The GOP: The "White Man’s Party"

A second Washington Post column looks at a phenomenon I have noted myself and commented upon: the fact that the Republican Party is becoming the party of white Christian conservatives while everyone else id decidedly unwelcome in the GOP despite lip service to the contrary. Some of the coded messages given by some of the GOP presidential candidates such as Newt Gingrich have not even been all that subtle in stirring the racism pot. The result is that the GOP seems headed further and further toward extremism while it panders to the bigotries of this shrinking core of the party. Gays, blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians - the list is endless - are truly not welcome unless they are willing to act like blacks trying to belong to the KKK. Here are some column highlights:

In 1868, Horatio Seymour ran for president as the nominee of the Democratic Party, or the “white man’s party,” as it was called. The Democratic heartland in those days was the “reconstructed” South. White men there loathed the Republican Party and its standard-bearer, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant — who relied on the votes of newly enfranchised blacks. Women, of course, could not vote.

Today, such overt racial appeals are as passe as the “solid” Democratic South. But racial polarization, alas, is not. As election analyst Sean Trende argues in a provocative new book, “The Lost Majority,” one plausible scenario for the American future is the entrenchment of “racialized” parties . . . .

We’re already well on the way. According to Trende, the Democratic share of the white vote for president has lagged its share of the total vote by a steadily increasing margin since 1980; the white electorate “leaned” against the Democrats by 10 points in 2008, even though Barack Obama did better with whites than John Kerry had four years earlier. A similar pattern holds for the congressional vote.

Data from other sources confirm these tendencies. More than three-fourths of African American voters identify with Democrats; Hispanics favor Democrats 47 percent to 24 percent, according to a 2011 Gallup poll.

According to Pew, barely a third of white men consider themselves Democrats. If the GOP is becoming the new “white man’s party,” the Democrats are reliant on women and people of color.

The causes are, by now, familiar: the white backlash against civil rights and the resulting long march of Southern whites from the Democratic Party to the GOP; the defection of white ethnic “Reagan Democrats” in the North; the GOP embrace of conservative positions on abortion and other social issues, which alienated many women;

The trend toward a whiter, maler GOP and a browner, more female Democratic Party took root over decades in which broad structural changes — constitutional, economic and social — incentivized politicians to appeal to voters, openly and otherwise, in such a way as to produce today’s racializing parties. Those habits won’t change easily.

Still, it’s hard to see much future for a GOP that has minimal support from blacks and Latinos, especially when the latter are such a fast-growing part of the population. Though the growth of the Latino population appears to favor Democrats, the party can hardly afford to write off white men altogether.

An optimistic view is that party racialization is approaching the point of diminishing returns — and that the losing party in 2012 will conclude that it must broaden its base, or die.