Possibly, but right now the GOP is winning everywhere except the Presidency despite their huge problems. Imagine what would happen if the GOP got some sense?
Oh they are not. But they are a powerful modeling and predictive tool.
The nature of the demographics and geography is that the GOP is going to have a lock on the House for long time unless the Democrats figure out some sort of response. Less solidly the Senate too. And it will take either some extremely significant and unprecedented shift in GOP share of the Black and Hispanic votes and/or unprecedented ahistorical shares of the White vote (“and” most likely) to win the White House.
Neither of those changes are impossible but both are improbable and it results in a bit of a dysfunctional stalemate.
Unfortunately what would happen if the GOP got some sense is that the party would not hold together.
The only point was however that the current lay of the land is such that a Kerry or even a Dukakis would win. History informs and circumstances are not static.
They’d lose a huge chunk of their base, in that case, which I think would have a real chance of forming a new party. I think there are a significant chunk of Americans that demand nutty politics – if they don’t get it from Republicans, they will look elsewhere.
We’ll see.
The Republicans are only winning the House because of gerrymandering. More people vote for the Democrats.
- Not last time anyway. And not in two out of three of the last elections.
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Of course gerrymandering gives them a huge advantage and amplifies their House majority mightily. These are simply the facts on the ground and whining about it won’t change the facts on the ground any more than GOP whining about the changing demographics’ impact on their presidential prospects change that.
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The GOP success is not only in the House (and less so the Senate). They also control more state legislatures and they have more governorships … both by far.
So where is the new talent for the national bench to come from when they are relatively blocked out of the minor league teams?
Plus in 2012 the Democrats’ smashing victory was by 1%. And Democratic supporters whine that this “landslide” should have flipped 25 seats or more?
Huh?
The number is quoted directly above. In 2012 the margin was 56.1 percent to 43.9 percent Democratic. Where do you get this 1% bit?
And while more votes were cast for GOP candidates in two out of the last three elections in absolute numbers 2.5% have indeed been cast for the Democratic ones adding them all up.
[quote=same as last source]
… we can just add up the total number of votes cast for all Democratic candidates and Republican candidates in the 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections, using Dave Leip’s election atlas as a source. It works out to 103 million votes for Democrats to 98 million votes for Republicans: a difference of 5 million votes, or 2.5 points.
The House vote was 48.8-47.6:
I type corrected. You are right adaher. My cite apparently is using Senate numbers and discussing the Senate claims. For Senate the margin in 2012 was huge D. And for anyone who is interested here is a good source for the numbers for both all in one place.
Meanwhile this is the nature of the beast. Rural America is dominated by the GOP and increasingly so. The GOP has its conundrum of dealing with the shrinking of the White majority in terms of winning the Presidency and the Democratic Party has its as well for Congress, for governorships, and for state legislative control: how to do better in rural America while not losing ground in cities. Gerrymandering makes fixing the issue much more difficult but the root cause is not gerrymandering; it is that the GOP is simply much more popular in rural America and there is still a lot of rural America.
It’s also group motivation. Our voters come out, yours don’t. Even in Presidential elections, Democratic turnout has tended toward the lackluster. 2008 and 2012 were exceptions, thus my contention that there might not actually be a Democratic advantage in general elections.
In midterms yes. In Presidential elections, apparently not.
Look at the graph labeled “voting rates” … The trend to increased Black turnout has been linear from 1996 on, before Obama. Even Hispanic rates increased from 1996 to 2008 (with a slight drop off in 2012 but still higher than in 2004 and previous). What is notable, and frankly shocking, is that White turnout dropped off from its 2004 peak in both Obama elections. I speculate that it is the fracture within the GOP that causes that, as some of the base sits on their hands rather than vote for someone they consider not conservative enough (and the opposite would likely be true if someone acceptable to extreme elements topped the ticket).
Meanwhile more about the urban/rural divide. The first link, from Forbes, looking at the 2012 election, posits that posits that urban/rural sort of plays out within the GOP as well, but less urban than suburban, with the mainstream “establishment” candidates being popular with more suburban GOP elements and the large rural part of the party going for candidates like Santorum.
In terms of how it plays out red/blue the WSJ link puts it context: