The Next America - Is the GOP Committing Long Term Suicide?

Today's Republican Party is largely defined by two things: (1) religious extremism as exemplified by the party's anti-gay jihad, and (2) racism and anti-immigrant and anti-minority bigotry. No one within the GOP seems to be noticing that long term, these twin pillars of the party are a recipe for political suicide. The younger generations are increasingly turned off by the religious bigotry of the Christianist base of the GOP and population increases are surging in the demographic groups that the GOP and Tea Party love to demonize. The days when this will be a strategy to win national elections are thankfully waning. An article in the National Journal looks at the phenomenon and the analysis ought to be troubling to rational Republicans, admittedly a vanishing breed in a party where objective reality matters less and less. Here are some highlights:
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The next America is arriving ahead of schedule. And it could rattle assumptions about the coming presidential election. Last week’s release of national totals from the 2010 census showed that the minority share of the population increased over the past decade in every state, reaching levels higher than demographers anticipated almost everywhere, and in the nation as a whole. If President Obama and Democrats can convert that growth into new voters in 2012, they can get a critical boost in many of the most hotly contested states and also seriously compete for some highly diverse states such as Arizona and Georgia that until now have been reliably red.
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Even as the growing minority population creates new opportunities for Democrats, however, the party faces persistent challenges within the majority-white community. In November’s midterm elections, Republicans won 60 percent of white voters—the highest share of whites they have attracted in any congressional election in the history of modern polling.
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These twin dynamics suggest that in many states the key question for 2012 may be whether Republicans can increase their advantage among whites enough to overcome what’s likely to be a growing share of the overall vote cast by minorities, who still break preponderantly for Democrats. In Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, and other key states that have experienced substantial minority growth, a National Journal analysis shows that Obama can win next year with a stunningly small percentage of the white vote—if Democrats can translate the minority-population growth into commensurate increases in the electorate.
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[I]n more racially diverse states, NJ’s analysis suggests, Republicans may need to win an implausibly high percentage of whites to prevail, unless they can also reduce Obama’s advantage among minorities.
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In releasing its final 2010 national results last week, the Census Bureau sent Americans a postcard from the future. From every angle, the results showed that the nation’s transformation into a “majority-minority” nation is proceeding even faster than expected. Nationally, the overall share of the non-Hispanic white population dropped from 69.1 percent in 2000 to 63.7 in 2010, a greater decline than most analysts anticipated. In a mirror image, the minority population grew from 30.9 percent in 2000 to 36.3 percent in 2010. The change over the past decade was especially dramatic among young people. In the new census, 46.5 percent of people under 18 were minority, a dramatic jump from 39.1 percent in 2000.
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The census numbers are “telling us about our future,” Frey says. “I see this as a pivot decade. This decade what we’re seeing is, these Hispanics and Asians are really crucial to our country because they are juxtaposed against an aging white population.
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The increasingly nonwhite tilt of the youth population has profound implications for American politics into the distant horizon. The young, increasingly minority population is likely to view public investment in schools, health care, and infrastructure as critical to its economic prospects, while the predominantly white senior population might be increasingly reluctant to fund such services through taxes. The trends could portend a lasting structural conflict.
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If the minority share of the vote increases in 2012 by the same rate it has grown in presidential elections since 1992, it will rise to about 28 percent nationally. By itself, that could substantially alter the political playing field from 2010, when the minority vote share sagged to just 22 percent. It means that if Obama can maintain, or even come close to, the four-fifths share of minority votes that he won in 2008, he could win a majority of the national popular vote with even less than the 43 percent of whites he attracted last time.
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To win the presidency, Republicans must capture states that Obama won in 2008. And few GOP strategists would probably want to bet the White House solely on holding down Obama’s vote among whites to the levels the NJ analysis suggest might be required for the GOP to retake enough of those states to reassemble an Electoral College majority. So even if Obama’s support slips among whites, Republicans will face a tough uphill climb if they cannot capture more minority votes.
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Given Latinos’ growing electoral importance and the GOP’s sharp right turn on immigration issues, some senior Democrats privately say they would not be surprised if Republicans try to solve their challenge in a single stroke by picking a Hispanic vice presidential nominee in 2012.