Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post interviewed noted Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher about Mr. Belcher’s new polling that latest round of focus groups indicates that in spite of understand how “bad” the current occupant of the Oval Office is, some millennials of color that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 do not regret their third party and non-votes in the 2016 elections.
“What we clearly see in the focus groups is they don’t regret what they did.”
“They” are millennials of color who either didn’t vote or voted third party. And for Cornell Belcher, the president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, who was the pollster for the Democratic National Committee under then-Chairman Howard Dean and for both of Barack Obama’s campaigns for the White House, this makes them the new swing voters the Democratic Party should be trying to win over.
Two links at Capehart’s WaPo essay go to the survey that Belcher did and to Capehart’s Cape Up podcast. I will link/embed them here.
Breaking Away: Exploring the Third Party Millennial “Protest” Vote of 2016Key Focus Group Findings June 2017
Here is who was focused-grouped and where. These are NOT WWC voters.
Some of the quotes that I’ve seen in this study are far more eye-popping than these turgid polls/focus groups of Trump voters.
I’m still going through Belcher’s survey and I’ve gotten to about the 15 minute mark on the podcast.
In the meantime, I have a couple of observations...and a sort-of ground rule.
1) 6-7% of minority voters in Florida voted third party and, if Belcher’s 2 focus groups in Fort Lauderdale are any indication, they do not seem to regret their vote!
2) At the 10:38 mark of the podcast, Mr. Belcher tells the story of doing a focus group of black millennials in Charlotte, North Carolina three weeks prior to the 2016 election. He shows the focus group a paper of Hillary Clinton’s criminal justice proposals and they literally did not believe Belcher and pushed back on what he was saying.
I don’t think that was the result of Russian propaganda/fake news, either.
3) At the 13:00 minute mark, there’s the talk about changing the consultant class again. Dissatisfaction with the Democratic consultant class is VERY high and shared among factions in the Democratic Party.
4) Last but not least, I love the fact that Mr. Belcher takes as much pride in the work that he did when he worked under Howard Dean as he did of the work he did for the Obama campaigns.
Here’s the ground rule: Please, please keep the Hillary-Bernie piefights to a minimum.
For one, y’all know how I feel about Senator Sanders.
Two, I don’t think that “Bernie Sanders” is the across-the-board answer to these questions and problems posed by this survey.
Not shading Bernie, per se, but my stated position is that Bernie is more of the problem rather than part of the solution.
In a way all too routine for the Democratic Party.
(This post will be updated accordingly as I continue to read through the material and listen to the podcast.)
Amended 7/18/17 6:31 CST CK
Wednesday, Jul 19, 2017 · 1:52:11 AM +00:00 · Chitown Kev
I was going to simply attach this "slide” to a comment but I decided to add it in an update...because there are a number of people in the comments that are saying that voting in US Presidential elections is a binary choice.
Not only do the voters that Belcher surveyed not feel that way...for the time being, these millennial voters of color have no intention of regarding future votes in presidential elections as a binary choice.
The Democrats have to win those votes. (Granted, these voters are inclined to vote for Democrats in the future...but these voters aren’t making any promises to do so, either).
But seriously...there has been a lot of data out there that showed that black voters (esp. ages 18-29) already felt that way about voting, so none of this should have been a surprise.
(nevermind!)
