Is what we've been seeing for six years or more not simply a sign of Republican preeminence in many state capitols and in Congress? No. Hard numbers suggest it may be the beginning of a death rattle.
It’s no secret that Republicans have a demographic problem when it comes to national elections. But what many people don’t realize is that the GOP’s issues will be worse in 2020 than in 2016 — unless things change dramatically. ...ChrisCillizza,WaPo
The population of the US is very, very different from the time when the GOP took a nasty right turn and was identified as a diminishing group of sour white men. Decades have past since the extremist John Birch Society developed even as McCarthyism was fading in the late '50's. Reagan allies gave us the Federalist Society and that was several decades go. The far right's resentments are now part of the America's history, back when the non-white faces of America were still un-people.
As we know all too well, there are still Americans who are convinced, commited racist who believe "real" Americans are white. They call themselves "conservatives." They identify with libertarians and Republicans and they are the most familiar faces of the shrinking Republican party. They are embarrassingly insistent in their racism. But they are few.
Consider this: In 2012, roughly nine out of every 10 people who voted for Mitt Romney were white — even as the white vote continued its steady decline as a percentage of the overall electorate. Romney lost African American voters by 87 points and Hispanics by 44 points.
In an essay in Commentary magazine on the demographic problem his party faces, former Bush administration official Pete Wehner writes:
“It’s an undeniable empirical truth that the GOP coalition is shrinking, and it’s shrinking in the aftermath of two fairly decisive defeats, with the latter coming against a president whose policies were judged by many Americans to have been failures. Which means the Republican task isn’t simply to nominate a candidate who can fire up the base; it is to find principled conservative leaders who can win over voters who are not now voting for the GOP at the presidential level.” ...Cillizza,WaPo
The America of the early decades of the new millenium are not uniformly white. We are more brown than white, blends and hybrids speaking a variety of languages and proud of the array of national flags in our families' histories.
We are all over the place -- and most important, many of us live in states that were once deeply conservative and very race-conscious.
... It’s not just the raw numbers that should concern Republicans. It’s where the younger-than-20 minority populations live that could prove politically problematic.
The concentration of young minorities in the Southwest and the South means that states such as Texas, Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina — which have all been conservative redoubts at the presidential level for decades — could be in real jeopardy for the GOP in the medium and long term. ...Cillizza,WaPo
In other words, the GOP is, at present, dominated by contentious, retrograde conservatives whose antisocial attitudes and antisocial politics have no place in contemporary America.
The math isn’t complicated. Winning 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and 6 percent of the African American vote — as Romney did in 2012 — makes it hard to win a majority of the overall vote when those groups represent 10 percent and 13 percent of the electorate, respectively. If Hispanics increase to 20 percent of the electorate by 2024 or 2028, and the Republican presidential nominee’s performance is roughly equivalent to Romney’s 2012 showing, it will be impossible — or close to impossible — for that GOP nominee to win a national majority. ..Cillizza,WaPo
