Saying “Hillary only won the Confederacy” isn’t just idiotic — it’s also bad for the Democratic Part
Earlier this week, the activist group Progressive Democrats of America sent out an email in which it tried to downplay Hillary Clinton’s primary victories by noting she has “won the Confederacy” while the rest of the country is “primed to go for Bernie.” This was an awkward attempt to make the case for not giving up on the Bernie Sanders campaign despite Clinton’s almost insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. The race, this line of thinking goes, is now moving on to western states where Sanders has enormous support. A few significant victories, and he could be right back in it.
The backlash to the letter was swift. Detractors pointed out that, for starters, it’s not true — unless Massachusetts, Illinois and Ohio are now considered part of the Confederacy. Also, the argument elided the widely reported fact that Clinton owes a great deal of the margin of her victories in Southern states to African American voters, a group traditionally not, to put it mildly, great supporters of the explicit white-supremacist ideology associated with the Confederacy. That word itself has become shorthand for the voting advantages enjoyed by the majority-white Republican Party in the South. Tying it to wins involving a large share of the African-American vote is silly.
The PDA quickly apologized. In truth, however, the organization was parroting an argument I’ve seen made by scattered Sanders fans on social media over the last few weeks. (Note: I am not saying Sanders himself is responsible for his supporters’ dumb comments, implying Hillary is winning with the votes of unreconstructed Confederates, nor that he and his fans are racists. PLEASE DON’T @ ME!) It has taken a couple of different forms – sometimes the claim substitutes “red states” for “Southern states” – but the implication is always the same: Hillary Clinton is winning states that no Democrat will win in the general election, So we shouldn’t assume they reflect a wider base of support for her in the country.
As an argument about who the Democrats should nominate, this is a supremely dumb one. This is a primary election. The issue of whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is better suited to win, say, Alabama in the general election is not the question that is up for debate.
But there is a wider issue here, of which this dust-up is just an example, and that is the tendency of Democrats and left-of-center voters to throw up our hands and sneer at the South when it comes to talk of a voting coalition, or just about anything else.
http://www.salon.com/2016/03/19/saying_hillary_only_won_the_confederacy_isnt_just_idiotic_its_also_bad_for_the_democratic_party/
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