Not in 2016.
I don’t think anyone was claiming 2016.
Personally I wouldn’t overstate the structural disadvantages. The voting behaviors of different demographic groups are not immutable. Currently the GOP has not made a case that wins over a large number of Hispanic voters but that can change in one election cycle with changes in GOP positioning and a particular candidate. The biggest structural disadvantage preventing that is that the primary process forces any potential nominees into statements and positions that prevent them from making headway there.
Candidates do matter and structural advantages would not save the day if the Democrats put up a candidate as weak with the general electorate as any of the GOP hopefuls are either. It would make it closer, but they’d lose.
Did not mean to ignore this.
Romney’s level of trust was a problem mainly by virtue of the fact that he was running against someone who at that point had outrageously high scores on trustworthiness. Overall Americans do not trust the government or politicians.
It seems that Romney and Clinton operate at about the mean level (46% being the most recent generic politician number) and Obama was exceptional at that time (he has dropped since). I am a bit skeptical that any of the GOP hopefuls could similarly break that pattern.
But besides both being at the mean for trust for politicians they have few of the same strengths and weaknesses.
I think Latinos already vote close to 42% Republican in Texas, and in much of the South, whites vote 80-90% Republican. As whites become more of a minority, they tend to vote as minorities do, in blocs.
There is some truth to that, but what you are saying is that in Texas, whites will band together, but minorities will be too stupid to consistently counteract them and will dilute their blocs’ strength enough to let the whites continue to dominate the state politically. I doubt that, but I guess we’ll find out if there really is something in the water down in the Lone Star State that makes nonwhites especially compliant.
Moving back beyond Texas to the nation at large, I keep hearing this idea that Republicans aren’t so popular with Latinos just at the moment, but this can change any second. Nope. They did have their chance, a few years back, but they blew it. Bush and Rove had the right idea, but there are just too many xenophobic white dudes in the party’s base, and this is reflected in Congress. Hispanics aren’t stupid; they’re not going to quickly forget all the rhetoric that’s been aimed their way by House Republicans. The GOP brand is pretty well tainted with them, and that’s not going to change in the near or even medium term.
Besides which, if a Republican nominee really broke with the xenophobic wing in a substantive and strong rhetorical way, there would be revolt. A Republican nominee cannot woo Hispanics without completely enraging the base, and that’s a pretty intractable problem for them.
Except that you’ve heard from a lot of people on this board (myself included) who have said they would vote for Clinton despite not liking or indeed entirely trusting her.
That’s actually quite a high bar for the Republicans to clear.
Let’s fact check shall we.
There was no exit polling in Texas last Presidential cycle and any claims from either side of how the Texas Latino vote splits is mostly extrapolating from polling at state level offices … which is a different beast.
The best we’ve got are polls that show the GOP’s Presidential share of the Texas Hispanic vote has been dropping consistently from GW Bush’s peak - 35% in 2008 and 29% in 2012.
Statewide office some GOPs are excited that Cornyn got 48% of the Latino vote last time but putting it to perspective, Cornyn overall won by a 27% margin while was roughly even with Hispanics - if a Presidential candidate underperforms with that subgroup by that same degree?
Now the issue of what White voters will do is harder to parse … just like the Democrats are mistaken to take the future Hispanic vote for granted, the GOP would be mistaken to assume that the Texas and Southern extreme distaste for Obama would translate to the same levels against every other Democratic candidate, say one who is perceived as a bit more centrist and who isn’t Black.
The claim that “As whites become more of a minority, they tend to vote as minorities do, in blocs” is easily disproven by the counterfactual: California currently has become minority non-Hispanic White and yet White voters there voted about the same as they did in New York.
The other fact is that younger White Texans are less overwhelmingly Republican than older ones and Whites moving into Texas from elsewhere as well. In short extrapolating an 80 to 90% White GOP advantage in future cycles … even this one … may be foolish.
Oh, good points. And your point on California holds despite the fact that their emigres have been turning Colorado blue, and despite the fact that in the '90s, they kind of invented the modern anti-Hispanic Republican movement with Pete Wilson and Prop. 187.
To that last point a small morbid mortality aside … the Southern states are losing their older White (and consequently more reliably GOP) voters faster than elsewhere. Moreover, even though fewer Texans live as long as elsewhere, more of them have dementia - “Nationally, Texas ranks third in the number of AD [Alzheimer Disease] cases and second in the number of AD deaths.” Yes, it is morbid, but increasingly more of the over 65 White Texan group will either die off or be too disabled to vote.
That’s a nice graph, which also illustrates how well Republican voting is working out for people (with Utah as the outlier).
And Texas is not per se the worst by age adjusted rates in the South. As a block dementia seems to hit the South (and the Pacific NW and Maine) particular hard. Not sure why.
Some discussion about how their party’s budget plans gut Social Security and Medicare to pay for more tax cuts for the Job Creators would be in order. I think you can expect it, too.
But he’s a governor! That makes him credible as a candidate! And their best one since Jindal drooled on himself in public.
Christie, gotta be Christie now, right, adaher? Or maybe Kasich is your last, best hope even if he’s shown no signs of interest? Who else ya got? Not Brownback either, same reasons as Jindal. Shit, gotta be *some *governor out there …
I should have added that Kasich disqualified himself by accepting Obamacare funding for Medicaid expansion. It might be safe a year or so from now, or at least after the *King *ruling settles in, but he did it too soon.
Rick Scott learned his lesson, though - he’d been wavering on Medicaid but he’s back solidly on his traditional “screw 'em” platform. Odd that **adaher **has not been promoting the virtues of the GOP governor he’s most familiar with.
Because that article will really convince people who would otherwise vote for him. Ayup.
Seriously. I detest the guy and find that pretty weak. Unemployment rate in WI is pretty much paralleling the country and its next door neighbor IL. And any impacts of a governor’s policies, for the better or for the worse, are not going to be seen much in a first four year stretch.
Wisconsin’s problems are longstanding and it isn’t just the number of jobs … compared to the U.S. over the past 8 years average real median household income has dropped more there than for the nation as a whole.
Walker would be a great GOP nominee. There’s not one of that group that would lose Ohio more horrifically!
He was just on MTP and seemed plenty interested to me. Don’t forget, he ran before–and as the saying goes, the only cure for presidential fever is embalming fluid.
He’d probably do better than any other conceivable nominee, but he’d still lose.
Right wing nutjobs, doing what they do, might just help turn Texas blue faster than I thought.