You have to give them credit: the Democrat establishment has carefully cultivated and trained a massive welfare state clientele over the decades, and when the word goes out, boy, does everybody fall in line.  This is true even when the designated candidate is the monumentally stupid and corrupt Joe Biden.

This constituency is composed most famously of the long-suffering poor black community — like the folks at the beck and call of Jim Clyburn in South Carolina.  It includes lots of poor whites as well, the ones in the Yankee "opioid belt"; they keep places like New England and Minnesota voting blue.  Then there are characters like Amy Klobuchar and Mayor Pete, who were on TV saying they were going to fight it out all the way to Milwaukee, until they got the phone call, and then they weren't.

Here in Kentucky, our primary is not for several months.  But the orders came down here, too, as they did everywhere, to get behind Old Joe if you know what's good for you.

I even have a friend who does property management, which includes some Sect. 8 homes.  He was struck this week by one of his favorite black tenants, who was a huge Bernie-backer and always wanted to talk politics whenever he came by to fix something.  This last week, though, she was visibly shaken when he asked her about the election.  One of the many social service workers she sees every week had laid down the law.  (She is a grandmother raising the grandkids, with the parents imprisoned or disappeared, and is a prolific customer of government programs.)  Bernie, she was given to understand, "uses bad language" and was now beyond the pale, and she didn't want to talk about it.

Think about that when somebody complains about Republicans not making enough of an outreach to black voters.  It's a rigged game.  Too many poor people are cordoned off on the "liberal plantation" of deep blue cities, sort of like urban Indian reservations, where there are a lot of crime and very little legal private economic activity.  What work there is comes from government social agencies or the worthless public school systems.  Republicans have a better chance of guest-hosting an MSNBC program than finding quality time with voters in these places.

And they would need a lot of that time, because the residents get a daily barrage of race-crazy politics from whoever the local Maxine Waters-style activists might be — and well funded ones at that, those billions of union dollars for politics each year go for "street money" to keep the operation running smoothly.  Mayor Bloomberg, by the way, will chip in more money for this garbage in 2020, as he did in  2018.

But there is a little bit of light here.  First, there's now a historic movement of black America out of the cities.  This will mean more black citizens living in normal, mainstream America and a small but helpful upswing for Trump in 2020.

Second, and more interestingly, on Super Tuesday, the one group of Democrats that definitely did not follow orders were the Latinos, who powered Crazy Bernie to victory in California, Colorado, almost Texas, and then Nevada last week.  Now, Crazy Bernie's own Latino voters are not likely to go for Trump, but it does show that the Hispanic community overall is not so easily "bossed."

Nor is it so well connected to the welfare state, nor tuned into the race identity politics the Democrats are selling.  All but the poorest Latinos assimilate easily into American society, and polls now showing Trump doing superbly among Hispanics are likely to hold up.

The Judis/Teixeira thesis has always been that as we got more "people of color" in America, no matter how contrived that term may be, the Democrats would keep them all under lock and key.  A favored few pajama-boy liberals at the top like Devon Archer would then run the country, while their army of minority underlings took the welfare crumbs without complaint.

That theory still has a lot to recommend it, but it must be under serious reconsideration in 2020.  Whether it pans out that way or not is the great political question for our national future. 

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky. 

Image: Kelly Kline via Flickr.