I agree with your comment about the cattle prod but the offset to that is that twenty years from now a lot of the mostly old white homophobic, xenophobic and white protectionist Republican prodded cattle hard core voting bloc will be dead or highly senile. The plus side is that the old white male run farm teams for the Republican Guard has lost it’s pool of young recruits to play on their team.
I think that thanks to these three scandals, the Democrats will lose every last conservative Republican voter they ever had! Which nationally would account for .00005% of all registered voters. Meanwhile, the Hispanic vote continues to grow … be funny if the Dems get Texas!
Apparently the last two posters haven’t heard that largescale immigration from the south has slowed to a trickle. At least that’s what immigration reform advocates are telling us. They wouldn’t lie, now would they?
But if true, those white folks are going to retain their majority pretty easily. Besides, even under the most optimistic scenarios, whites will still be 74% of the population in 2050. It’s just that many of those will be Hispanic whites. But after the first generation, is there really a difference between a Martinez and a Giuliani in terms of voting habits?
You are phrasing your argument in such a way as to paint a negative picture. That doesn’t seem very cool.
People who cross the border don’t vote. It’s the second generation that are adding up. Even if no one came from south of the border, Hispanics would still be growing quickly.
The difference is that the GOP doesn’t gin up anti-Italian sentiment with every passing week.
Can I assume that you’ll admit your previous argument doesn’t hold water?
Are all white Americans Republicans or something? I was talking about Republicans losing their elderly base without appealing to young and fresh replacements. My comment had nothing to do with immigration from the south.
Eventually they do vote, and I’ve seen no polling on 2nd generation Hispanics. I think you’d find a much less friendly picture for Democrats if you did.
Recent arrivals may feel that way, but living in an area that’s heavily Latino, the difference in outlook between recent arrivals and Latinos who were born here is like night and day. And if they are white, they tend to identify as white if Spanish isn’t their first language.
Whites are becoming more and more Republican. The gap is now 20 points, compared to a gap of 17 points in 2004(a race Republicans won). If Republicans gain another 3 percentage points by 2020, they’ll have nothing to worry about.
What was 2004? A difference of 80k votes in Ohio going the other way? Let me know what Bush’s numbers were in 2004 with Latinos/Hispanics. And tell me how many of that community have voted Republican in the two elections since.
Then go to my point about the Demographics of sex and then age. The Republican Party is a Party of older white (non-Hispanic and non Latino) males.
One big issue in Ohio in 2004 was same sex marriage. Republicans got it on the ballot to bring out the Evangelical Christian Vote and that was probably the difference.
Gay issues have lost a lot of power for Republicans, And they have lost national security as their last line of defense against Dems.
What is left for Republican other than shutting down the government to hope for a recession to pin on Obama and voting against Obama Care another 37 times…
They do have gerrymandering in Pennsylvania and Ohio… I will grant you that.
But they held the House in 2012 but lost the House Representative national vote by over a million I believe… because of gerrymandering.
Bush did a lot better among Latinos.
Right now. Demographic voting patterns do not consistently hold up long term. Republicans have won the female vote in the past, they’ve won the young vote in the past, and they’ve lost the elderly vote in the past. That’s why I don’t take predictions of demographic doom seriously. There are other issues too, like what happens to the Democratic Party when it’s no longer run by rich white liberals, but instead is majority minority party? How does that affect their position on abortion, gay rights, and environmentalism? If the Democratic Party is forced to change their platform on those issues, or simply downplay them, would that not push upper class white social liberals out of the party? Rich whites support Democrats because they care about civil rights and the environment. If the Democrats no longer stand for those issues, then it’s all about who will let them keep their money. In the end, I expect that the white vote will become as monolithic as the black vote.
Turnout might have been better, but Bush did less well among whites than Romney did. There has definitely been white movement towards the Republican party.
They have harmed their brand, yes. But the nice thing about brands is that you can rebrand. Democrats used to be the party of fiscal irresponsibility until Reagan/Bush and Clinton caused a reversal of roles. If Obama is succeeded by a fiscally responsible Republican, they get that part of their brand back.
True, but not the kind you think. They have more districts because minorities are concentrated into gerrymandered districts in order to produce more minority Congressmen. This was supported on a bipartisan basis, Republicans because they knew it would give them an advantage, and Democrats because well, they had no choice if they didn’t want their coalition to splinter permanently.
Cite? Or just unskewing history?
There are numerous cites making both cases, but common sense should tell you that if you stuff all the african-Americans into racially gerrymandered districts it’s going to make Republicans outside those districts a lot harder to defeat.
Sure. So not cites then?
