{"id":26627,"date":"2012-11-23T16:25:34","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T16:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26627"},"modified":"2012-11-23T16:36:05","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T16:36:05","slug":"american-voters-are-getting-all-mixed-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26627","title":{"rendered":"American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dog Park: Media Unleased<\/a>
\n2012-11-20<\/p>\n

Leighton Woodhouse<\/a><\/strong>, Founding Partner<\/p>\n

As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared\/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama<\/a>. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
\n<\/strong>\u00a0
\nThe story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy\u2019s post-election anointing of the \u201cnew governing coalition,\u201d following the second presidential election in a row in which African-Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there\u2019s another demographic category of Americans that\u2019s getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it\u2019s the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
\n\u00a0
\nThat\u2019s not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is \u201cmixed race\u201d really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is \u201cLatino\u201d or \u201cAsian\u201d). <\/strong>As a demographic category, however, it\u2019s going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It\u2019s simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That\u2019s more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more interracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up Dog Park: Media Unleased 2012-11-20 Leighton Woodhouse, Founding Partner As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared\/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,8,26,20],"tags":[12845,12843,12844],"class_list":["post-26627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-census","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-dog-park","tag-dog-park-media-unleased","tag-leighton-woodhouse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}