The Republican Party would love to win more minority voters, but if that can’t be done, they can win with white voters.
And there’s no “might” about white voters remaining a big majority. Unless we specifically choose to make whites a minority. Demographics are not an accident, at least not if you’re a sovereign country.
Besides, I’m not convinced of any of the trends, either demographic, or voting behavior. 2008 and 2012 saw extraordinary racial polarization in voting. Since 2016 will almost certainly feature a white Democrat, I’ll be interested to see how that changes minority turnout levels and voting behavior. I’ll be interested in seeing if that changes white voting behavior as well. Hillary Clinton does well among white working class voters.
Why would that not be possible? Or is the thing that is “not possible” (read: inconvenient) the abandonment of its racial politics? The Democrats did that once, why can’t the Republicans?
What is it that you’re proposing? Some set of laws encouraging or requiring racist whites (but not them dam’ librul ones) to reproduce profusely, while limiting the number of brown babies? Or are you proposing only the reinstatement of immigration quotas by country and race, like we had a century ago? Please be specific or else you’re getting yourself into a hole there’s no climbing out of.
The Democrats have abandoned racial politics? Now that’s funny!
We don’t have immigration quotas by race anymore, nor should we. But we do have immigration quotas in total, and no sovereign nation would forego such a policy. Whites becoming an actual minority in our lifetimes won’t happen from mere reproduction, it would require the purposeful importing of at least 100 million new immigrants over the next 30 years. Never gonna happen.
One of the reasons reproduction alone can’t eliminate a majority is intermarriage. While the offspring of a white and black marriage is generally regarded as black, all other white/minority marriages tend to produce a person that is regarded as white. See: George Zimmerman, Mark Paul Gosselaar(Zack Morris), or even Wentworth Miller from Prison Break, who is actually part African-American, but always gets cast as a white guy. In cultures where intermarriage is not frowned upon, minorities tend to be quickly absorbed into the majority population. Assuming rates of interracial marriage increase over the coming decades, we’ll have a lot more dark-haired white people around than is currently projected and a lot fewer brown people.
You seem to be delusionally hopeful about the kind of people who will vote for republicans. Hint: not the interracial ones, even if they come out vanilla flavored.
I don’t think you’re getting that regardless of the issues, many white voters just aren’t comfortable voting for a party that is almost entirely white. Diversity is not just good for vote-counting, it’s a popular idea by itself. The diverse party, other issues being equal, is more attractive superficially to most voters (of any race) than a non-diverse party. Being “all-white” (or nearly all-white) is a real stigma that hurts the Republicans.
I’ll guess there are many white voters (especially older ones) who admire GOP’s lack of diversity. This is why GOP strategy is focused not just on white voters, but more specifically on white racist voters.
Perhaps, but my point is that every year this will be more and more of a losing strategy- for every racist vote you get, you’ll lost more than one non-racist vote because you’re not diverse.
I actually agree with you here. It would be possible for the Republicans to easily win with only white voters if they could somehow persuade whites to vote in a large (90+%) bloc.
The problem is that this would require at least half the people who self identify as Democratic to switch to backing Republicans.
See, despite being the non-white party, 61% of the people who identify as Democratic also identify as white. Democrats aren’t “anti-white,” they are white themselves. Whites are simply the majority of both parties. It gets glossed over a lot but the majority of people who voted for Obama were white, same as the majority that backed Romney. Claiming that the Republicans could win if the majority of Democrats supported them is certainly true, but it’s not going to happen. 87% of the Republican party identifies as white. They’ve basically maxed out the number of white votes they can possibly get. Pretending that they’re somehow going to sweep up more white voters ignores that the fact that there really aren’t any left to be had other than among first time voters who skew heavily Democratic.
