Politics and Flipping

My mother and I just got back from seeing Pan's Labyrinth (separate post coming on that).

On the way she told me a great story from a Democratic political meeting she'd been to today. A strategist was talking about how to turn neutral groups into dedicated Democratic voters. This is a big subject in her county, which is experiencing a huge influx of Hispanic immigrants. The strategist gave, as a recent example, a campaign in a Virginia county that helped turn the state for Jim Webb instead of George "Macaca" Allen.

The strategist noticed from demographic data that Korean-American men in the county, who were mostly of fairly recent immigrant origin, were voting majority Republican. He asked a Korean man if he felt that Republican politicians were really serving the Korean community. The man told him he didn't really know, but all of his friends and family voted Republican because they were from the Republic of Korea. Now, I know this sounds moronic, but I can sort of believe it. My mother worked with a woman in New York who was a Republican, and when my mother asked her with polite curiousity why she had become one, she said, "In college someone from the Young Republicans told me I should be a Republican, because Republicans were on the right, which meant they were right, right?"

To be absolutely fair, I'm sure there are some voters out there with equally stupid reasons for becoming Democrats.

Anyway, through a concerted effort of outreach, the strategist "flipped" the Koreans and they turned into Democratic majority voters.