If Texas goes blue, the Democrats will have 400 sure electoral votes, because before Texas goes blue, a lot of other states go blue.
Demographics alone do not predict election results. If it did, Vermont would be one of the reddest states in the union and Alabama would be one of the bluest. Culture>demographics.
OK then, how’s the *culture *trend looking for ya?
Just fine, if we’re talking winning votes. Republicans are starting to concede on a lot of these cultural issues, which enables them to concentrate on guns and taxes and national security. We’ll know a lot by how willing Democrats are to engage Republicans on those issues. If they try to make this election about abortion again, it won’t go so well.
Well, which is it?
If?
Still waiting for that list of states. It can be a short list, just the flips, if it helps you.
Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado.
If Democratic turnout falls because Obama isn’t on the ballot, the Republicans will pick up a lot of states they shouldn’t.
Colorado’s not going red. In 2014, the Republican’s blowout year, Colorado;s House delegation remained the same (no change either way), the Democratic Governor was reelected, and they retained the State House. The R’s did win the one Senate seat, but the Dem was a terrible candidate who acted like he didn’t even want to be in the race.
All the population centers vote blue, except Colorado Springs, and they vote like Iowa Republicans. Rick Santorum won the 2012 caucuses here by a landslide. The rest of the state is pretty much empty space. Unless the R candidate is one of the crazy Christians like Cruz or Huckabee or Jindal, which it won’t, the Republicans in Colorado will stay home or vote for some whackjob third party candidate.
Republicans have lost Colorado, and it is becoming more and more Hispanic.
Virginia and Colorado are both getting bluer with every passing year. They are a lost cause for the GOP, IMO.
I actually live in a state that is one of the few to be steadily moving in the other direction: Missouri. It’s kind of annoying to be here, but I take comfort in the thought that the influx of conservatives to areas like Branson is diluting their strength elsewhere.
That may be the hope of the “reform conservative” crowd, but I don’t see that flying with the grass roots. Republicans who fail to be xenophobic enough about Hispanics, and moralistic enough about social issues, will get punished by primary voters. On the other hand, if the party does move enough away from those issues on the presidential level, there is a real threat of evangelicals either staying home or voting for a third-party candidate like Roy Moore.
Problem is, in order for Clinton to win, she has to win despite not being trusted, and despite Americans not viewing Clinton as someone who cares about people like them or shares their values:
http://pollingreport.com/hrc.htm
It’s a pretty low bar for a Republican to clear, simply being regarded as more honest, more genuine, and more in touch with the concerns of average Americans. Of course no one has ever gotten rich counting on Republicans to do anything right, but their job is a lot easier this time around than in 2012, just as their job in 2012 was easier than in 2008. If demographics mattered as much as you think, then Obama should have done better, not worse, in 2012.
Hmm. Looking at your link … most recent data is pretty much even splits - 46/46 on honest; 47/48 understands the concerns; 48/47 shares your concerns. And 49/46 favorable to unfavorable (which again, is at this point a proxy for her vs the wartless “generic GOP candidate”).
More telling from your link is the question: Someone you would be proud to have as president?
“All” gives that question yes 57 to 42 but more importantly the negatives are concentrated in the Republican group, 18 to 82, who she’d not get in any case. The “Independents”, a group that usually leans GOP, answers yes 58 to 41.
Yes there are many a month of negative campaigning to go …
Even on a thing like honesty is not a good place to be. Here’s how Obama and Romney compared when Gallup asked about these attributes in 2012:
The reasons for the Clinton/Romney comparisons is that she has most of the same strengths and weaknesses.
Except for the total disdain for “the 47 percent”, and the agenda that calls for gutting Social Security and Medicare and repealing Obamacare, and a few other things that even you can list, that is. 
Perhaps the poll missed the Ohio Jeep workers who Romney tried to frighten by telling them that Chrysler was moving all Jeep production to China, and kept repeating the lie even when called out by Chrysler.
That’s okay if you were a “severely conservative governor”, who implemented Romneycare nonetheless.
Clearly, disappointed Republicans are going to continue to blame their individual nominees for losing while remaining willfully blind to the structural disadvantage they face. Democrats have often been guilty of this as well; I believe the political scientists who argue that only when the structural factors make the race a coin flip do the personalities matter much.
More headwinds for the GOP:
Will their nominee “take away my health insurance”?
Poll numbers for Obama and the economy continue to improve:
…pigs will fly
…hell will freeze over
beggars would ride
on the twelfth of never
Anything I left out?
Not today. Not tomorrow. But yes.
So when Texas is less than one-third white, let’s say 70% of those whites continue to vote Republican. That requires 42% of nonwhites to vote Republican, to get to 51% overall. Good luck with that.
Interesting. It reminded me of something I’ve always found puzzling though:
It is treated in the media as a self-evident proposition, an immutable fact, that this statement (which I watched Romney make, live, in a debate) was evidence of “far right” positioning on his part. But I never got why this would be. To me, it just came across as the usual Romney fence straddling. Doesn’t the far right want *actual *deportation, as in minus the “self-”? And in fact, hasn’t *Obama *already deported a record number of people, involuntarily?