How do you suppose the Republican Party plans to survive, or even thrive, as demographics change?
The average age of Republican voters is said to be well north of 65. When they die off, become demented, or simply become less committed in the next decades, there will not be anything close to the amount of replacement voters needed to sustain the Party.
The outlook for the Republicans is even gloomier since today’s first-time and ‘young’ voters are now even less inclined to support them than they might have been historically. I say this not just because of Republication policy on global warming, or the lack of opportunity for meaningful advancement as today’s youth enter the real world. It’s also that young and soon-to-be voters are being nurtured in an environment of extreme polarity. Convictions formed late in adolescence and in early adulthood stick and persist for a long time, maybe forever. The current degree of polarity will only make them stickier. And even if 30 or 40 percent of today’s youth are somehow ‘genetically’ ingrained to stick with the ‘right’, their numbers will be dwarfed by the large majority who will peel off to the left.
With the above in mind, does the Republican Party expect to survive? I’m sure they would answer yes. My follow-up question would then be to ask just how they propose to entice new voters in the next decades. Intolerance and xenophobia will only get you so far.
It’s a trope, but America is becoming browner (a double-whammying characteristic given its tight link to younger average age) and it is also becoming more ‘liberal’ (at least on an overall population basis). What drawing card could the Republicans possibly use to prevent themselves from becoming a marginalized political force and having no hope of forming a (federal) government? (State governments may be a different matter.)
There isn’t a perfect correlation between “Trump voter” and “Republican,” but surely the average/median/mean/mode Republican voter age lies somewhere in the 40s or 50s age range.
Is this post from 2013?
All this was already said after Romney lost, and Trump ended up winning 4 years later by doubling down on white identity politics. And guess what- Trump actually got a larger share of the Hispanic vote than Romney did.
There are more whites without college degrees in this country than all PoC COMBINED. The coming demographic “wave” is being overblown, and identity politics is a losing game for Democrats. Also, utimately, Hispanics will assimilate into the melting pot and slowly begin to behave like white voters, just as the Italians, Irish and Slavs did before them. We are already seeing this with 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, and especially in states like Florida.
Of course, our joke of a governing system, which was created by pre-Industrual age slave-owners who shat in champer pots, favors disenfranchisement through the Senate and the Electoral College. This won’t ever change because it is Infallible & Perfect, Glory Be To The Founders. Democrats are huddled in large cities and will continue to be screwed over by the system. Of course, Republicans will continue to make voting difficult at the state and local level, and Democrats will do nothing about it except whine. They’ve got whining skilled to 100, don’t worry about that.
And consider that we are the verge of entering a climate change dystopia, where we will be stuck on a steaming, overpopulated planet with dwindling resources that will be bombarded by constant catastrophic weather events, creating wonderful things like refugee crises, food & water shortages, and further instabilities in already volatile nations. This is exactly the kind of situation wherein a nationist, rightwing populist party would prosper.
Young voters now perhaps favor the Democratic party, but if the party continues to be represented by bleached skeletons who refuse to listen to them or do much of anything at all, this will not last. Most are already disengaged from or disillusioned by the mess of a country the Boomers are leaving us. It’s clear to most rational people that our political system is objectively broken and is completely incapable of addressing the various crises that we are left to face.
Thinking about it, you must be right. Maybe I read ‘Republican supporters’? I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up the figure but damned if I can find it again.
Structurally their strength in rural states and districts amplified their power.
They don’t have to win other demographics. Just keep the overwhelming support they have in the ones they currently do so well in and do less poorly in other ones. A post-Trump GOP can make inroads into groups that the current GOP does poorly in within a few cycles.
Also, voters naturally get tired of one party after that party’s been in place for 8 or 12 years. It doesn’t matter how well Team Red or Team Blue do during those years when they hold the White House, once eight years have gone by, voters itch for change.
I think the Republicans do have reason to be apprehensive about changing demographics. It is true that Trump defied expectations. But there were a lot of factors behind this, and no reason they would all apply to subsequent pairs of candidates. Trump is unique in many ways.
There has already been a schism of sorts between classical conservatives, mega donors and Trump supporters, which can include dissatisfied workers, people without a college education, those who favour a specific issue, loyal Republicans and those who don’t like the alternatives. These different factions may have different feelings about things, but most of them would rather be in power.
Accordingly, the Republicans will modify their messages if this is needed to gain broader support. They will seek candidates with specific appeal in a given district. They may even moderate and modify certain views.
