jerseyhoya wrote:There were nine precincts in Cleveland where Romney received zero votes, the largest of which gave Obama 542 votes.

Still, was there not one contrarian voter in those 59 divisions, where unofficial vote tallies have President Obama outscoring Romney by a combined 19,605 to 0?

jerseyhoya wrote:

mozartpc27 wrote:

pacino wrote:More like big segregation

Precisely. Name one reason that Romney gave poor minorities to consider voting for him.

I'll wait.

School choice

JFLNYC wrote:School choice (aka vouchers) is bad for those lower on the socio-economic scale. Primary and secondary private schools will become min-universities, with decisions on admittance being made in large part on the basis of socio-economic status of the students, including which parents are more likely to contribute financially to the school. In effect, the choice goes to the schools, not the students.

JFLNYC wrote:Public schools will be left with the less gifted students of poorer parents. The voucher system is designed for them to fail and, when they do, conservatives will cite it as an example of the virtues of private schools.

td11 wrote:like 89% of romney's total vote came from whites

jerseyhoya wrote:I have a hard time imagining that being the outcome for inner city parochial, private and charter schools. In a lot of these neighborhoods there's very little socioeconomic diversity. Has that occurred in places where vouchers are used? I've never even heard that given as a reason to oppose vouchers.

jerseyhoya wrote:Inner city public schools have largely failed. They didn't need vouchers to do that.

A poll we did at Eagleton last year found blacks in New Jersey more likely to support expanding charter schools and the usage of vouchers to send kids to private schools.

pacino wrote:Charter schools in Philly have been a failure

Throughout much of the period of conservative domination of presidential elections from 1968 to 1988 — and in terms of Congressional power from 1994 to 2006 — the Republican Party had a major election-day edge: there was far more ideological cohesion and less divisive conflict on the right than on the left. Conservatives, from white evangelicals to corporate C.E.O.s, found common ground in their support for an aggressive national defense and in their opposition to what they saw as a coercive, redistributive tax collecting and intrusively regulatory domestic government.

The left was often split: between environmentalists and pro-development unions; between proponents and opponents of affirmative action; between law-and-order whites and liberal advocates of criminal defendants’ rights. As a result, the Democratic Party was vulnerable to Republican wedge issue strategies that produced such famous political commercials as Jesse Helms’s “Hands” — a k a. “White Hands” — and Ronald Reagan’s “Bear”

More recently, there has been a steady diminution of conflict and a growing consensus on the left culminating in the 2008 and 2012 election victories. Issues now linked – clustered — in the minds of many Democratic voters include not only traditional socio-cultural, moral and racial issues like women’s, minority and gay rights, abortion and contraception, non-marital child-bearing, and the obligation of government to provide a safety net, but also to matters pertaining to the overarching role of government in generating greater social justice.

In this view, the achievement of a just society requires a government active in pursuing a progressive distribution of income (through the tax code, for example), and the reduction of armed conflict, as well as the active regulation of matters as diverse as sustainable development, environmental protection and consumer-friendly reform of the finance and banking sectors.

Essentially, the new core of the party – minorities, unmarried men and women, young voters and whites with advanced degrees – is in general agreement on this broader spectrum of issues, forming a coalition of shared ideas.

jerseyhoya wrote:

pacino wrote:Charter schools in Philly have been a failure

By what metric? Compared to what?

JFLNYC wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:I have a hard time imagining that being the outcome for inner city parochial, private and charter schools. In a lot of these neighborhoods there's very little socioeconomic diversity. Has that occurred in places where vouchers are used? I've never even heard that given as a reason to oppose vouchers.

That's a monolithic, terribly general assumption about the socio-economic status of all families in all inner-city neighborhoods. I don't have a tough time at all seeing it happen. Once you give those schools the choice of which students are accepted, the brightest and most advantaged students (even relatively speaking) will go to some schools, while the slower, less advantaged students will end up together.

jerseyhoya wrote:Inner city public schools have largely failed. They didn't need vouchers to do that.

A poll we did at Eagleton last year found blacks in New Jersey more likely to support expanding charter schools and the usage of vouchers to send kids to private schools.

Of course that's what they think because they're laboring under the misconception that they'll actually be able to choose the school to which they'll send their children.