I think the point was that Texas has changing demographics. You ought to hear die-hard Texans like my wife and her aunt bemoan the liberals in Austin. You’d think San Francisco was waging an intentional culture war with Texas to hear them tell it.
If you transplant enough urban liberals into the high-tech, big-city parts of Texas, you could very well change its color without either party having to change their message. It’s not going to happen next election, but it wouldn’t entirely surprise me to see the Texas of 20 years from now voting like California.
If you are politically astute enough to think of a way to sell this pivot to the people to whom these “fringe” issues are sometimes a matter of life and death, you could probably fix all the Democrats’ problems.
And they DO have privilege, to a possibly small but real extent, because they don’t have to worry about being laid off and living in a trailer park AND simultaneously worry about being disproportionately shot by the police, or have the threat of eviction from the entire country hanging over them, or having their place of worship firebombed by yahoos in pickup trucks.
What will eventually happen is that urbanization will turn blue states bluer, purple states blue, and red states purple. Some states like Kansas, the Dakotas, and Alaska might be immune to this trend and stay red in perpetuity, but once sufficiently urbanized, blue states will stay blue. A narrow victory over an immensely unpopular Democratic nominee is the Republicans’ last gasp.
But due to the concentration of Democratic voters, you can easily end up with situations where the Democrats consistently get more votes and yet never actually get control. Look at the US Representative elections in Virginia this year, where the Democrats got just over 50% of the vote and won 4 out of 11 seats - and that’s after the court-ordered redistricting.
Plus, waiting for demographics is probably not going to work. Texas has allegedly been about to turn purple “pretty soon” for a long time now, but what actually keeps happening is that the Republicans keep getting an increasing share of white voters. Sure there’s got to be some limit to that trend, but Texas hasn’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1976 or had any Democrat in any statewide office since 1994. You really can’t discount how discouraging those decades of failure are for rank and file voters, plus how much it depresses the ranks of potential candidates.
I think the only place that’s really happening is Virginia, and that’s not so much urbanization as a lot of very well off people who actually vote being dependent on government jobs for their six figure incomes.
It’s hard to predict anything right now though, because the parties are going through changes, which means the coalitions will shuffle. What if the Democratic Party becomes a “soak the rich” party again? Do the well off urban professional whites stay on board? How does Obama’s last middle finger to Israel change the Jewish vote, which has been threatening to go GOP for awhile but nver quite does? How does increasing Asian immigration and decreasing Lation immigration change things? Asians have become pretty good Democrats but have very different priorities from the liberal base, as in no to affirmative action, strong support for the police, and don’t tax us too much or interfere with small business with overregulation. Personally, I think the only thing keeping Asians Democratic is Republican xenophobia. If Republicans get over that pathology a lot of possibilities open up.
More of this silly “demographics is destiny” argument that I thought this last election so thoroughly disproved. Utah is a heavily-urbanized state, and still bright red.
It should be obvious now that there was no “blue wall”. Nor is there a red wall. The red/blue walls were a creation by some political hacks to create another publicity gimmick that might catch on with the public. Unfortunately, many people believed these gimmicks and catch phrases. Too bad for them.
Yes, the Republicans were slowly taking back control of state legislatures, both U.S. houses, and then the Presidency. In spite of their constantly losing seats, the Hillary worshippers continually told themselves, and convinced themselves, that they were winning, or that they could not lose.
Now the DNC/MSNBC/Hillary worshipper-types are embarrassed that they could have been fooled so completely. You could see the shock on their collective faces as the election results rolled in. Sad really. They would like to tell you that they are too smart to fall for the type of campaign horseshit that they fell for, but the election results speak for themselves.
I don’t understand why people keep implying that the GOP is going to blow up???
Both political parties are very good at adapting to whatever the current whims of society might be. Just as the GOP absorbed the Tea Party’s best ideas, the DNC should (might?) regroup and present stronger, more electable, candidates in the future. It’s really up to the party leaders, and its big buck donators, to create a slate of more electable candidates.
Neither the DNC, or GOP, are going to go away in our life time. I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty healthy.
I agree. I predict the current Democratic coalition will continue to fray at the seams if not fracture in coming years. As baby boomers retire, and Govt spending in many areas becomes squeezed, it will prove more difficult to hold the Dem coalition together. It’s above my pay grade to predict how Democratic leaders adapt to this situation but adapt they must.
An article in the paper the other day said TX, FL, NC and OR would gain seats if trends continued as they are. Don’t totally trust that, though. It also said that 10 years ago, Oregon was on track to gain a seat, but then the recession hit and decreased in-migration, so Oregon didn’t get the seat.
“Helpful” for whom? Centrist moderates may or may not vote for a political party. They will almost never, however, give money to that party, nor will they volunteer for that party, and are less likely to serve in unpaid low-level offices, do delegate work, etc. Those things require a strong sense of commitment, loyalty, and passion, and those typically come from strong ideological views.
Shagnasty wrote: " I think it would be very helpful if both parties just ignored or repudiated their most vocal, fringe wings."
The problem with this is that the party that does it first puts itself at a tremendous electoral disadvantage for probably two or perhaps more cycles until news of their newfound reasonableness sinks in.
It probably wouldn’t even help the Democrats at all as the people who constitute the living needle that gesture would be intended to move will have its’ sincerity assaulted by the “information” outlets those folks consume.
It would turn from "cutting off your nose to improve your face to, well, just cutting off your nose.
California might be Kentucky’s opposite. Through most of the 20th century, the state politically leaned Republican, but I don’t think it has ever been perceived as being particularly conservative, socially or culturally. Both cases illustrate something we don’t often see today–Democrats willing to entertain conservative ideas, and Republicans likewise willing to consider liberal or progressive ideas.
Oh come on, it disproved lots of stuff. Sam Wang ate a bug because he was proven wrong, by an election. “The blue wall”. All those idiots that said Trump would never win.
Yup. And today I don’t believe in global warming, because it’s cold. It’s that good old American common sense. As opposed to some other kind of sense I guess.
