[Marxism] Is the Gore vote of 2000 solid for Kerry this year?

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eli wrote:    "I have yet to hear or of a single person who's voting for
Bush who voted for Gore last
time around, yet there are plenty of people (among them many prominent
military people) who voted for Bush who are voting for Kerry this time."

Well, Eli has a point.  The new polls may be more aiming at creating a
despair, demobilization, and even further retreat to the right by the
Democrats.  I seriously think the rulers are determined to have an
election that, one way or another, looks legitimate and can be present,
even with minimal credibility, as a mandate for the winner.  If they
decide for Bush, that means trying to sink the Kerry campaign, which has
been single-mindedly devoted to winning their support.

But I don't think most of us are in a position to take meaningful polls
of people who voted for Gore last time, and I doubt that the Gore vote
is as solidly Democratic this year as in 2000.  War was not an issue
that year.   Patriotism was not an issue that year.  "Supporting our
troops" was not an issue that year.  Frankly, I assume that the Gore
vote for 2000, like the Bush vote for that year, has polarized over
those issues and will not be solid this year. There has been much more
social polarization since that time, and the country is more in crisis.

Just to take a semi-absurd instance, I believe that Zell Miller formally
endorsed Gore in 2000. In many "heartland" state polls, Kerry seems to
be doing significantly worse than Gore did, not better.

Then there is the non-voter trend, which the polls may be aimed at
increasing but which probably is very substantial.  Despite the war
issue, is there any sign that the most oppressed sectors who make up
huge sectors of the non-voters (Blacks, latinos, low-paid whites, etc.)
feel any reason to vote this year.

Then there is the strong resentment of the Democrats, who have not done
anything to make working people's lives any better for decades but still
claim our votes on the grounds that the Republicans will be "worse" on
something or other.

I hate the crap about how stupid the increasingly poor working and lower
middle class  white folks in the "heartland" are.  They increasingly see
the Democrats as people who see them as stupid super-patriotic
low-lifes. I think the thinking of people like Merle Haggard and Steve
Earle gives some sense of what is going on, especially among the youth
in these areas but also beyond, but people like Haggard and Earle also
are more part of and have much greater knowledge of the world outside.

The Democrats keep trying to appeal to "heartlanders"  not with higher
wages or a better life, but by trying to prove they are more patriotic,
more anti-welfare, etc. They don't convince anybody and they won't.

People tell me the "heartland" is "voting against their class interests
because they don't even have medical coverage".  The assumption is that
if they vote Democratic, they will get medical coverage.  Anybody who
believes that is an even bigger sucker than the poor or hard-pressed
white folks in the heartland. The Democrats don't convince them, and the
liberals respond to their failure intellectual snobbery toward those who
do not have their balanced view of things -- evangelical Christians,
farmers, small businesspeople who are going down, and so on.

These people still think Saddam had WMDs and was involved in 9/ll?  How
else can anyone support this war today than by believing those things,
and those people were raise to believe that supporting their country in
war time is a duty. The only people who can support the war otherwise
are the class or sections of classes that feel a social stake in it.

When they get radical, and and this will probably require the
re-emergence of a fighting labor movement, it will be in more than one
direction, but I am betting none of them will be moderate.
Fred Feldman


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