Here’s just one, but there are many on both sides. This one from one of the most respected political science blogs out there, probably second only to Nate Silver:
In every state districted by Republicans, Democrats won fewer seats than their historical expectation, and in six cases they underperformed by 20% or more (as a percentage of total seats up for election). So it appears that Republicans gained benefits across the board from controlling the redistricting process.
By contrast, Democrats exceeded their expected seat share only slightly in the three states where they controlled the process. As shown in Table 2, Democrats gained just a fractional seat above expectation in each such state. For instance, Illinois Democrats won a smaller majority in their delegation than Pennsylvania or Ohio Republicans won in theirs, despite winning a much larger vote share.
But partisan control of redistricting cannot completely explain each party’s performance relative to the hypothetical unbiased map. Instead, we still observe bias even where we should expect none in the redistricting process. Table 3 shows that Democrats also fell short in several states with bipartisan or court-drawn maps, winning on average 7% fewer seats than expected.
So how many seats did this underlying disadvantage cost the Democrats? If we were to imagine that these bipartisan or court maps were unbiased, and Democrats received the same benefit from their own maps that Republicans received from theirs (let’s say a 13% advantage as an average), this would have yielded 14 additional seats, likely getting the Democrats within 3 or 4 seats of the majority.
In direct support of the Chen and Rodden argument, states that are heavily urbanized (such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania) are more distorted against Democrats than more rural states (such as Minnesota and Wisconsin). Indeed, urbanization has a negative and significant effect on the difference between seats won by Democrats and expected seats, even after controlling for the party in control of redistricting.
And the man himself, Nate Silver:
And they remain in control of the House of Representatives, in part because the median Congressional district is now about five points Republican-leaning relative to the country as a whole. Why this asymmetry? It’s partly because Republicans created boundaries efficiently in redistricting and partly because the most Democratic districts in the country, like those in urban portions of New York or Chicago, are even more Democratic than the reddest districts of the country are Republican, meaning there are fewer Democratic voters remaining to distribute to swing districts.
The part I was interested in was that Dems have systematically been working to pool minorities. I don’t doubt that it has happened, but you suggested it was the flipside of the Republican’s attempts to steal districts by gerrymandering.
Adaher cited Nate Silver who mentioned Illinois and New York. Those are solid blue states. I believe I mentioned Ohio and Pennsylvania where Republican Admins have stacked the deck for Republicans as best they could as they were Highly Gerrymandered in 2010. Dennis Kucinich lost his seat because his district was eliminated and turned into a think line along Lake Erie from Cleveland to Toledo where mostly Democrats live. Cleveland and Toledo were made into one District but are over a hundred miles apart.
OK… Obama won Virginia twice… And Florida Twice…It was great, but he did not need them.
He won because of the Demographics of aging white conservative Reagan Males dying off and women and minorities largely siding with Democrats. Young males don’t care much about Reagan anymore.
Without Virginia and Florida plus Ohio and Pennsylvania, Republicans go nowhere in national presidential elections. Democrats are increasingly getting into a situation where they only have to fight significantly hard in those four states in national elections.
As the GOP’s old white males begin dying off, it get’s harder and harder for Republicans, more than anything else.
Here’s the start of an answer to the opening question. During Scandal-mania we have:
GALLUP DAILY May 15-17, 2013 – Updates daily at 1 p.m. ET; reflects one-day change
Obama Approval 51% +2
Obama Disapproval 42% -3
I’d bet that most folks not paying a hell of a lot of attention hear the word Impeachment coming from the Republicans and their propaganda outlets… they subconsciously link it to lynch mobbery and are repulsed and defend the President mentally. They have heard five years of this Republican hysteria and basically tune it out.
IF a real scandal ever shows up… they may have cried wolf too much already.
The Tea Party gains it’s strength from unfocused anger, & does not do well with difficult concepts.
And the Republicans are split by the TP-ers.
Therefore, it would be in Democratic interests to create a scandal/non-scandal, that would blow over in an instant, but leave the TP-ers hopping mad, but confused. This would split the Republicans during mid-term elections.
This IRS thing is almost perfect for that possible (unproven) goal.
As I said, demographic voting patterns do not hold up long term. Obviously the Republicans need to do better with some groups: women, young voters, Asians, and Jews are good targets.
Or, they can win more of the white vote, which also works just fine. If the GOP gains just 2 percentage points more among white voters, they’ll eke out victories in Presidential election years and easily steamroll the Democrats in off-year elections.
2014 is going to be very interesting in this regard. A wave is not forecast, but the current Democratic coalition is notorious for not showing up if Obama isn’t on the ballot.