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Historically speaking, the next president will probably be the same race as the current one; after all, it's happened 42 of the last 43 times. That's a joke, of course, but Ben Smith at BuzzFeed thinks there's actually a pretty good chance the next president will be black. Certainly in a Democratic primary, assuming there's no "true white liberal champion, a la Howard Dean," a black candidate would be most likely to unite the party's core demographics: well-educated voters and voters of color.
What's more, two of the Democrats' best candidates—Cory Booker and Deval Patrick—are black, and both are Obama allies, a potential advantage. Pundits like to pretend things that just happened won't necessarily happen again, but "in fact, politics is the sport of repetition and of copycats." Republicans, meanwhile, lack an obvious black candidate, assuming Condoleezza Rice is out. "But the Romney-Ryan debacle did probably guarantee one thing: That the Republican Party will never again present a ticket with two white men on it," Smith writes. Click for his full column.