I agree with the basic premise of the thread since, all else being equal, the current batch of politicians are looking at at least a .2% swing blueward each election cycle which they will have to deal with.
I imagine in the near term, voter suppression efforts will ramp up.
In the medium and long term, there may be a shift in the makeup of the party’s candidates to reflect the changing values of the electorate. Or the current politicians will try to change the focus of their views to take this into account, but voters will see through this if it is too blatant.
We’re already seeing some of the latter playing out (with of course a lot of voter suppression efforts as well.) A President who at least paid lip service to equal rights for homosexuals and marijuana legalization would be unthinkable 20 years ago, but the public views have shifted.
That is a given. GOPs know they can’t win free and fair elections above local level. Entrenched power gives them tools to gerrymander, disenfranchise, and suppress, their only means to retain unjust power. How long will US citizens submit to rule by losers?
Putin’s Puppy POTUS, Moscow Mitch, and the GOP Senate are stacking federal courts with unqualified sycophants bound to maintain GOP control, no matter what, for generations. Can a rotten judiciary save kakistocracy?
Another stage of suppression: more violence against candidates, dissidents, bystanders, people of color or perceived difference, anyone without a MAGA hat, et al. RNC and local GOP officials will deny incitement despite coded language heard, understood, and acted upon. “Kill A Liberal” won’t just be on truck mudflaps.
Eisenhower said, “If a political party does not… advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.” Ike nailed-em. When will they go the way of Whigs?
It’s not like this is unprecedented. There were several states which were effectively one-party states for decades. And this happened within living memory. The Republicans just need to revive those old practices.
How can the GOP wing of the crippled Republicrats survive demographics? Answer:
Narrowing the franchise, by suppression or outright bans of target groups, guarantees a lack of “consent of the governed”… unless there’s a Chinese Politburo deal: You get material wealth as long as you shut up. Even there, retaining power requires state violence. I doubt we’ll see a Starship Troopers world where only veterans may vote or hold office and everyone else is happy because prosperity and no repression.
US “single-party” states with limited franchise have been white-run feudalisms. Deep South FTW! California’s current Dem majority stems from previously dominant GOPs making themselves quite unwelcome over the last couple of decades, not from nasty libs disenfranchising poor innocent conservatives. Californians can vote fairly easily. GOP power will vanish with universal voting.
How can the GOP survive? Possibly by reinvention. Possibly by dictatorship. Possibly the nation or political structure will not survive, suiting US enemies just fine. With any political move, consider: Who benefits?
California is an excellent example. When the GOP was in power they attacked Hispanics and immigrants, just as the national party party is doing today. When the demographics changed, they got wiped out pretty much. Now all they have is the Central Valley. The new redistricting method is a fair one, they don’t have to cheat to win, unlike Republicans.
Exactly: in order to be the party that caters to small-c conservatives, they’d need to cater to the views that young Gen-Xers* and beyond will be stuck in as they age, which will be different views from the ones the current oldsters are stuck in. So they’ll need a combination of fresh blood and shifting policy views if they don’t want to be in the political wilderness, or else resort to voter suppression.
I was listening to a video of Noam Chomsky recently and he was saying something to the effect of how both parties bow to their corporate overlords and modern Dems are basically the soft Republicans of yesteryear and modern Republicans have now skewed so far right as to be off the scale.
He makes the point about how Republicans have built a sort of strange coalition of single issue voters in these last few years, namely things like people who want guns, those who are anti-immigration, and how at some point, Republicans after Reagan and maybe Bush senior, had previously if not completely pro choice had at least tolerated abortion as a personal issue, at some point they largely flipped on the issue, going the other way on abortion and picking up the Evangelical vote along the way.
So to keep power I guess one must keep a coalition of single issue voters that are distracted by those issues, meanwhile meaningful legislation that would change people’s lives for the better like workers’ rights, healthcare, pollution, and global warming is never passed and keeps the corporate system happy.
They are no longer even concerned with projecting the image of ruling with the consent of the governed. Nixon and Reagan era Republicans used phrases like Silent Majority and Moral Majority to suggest (even if it wasn’t true) that they spoke for the majority of the governed. Today, people on this very board, will say that it’s 100% OK, a feature not a bug, that the electoral college overrules the popular vote, and the Senate majority represents way less than half the country, that democracy is unfair, and if we fixed it, we’d all be living under the tyranny of California.
The Republicans aren’t even shy about saying that their plan is to Gerrymander and Disenfranchise their way to victory.