sure how a discussion about those who are in favor of or against the electoral college turned into a partisan debate, but I'll roll with it. When discussing the fact that Democrats in the south were opposed to voting rights and civil rights in the 1960's, one also has to remember that the Republican party during that time was almost non-existent in the South. Here is an excerpt from a study by Gary Jacobson regarding party polarization. "The consensus explanation for the rise in party cohesion in Congress since the 1970's is party realignment in the South. The short version is that the civil rights revolution, particularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965, brought southern blacks into the electorate as Democrats, while moving conservative whites to abandon their ancestral allegiance to the Democratic Party in favor of the ideologically more compatible Republicans."

With data from National Election Studies (I wish I could put the graph on here) from 1952-1998, you can see the rise of Republican voter ID and representation in Congress. From 1952 to 1960, there were no Senate seats in the south that were held by Republicans and less than 10 percent of House seats held by Republicans. Less than 20 percent of voters during that same time period identified as Republican. From 1962 until 1998 those figures rose steadily until in 1996 when almost 70 percent of Senate seats in the south were held by Republicans, almost 50 percent of voters identified as Republican, and almost 60 percent of House seats in the south were held by Republicans.

[Texan_Til_I_Die]

I'm still not following your logic when you say southerners switched parties because of the outcome of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

97% of Republicans in the Senate voted for the Act (30-2) while only 73% of Democrats (47-17) supported it.

In the House, it was 82% of Republicans (112-24) vs 78% for Democrats (221-61) in favor of the bill.

If southern whites were so outraged by blacks signing up to vote, why did they migrate to the party that overwhelmingly supported the act that allowed it?

I'm not denying (the numbers don't lie) that there was a huge shift in party allegiance between about 1960 and 1980, but I don't think it was due to racism. I think it was caused by the Democratic Party's abandonment of common, everyday people in favor of certain special interest groups.

[slugshooter]

I'm still not following your logic when you say southerners switched parties because of the outcome of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

97% of Republicans in the Senate voted for the Act (30-2) while only 73% of Democrats (47-17) supported it.

Where were those two Republican Senators from that voted against it. In 1965 the percentage of Republican held Senate seats in the south was 8%, so it is possible the two against the measure were from the south.

Strom Thurmond is a good example who began his career in the Senate in 1954 as a Democrat. "Thurmond supported racial segregation with the longest filibuster ever conducted by a single Senator, speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an unsuccessful attempt to derail the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Other Southern Senators, who had agreed as part of a compromise not to filibuster this bill, were upset with Thurmond because they thought his defiance made them look bad to their constituents.As Thurmond was increasingly at odds with the Democratic Party, on September 16, 1964 he switched his party affiliation to Republican. He played an important role in South Carolina's support for Republican presidential candidates Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1968. South Carolina and other states of the Deep South had supported the Democrats in every national election from the end of Reconstruction to 1960. However, discontent with the Democrats' increasing support for civil rights resulted in John F. Kennedy barely winning the state in 1960. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson's strong support for the Civil Rights Act and integration angered white segregationists even more. Goldwater won South Carolina by a large margin in 1964."