Since at this point nobody in their right mind votes Republican unless their patronage depends on it, we need a second party. But the people who really can’t stand Democrats will have to see that the GOP cannot win before they will vote for another party.

I would like to see a strong Libertarian party competing with Democrats, but we can’t get it while the GOP gets more votes than the Libertarians. That is, no third party can get more than 4% of the votes while the GOP has more than 6%. So we might approach a de facto one-party state while the GOP self-destructs.

The best thing would be for the GOP to just dissolve itself right now, and let its members join or form whatever new parties they prefer. But that’s very unlikely. I’m afraid it will limp along in an undead state for years before it finally disappears for good.

I doubt the GOP will survive as a third party, as they will have no reason to exist once they can no longer hand out federal money. But they can spoil elections until they’re down to a third party.

Brett, you’ve phrased the question in much too abstract a manner. No one, black or white, voted for “the black candidate,” or even for “the Democratic candidate.” People voted for Barack Obama or John McCain or Bob Barr or Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. And they voted in 2008 in the United States of America. In other words, those who voted for Obama voted for him, among other reasons, because he would be the first black president in our history, but also because they preferred him to McCain and the others on the economy, Iraq, etc. Such an expression of preference occurs in a concrete situation that can’t be characterized simply as choosing “the black candidate.” In other words, you’re reducing a complex multifactorial and historically dense concrete situation to a single variable choice. In still other words, voting for Barack Obama, who would be the first black president in our nation’s history, and who seemed better able to handle the economic crisis and who promised to get combat troops out of Iraq in 16 months, is not simply equivalent to voting for “the black candidate.” Or another take on it: you’re ignoring what we could call the Colin Powell phenomenon: black Republicans who in this particular election, faced with this choice of candidates, voted for Obama. After his two terms in office, they might go back to voting Republican. But they didn’t in 2008.

All that’s probably why yours is an “uncommon opinion”: most other people appreciate that your brand of reduction isn’t a good way to go in thinking about Obama’s election.

As for the notion that the white vote for the Democrats is ever going to reach 95%, do you really aspire to live in a one party state?

A 7% increase isn’t that much, compared to some others.

And going to 95% just means they’re ahead of the curve. With current GOP strategies, pretty much everybody else is heading to 95% too. The GOP is rightfully heading toward third party status.

There is something creepy and dysfunctional going on with the GOP.

I’m not sure what to do about it, but my preference would be to disband the GOP, retire most of their politicians, party hacks, precinct captains etc, and replace them with a Libertarian party.

If I had a chance to vote for an honest libertarian who intended to majorly reduce military spending, reduce government spending generally, reduce regulation of reputable business while eliminating fundamentally unethical industries like banking, he’d have a good shot at my vote.

We need a good alternative to the Democratic Party and the GOP is not it. It’s just plain too dysfunctional.

Ok, imagine that, normally, largish groups of people have some diversity of opinion, such that they disagree as to whether option A or B is better. That generally IS the case unless option B really IS building those death camps.

Imagine that the largish population group demonstrably is in better agreement on some issues with the party they’re rejecting. Normally largish groups of people disagree about how to order their preferences.

No, I’m going to stick by my position, that there’s something creepy and dysfunctional going on here.

It’s not Appalachia. The Northern Appalachians (New England) were always blue and became even bluer. The Blue Ridge mountains shifted blue, as did Piedmont and the northern Ridge & Valley and Appalachian Plateau. Middle/Western Tennessee is not Appalachian, neither are the Florida panhandle, Arkansas, East Texas or Oklahoma. The only overlap between Appalachians and redshift can be found in Eastern Kentucky. The swath that turned red in the NY Times map is the rural, “American” ancestry South, aka Joe-the-Plumber Country or the Cracker Crescent.

You’re swaying me, Brett. For the warm-hearted favor of not building death camps out in the desert for them, black Americans should at least have given the GOP 5%. The party really ought to try making this a talking point in the mid-term elections.

I’m not saying it should be pivotal to their strategy or anything, but they could at least have an inner-city poster campaign based on this appealing premise, featuring photos of camps (empty WW II Japanese internment facilities would do), and captions like “Another year goes by and we’re still not sending you to death camps—why not give us a try this election?”

All right, Brett, one last attempt, even though I’ve argued with brick walls that are less obtuse than you are: imagine that option A is only 2% better than option B, but it’s pretty consistently 2% better, and every once in a while, A is astronomically better. Why would you ever choose option B? Out of some sense of fairness and proportionality? Oh, wait, I know: it’s that black Americans have no sense of adventure.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.