Way back in the olden thymes, when Pat Buchanan was challenging Bush the Elder in the GOP primary, I found myself in a working class Irish bar talking politics. The TV in the bar was on the local news and they were doing a segment on the race. A male and female were beside me at the bar, chatting about the race. The woman said something like, “I can’t vote for Buchanan. He’s a racist and I can’t vote for a racist.” The male sort of nodded along, hoping to score some points.

I think that was the point when I began to realize politics, at least for me, was only going to be for entertainment purposes. I did not fully comprehend the implications of what was happening, but in retrospect, Buchanan’s run was the beginning of the great unraveling of the Reagan coalition. The ruling class had managed to convince working class whites that their interests must come second to the new religion. Antiracism is who we are now.

Of course, the managerial class was built on a lie. The managerial elite, particularly the corporate side of the house, hate working class Americans. They developed a particularly healthy disdain for normal white people, as seen in their jihad against companies like Walmart. This was the heart of the Sailer Strategy for Republicans to regain the edge in elections. Now it appears the Progressives are beginning to come to terms with it too.

With the 2018 midterms months away and the 2020 presidential election cycle approaching rapidly, Democrats are considering how to improve their poor showings in 2014 and 2016. The party has been debating — sometimes heatedly — how to do this. Which voters should they target? How should Democrats target them?

But here’s what’s clear: White voters have been fleeing the Democratic Party, and that’s a big reason Democrats are looking to rebound from back-to-back losses.

Whites have slowly but consistently moved away from the Democratic Party. These recent losses are on top of Democrats’ losses among Southern whites during the 1960s and 1970s after Democrats’ support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Bill Clinton won 49 percent of the white two-party vote in 1996. Al Gore won 43 percent in 2000. John F. Kerry won 41 percent in 2004. Barack Obama won a slightly larger share in 2008, but then dropped to only 39 percent in his 2012 reelection bid. Hillary Clinton got the same percentage as Obama.

Obama was able to mask the Democratic Party’s weakness among whites by prompting record-high turnout among African Americans, as well as strong turnout from other Democratic-leaning minority groups. Hillary Clinton was unable to generate the same level of enthusiasm from racial and ethnic minorities.

What some on the Left are beginning to notice is called math. If you increase your share of a large voting block, like say white people, you get more votes that if you increase your share of a small voting block, like Hispanics. This was the point Sailer made a long time ago, one that Donald Trump took to heart in his 2016 campaign. There’s also the fact that the black vote is maxed out and the Hispanic vote has proven to be quite fickle. It takes a massive effort for the Democrats to get that vote out in strong numbers.

I used the American National Election Study data to show that many whites view the Democratic Party as moving further away from their own positions. This is true both when whites are asked to assess the positions of the parties generally and on a variety of specific issues such as government-sponsored health care and the government’s role in providing employment.

My research suggests this combination of political “sorting” and changing white perceptions of the Democratic Party has resulted in an almost eight-point swing in white vote choice. That lines up well with actual vote returns. White votes were split between the two parties about 50-50 in the 1970s — but in elections since 2000, that has become closer to 60-40 in favor of the Republican Party. Democrats might be gaining more votes from Latinos, Asians and other emerging demographic groups, but they are losing whites as a result.

Furthermore, the demographics of the white voters who are likely to support Democrats are different from the white voters who supported the Democratic Party in previous decades.

Most notably, while the Democratic Party is winning a lower percentage of whites overall, a greater proportion of college-educated whites are voting for Democrats. Attitudes on social issues in particular have become stronger predictors of voting behavior in recent elections; economic attitudes have become more important, too, but were already quite a strong predictor to start with.

The reason for this phenomenon is another temporary factor. College educated whites can afford to avoid many of the realities of multiculturalism. At least they think they can, by moving to ex-urban enclaves. That is something this study missed. The suburban white boy vote started to move toward Trump in the last election. Despite the hand-waving from the Left, these voters are waking up to the reality of the demographic age as well. It’s playing out in their neighborhoods now and they are responding accordingly.

There is also something else that left-wing analysts do not get and that is the intensity of the white response. In the South, whites are much more keenly aware of race and therefore more attuned to voting on racial lines. When it matters, whites will come out hard for their team. The white vote is much harder to split using the normal subversive tricks. This is starting to play out on the national level as even areas close to the Canadian border are seeing violent African and Hispanic migrants dumped into their communities.

As an aside, take a look at the comments of that Post story. You see many of the usual auto-responses from people who think it is still 1968. You also see many more normal responses from people who get it. It takes time for this type of culture changes to seep into all the nooks and crannies of a society, but people are slowly waking up to the demographic reality of our age. While we still bother having elections, white people will increasingly choose to vote their skin over all other considerations.