I’ve been arguing for years that the demographics of the country favor the Democrats. They have large majorities of every growing population slice, while Republicans base their majorities on the aged, the less-educated, the rural counties, and the whitest of whitey whites, all of which are shrinking relatively to the population as a whole.
Gerrymandering has helped states carve district that allow hugely disproportional numbers of wins compared to percent of voters going Republican. That’s not the only reason for Republican success. They have worked hard and spent lots of money to get people elected from the lowest offices on up. They’re also fortunate that the base they reply on votes in greater percentages - doubly so in non-presidential elections - than the Democratic base demographics.
This can’t last. The party seems to be at its peak and must inevitably decline. And now I find that Tom Melcher, the recently resigned and now free to speak the truth Texas GOP chair, sees the future in the same way.
Who the next chair will be might determine whether the state party can become more inclusive. Given the way the party has acted in its era of dominance, I’d say change is impossible.
Since then, Cruz hasn’t notably been trying to court the Tejano vote. Nor have our state’s Governor or Lt Governor. I’m not going to hold my breath–but all Texas Democrats need to get serious about voting. If anything, the national & state level Republicans have been doing their best to demonstrate why…
Hopefully. Yet if the Democrats move further to the right to gain acceptability – as with the Blair Project with the British Labour party, and endless calls now to avoid Corbyn’s 1970s unelectability — the outcome may not be that different…
So they are getting close to a <50% white electorate. The general population in texas is already majority-minority, but the electorate is whiter than the general public (In the US as a whole, I think white people are about 60% of the country but they were 71% of voters).
If there is a democratic wave in 2020, and whites are down to 55% of the electorate by then, then maybe Texas becomes a purple state. But it won’t become blue until 2028 or so as a guess.
One thing to keep in mind is that Latinos aren’t as monolithically Democrat as blacks are. A LOT of middle income or higher Latinos are often more conservative than you might think. And Asians tend to be fairly well split as well.
I don’t know that the state is inevitably going to become a Democrat stronghold anytime soon, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll become a battleground state in the near future.
Latinos have historically been about 2:1 D:R, sometimes going as high as 3:1 D:R depending on how far to the right the GOP has moved. So they aren’t as monolithic as blacks but they are a pretty strong democratic group.
Asians are roughly the same, going 2-3 democrat votes for every 1 republican vote in general.
Of course if the GOP makes outreaches, those numbers will shrink.
Sure, Latinos could be Republican voters. Except the Republican party can’t stop itself from pissing all over them. Electing Trump certainly didn’t help with the Latino outreach, did it?
Trump did better with Latinos than Romney did. That is not to say that another Republican with a more moderate message wouldn’t do better, but Trump wasn’t exactly a disaster, either.
There was a study posted on one of the threads after the Election which pointed out that the “demographic dividend” is unlikely to pan out since many second and third generation Latinostend to consider themselves White.
And as Nate Silver pointed out, if White working class starts voting a group, then there is no combination of minority voters which can overcome that.
Of course they consider themselves white. Those who gather demographic data have two questions. (1) Hispanic or Non-Hispanic and (2) Race. The first is either/or–you must pick one. The second allows multiple responses.
Being asked to supply proof of citizenship by a jumped-up cop playing ICE agent will probably not win over many White Tejanos to the Republican side.
What we’re going to see – what we’re already seeing – is an aggressive and massive voter suppression effort that will be coordinated at the federal and state levels. The Republicans know that demography is not on their side, but right now, the instruments of power are, and they’re going to use those with blunt force.
I have become increasingly skeptical of demographic political arguments and think that they provide a false solace to Democrats that the tide will turn their way without them having to actually work on their political strategy.
The basic problem with these arguments is that they assume voting patterns will remain the same and only the demographics will change. But over the 15-20 year horizons over which demographics change significantly it’s likely that voting patterns will also change and perhaps in the opposite direction. Perhaps as the Democrats become more dependent on non-white voters, working-class whites will shift more and more to the Republicans. Or perhaps the Democrats shift too far left on economic issues alienating college-educated voters. Or perhaps there are increasing tensions between black and Hispanic voters. Lots of things can happen.
The Emerging Democratic Majority argument has been around for a while now and there is not a lot of evidence it’s happening. The book was written in 2002 and while it seemed to be vindicated in 2006-2008, the Democrats are back to square one now and in fact in a worse position than they were in 2000.
Or to take a specific example let’s look at Florida in Presidential elections. In 2000 the Democrats lost it by the tiniest whisker. In 2012 they won it narrowly and in 2016 they lost it narrowly. Over 16 years, there is not even a hint of a major structural shift.
continuing population shift, not just in demographics, but from rural to urban
diminishing of the fossil fuel industry - their money and their influence is what, IMHO, drives the GOP in TX
continuing isolation and scape goat-ing of latinos (and other minorities)
time - lets face it, a large number of racist, xenophobic, completely fox-news brainwashed old whites need to die - lets hope their children (as they usually do) moderate as each generation passes
I’d be curious to see how that relates to economic status among Latinos. In my experience with upper-middle class/college educated Latinos, they don’t diverge significantly from the white mainstream (into which they’re pretty well integrated, FWIW). Basically what AK84 says upthread. I don’t know if they “consider themselves white”, but it sure seems that they’re effectively considered that by white people when they’re above a certain income/social status.
