The Obama Realignment - Will the GOP Get the Message?

It will take days to sift through all of the analysis and data from yesterday's election.  But one thing is clear: Obama won re-election because he once again put together a coalition of those too often treated derisively and as something less than full citizens by today's Republican Party: women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and younger voters.  I have saying for a long time that the GOP is engaged in a slow form of political suicide and last night was another step toward a much deserved death.  There simply are no longer enough angry white, male, homophobic, evangelical Christian voters to win at the national level.  And the demographics should clearly tell this to anyone not sticking their head in the sand and/or drinking the GOP Kool-Aid like some of my former GOP cohorts from years ago. And the demographic trend is spreading to the state level even here in Virginia.  A column in the New York Times looks at Obama's victory and the GOP's self-inflicted loss.  Here are excerpts:

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.

The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.

The Republican Party, left for dead after 2008, revived itself, and at many points across the 2012 campaign season Obama’s majority coalition looked vulnerable. Its policy victories seemed to teeter on the edge.  And the Obama coalition was vulnerable. 

But the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.

Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year. In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney .  .  .  .   .  he was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012.

You could see this belief at work in the confidence with which many conservatives insisted that the Obama presidency was not only embattled but self-evidently disastrous, in the way so many voices on the right sought to raise the ideological stakes at every opportunity, in the widespread conviction that the starker conservatives made the choice between left and right, the more votes they would win.

But even less starry-eyed conservatives — like, well, myself — were willing to embrace models of the electorate that overstated the Republican base of support and downplayed the Democrats’ mounting demographic advantage.  Those models were wrong about 2012, and they aren’t likely to be right about 2016 or 2020.

Tuesday’s result ratifies much of the leftward shift in public policy that President Obama achieved during his first term. It paves the way for the White House to raise at least some of the tax revenue required to pay for a more activist government and it means that the Republicans let a golden chance to claim a governing coalition of their own slip away.

[T]here will come a day when a Republican presidential candidate will succeed where Mitt Romney just failed.  But getting there requires that conservatives face reality: The age of Reagan is officially over, and the Obama majority is the only majority we have.