You are free to have your own opinions on what causes nonwhites in Ohio to vote for Democrats, but I doubt we will ever find evidence that mocking Warren for her dissembling will ever show up as evidence for the voting of otherwise persuadable nonwhites. My totally nonscientific sense of talking to several nonwhites about this is that it is viewed as a “fair” shot but not one that is especially important in how a candidate should be evaluated. Brown has gotten all the juice he is going to out of that issue.

But then again I don’t think it is “tone deaf” to criticize Democrats for things that Republicans would naturally be criticized for and am generally not of the opinion that Republicans should crawl away and die lest strongly Democrat-leaning commenters declare that anything and everything (other than a conversion to whatever the Democratic platform happens to be that year) will repel the electorate. Republicans will just have to go on respirating without your good opinion or your granting them the “family” rhetorical discount you are so enthusiastic to give the other party.

So you will hear, “It’s OK, so and so is ‘family’.” It’s quite a complement when they say it about you. That judgment about who is or isn’t “family” is very important to them and is being made constantly about everyone, whether you hear about it or not.

If you are in the habit of making disparaging remarks about someone’s ethnic background, for any reason, you’re not family, and everybody knows it. I know less about Latinos but they have similar social niceties among them. So do Jews. If they are around you they pay very close attention to how you treat others, under the not unrealistic assumption that you might treat them in the same way.

If someone is “not family” it will be collectively remembered a long time, and that someone is very unlikely to win anybody’s vote to whom it matters. Such things matter far more to the member of any separated “minority” group of any size, than any “rational political or moral philosophy” used to justify what you say about people.

As a rule, conservatives are exceptionally tone deaf to such social emotions in others. And there are very few Republicans who are family, for pretty good reasons.

For the last fifty years, that hasn’t really mattered, since “minorities” have been very definitely in the voting minority.

But that’s changing. Pretty soon there will be no “majority” of anyone. And if you are tone deaf to the fact that it might be much more important to somebody that you are family than whatever political philosophy you have, you will routinely lose elections.

Or to give an example: imagine Romney announces at the debate tomorrow that he is African American. Will the resulting predictable (and deserved) mockery result in Romney getting a lot more nonwhite voters than he otherwise would have gotten? I didn’t think so.

When this is over, I suggest that everyone here look very carefully at the voting patterns as reflected in the polls for non-male and non-white voters. Every gibe of this kind will have contributed to it. So will all the foolishness of trying to restrict voting hours and hiding behind a self righteous facade of “voter fraud.” And if you want an analysis of it that you can respect, see what Karl Rove has to say about it. As he himself has pointed out, he pays attention to the math.

Ohio’s early voting is about to start and there are African-Americans camped out overnight in front of the Columbus early voter center in order to not only vote, but to pointedly assert their right to do it at all. Now I know that in 2010 the results were due, at least in part, due to the “passion” of people opposed to Obamacare. But if anyone sat outside the polls overnight from an excess of passion, I don’t remember it.

And when you start thinking about 2016, 2020, and 2024, look very carefully at the changing population demographics of Texas and Arizona. You will see the future in them. You can think, particularly, about Texas and the number of electoral votes Texas holds.