It genuinely seems amazing to me that one of the major political parties extant today could be transformed from the party of limited government into one that wishes to control the populace through fear and misinformation. In a mere fifty years, the GOP has transformed itself into a party that supports expanded police powers, ubiquitous surveillance of the civilian population, a genuine and pervasive enmity towards women and minorities and (most troubling) an insidious push by a few powerful members of the leadership to supplant the secular nature of our laws with one based upon biblical principles. This didn’t happen merely because the GOP embraced such heinous ideas, but also because the opposition party failed to oppose these very measures. This is the only valid defense that the GOP has, “the other guys are just as bad.”
I’d say a pox on both your houses, but I am to blame, as are we all in my opinion, for the gradual disintegration of our hard-fought liberties. We could have spoken up in 2001 when the ill-named PATRIOT ACT was rammed through Congress, but we were apparently all shell-shocked into submission. 12 years later, the phantom threat to our republic still lurks in the shadows, and we all accept the consequences of our actions. A state of perpetual war is a very tried and true method of controlling the populace. It is no wonder that those who are in power are loathe to relinquish any of their ability to dictate their desires to the governed.
And we ask ourselves if the GOP will learn from their recent electoral defeats. Why should they? The men and women who are in charge will continue to hold the reins whether they are elected officials or paid consultants. The fact that one of their chosen will lose against Ms. Clinton in 2016 means little to them as long they remain able to further their agendas.
Baby Boomer here, voted for the first time in 1980, registered Democrat. For John Anderson, Reagan in 84 (Young, in love, in college, got better.) Haven’t voted for a Republican for President since. Didn’t vote for a Democrat until 04, in an effort to defeat W (certainly didn’t like Kerry, but 3rd party vote wouldn’t have kept Bush out of office. Unfortunately, neither did the one I cast.) Voted for Obama twice, got pretty much what I expected, centrist who made me proud in some things, disappointed me in others. Don’t count on all of us being GOP voters.
You are right, the GOP could win over young voters by governing well. Too bad they seem to believe more in not governing at all. Which just pisses off all age groups.
You can’t get the district lines any screwier than they are now. Ohio has a very nice system of districts. OH-9 stretches from Toledo to Cleveland along Lake Erie. Including a stretch along a bridge that crosses a large bay and has no population on it. OH-4 runs along just south of it, in the rural sections and also stretches down to Columbus, then hooks under and almost surrounds part of OH-5, to reach almost to the Indiana state line. Just looking at it, taking Kenton and Upper Sandusky out of OH-5 exchanging them for Lima would have made things a lot more even, but then the numbers of Dems in OH-5 would have been more even and Bob Latta might have actually had to campaign or something to win in a general election.
These are from the Republican controlled statehouse, and despite the fact that Ohio is a purple state, going close to 50-50 in voting for Dems and Republicans in statewide contests, our reps in the House are divided 12 Rs, 4 Ds. The same sort of thing goes on in other states, like Texas. So trying to say that the Republicans didn’t hold the House because of gerrymandering is not entirely accurate. At all.
This might be correct, if the military justice system actually worked with regard to sexual assaults and rapes.
I make less then you, and I would be willing to have my taxes go back up to the Clinton rates. The entire country would be a lot better off, especially if it helped the idiots whining about the deficit. They didn’t care about it when they voted to create it under Bush, but now it is a horrrrrible, horrrrible thing.
When the first round of Bush tax cuts hit, and they passed No Child Left Behind but didn’t fund it, the local city had to institute a city income tax to pay for school programs. An idiot I worked with then complained about that. “W cut taxes, the city should be able to do it too!” When I pointed out that Bush did it by forcing the states and localities pay for more stuff, he didn’t care. It should just magically be paid for somehow.
It would cost them around $14,000. Which is a lot of money, to me and you. More than a quarter of my income, 8% of theirs. Not that bad for someone making $175,000.
As for the question in the OP, someone in this thread answered it. The leaders of the GOP know why they lost. They would even like to fix the problem. But they can’t, because the state and local party has been captured by the Tea Party and other right wingers. If they appeal to the center, which they need for national elections, they will get primaried and very possible lose their seat (Dick Lugar).
