What's really motivating voters this election season? A voter psychology story
When people wax nostalgic for a Hubert Humphrey-style Democrat, political scientist Herb Weisberg can’t help but empathize.
Weisberg grew up in the Minneapolis of the 1940s, where Jews and blacks lived in adjoining sections of the city’s Near North neighborhood. At Ohio State University, he devoted his adult life to analyzing how American Jews vote, but can never forget the religious and racial discrimination that was a fact of life for both Jews and blacks in Minneapolis.
“I had two uncles who got degrees in engineering at the University of Minnesota and couldn’t get jobs in the city because they were Jewish,” said Weisberg in a recent telephone interview. To confirm that, he suggested I look for an article, written by Carey McWilliams in 1946 for the monthly magazine Common Ground, which called out Minneapolis as the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.
It took a fair-minded mayor named Hubert Humphrey to forge a new social contract for the city. Back then, the Lutheran church was a powerful force, so Mayor Humphrey reached out to Pastor Reuben Youngdahl in 1947 to head his Committee on Human Relations.
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