They can try and go right to please that segment, then they need to figure out how to get back to the center for the general election. Senators and Representatives can manage, especially in red states, but for the Presidency, I don’t think they will figure it out for a few elections.
And I think it will get harder and harder for the local politicians to pull it off, because they keep having to go farther out to the extremes to keep the wingnuts happy. Eventually they will just piss off too many independents and moderates.
I don’t think you can predict who it will be good for. I say it would be good for the GOP because the melting pot has historically produced GOP voters, whereas Democrats benefit from distinct ethnic communities. And this was true when those distinct ethnic communities were white.
That’s true for now. What happens when whites are no longer the majority in the Democratic Party? What happens when the yuppie issues that currently dominate the Democratic Party are supplanted by the more populist economic concerns of minority voters? What happens when the Democratic Party transforms from a party of mostly non- or infrequent church goers into a party that’s majority devout Catholic?
We’re seeing white flight from the Democratic Party even now, because white working class voters feel ignored by the Democrats. Democrats are all gung ho about importing 30 million new workers to compete with them.
Rick Santorum sees his dream of running for the presidency. But as a Democrat.
I’m not accusing you of anything, mostly because I think you were paraphrasing something you picked up from somewhere else, but those were some loaded, race-baiting questions. What happens when whites are no longer the majority in the Democratic party? Probably the same thing that happens to blacks in the Democratic party now. So becoming a two term president, I guess. Tragic? Seriously though, who cares? Are other racial identities unable to comprehend the wishes of white voters but whites can understand the needs of blacks, asians, latinos and every other group out there? In a sane world the GOP would get it’s shit together and we could go back to disagreeing over policy instead of skin color. Then all those conservative Catholic latinos could be Republican. Oprah can support the GOP for the best tax break.
And there is no “white flight” from the Democratic Party. I tried to show that. It’s over. There are no more people who self identify as white who can be persuaded to join the GOP as it currently stands. The Republican hope that half the Democratic party is suddenly going to start voting with them because otherwise the minorities will take over is crazy. If they were scared of that they wouldn’t have voted for Obama in the last election.
It’s not race-baiting. Right now, the Democratic Party is controlled by whites and white liberal interests are placed at the top of the list: the environment, gay rights, etc. Once Latinos are in charge, the priorities will change to Latino issues and white issues will be relegated to the backburner.
You’ve already lost middle class whites, all that’s left is poor whites and those aren’t going to hang around much longer if Democrats keep up what they are doing. And I can’t imagine wealthy liberal whites giving much of a damn one way or the other once their primary purpose becomes giving people money and having their issues ignored.
Now granted, it might not turn out that way. Maybe minority voters in the future will be more liberal outside of the economic sphere than they are now. Maybe they’ll be less religious. Maybe whites’ economic power will enable them to still steer the ship even while being a minority within the party.
But if we assume that minority voters will behave as minority voters do now, which is actually the assumption Democrats are going with when hoping for this awesome new future of Democratic dominance, then they’ve forgotten something very important: they’ve been all focused on how the REpublican Party will have to change, without considering for a moment how the Democratic Party will change. They just blithely assume that the white party brokers will still be in charge and setting the agenda.
Well, admittedly, some liberals are more into the economic issues, but most middle class and upper middle class whites I know consider gay marriage and organic foods and global warming to be the preeminent issues of our time.
And there’s still the religiosity issue. A party run by devout Catholics will simply not be the same as a party run by secular liberals.
Global warming is important, much more so than the others, which are really cultural (and the cultural front is one where the left can be sure to win in the long run anyway, without making any particular effort, just by generational attrition). But, otherwise, the populist economic issues are what really matter, and we’re never gonna get any action on those from the Pubs. The only economic-populist item on their agenda is border control, if that even counts.