Perhaps the main thing that will save Obama's sorry ass and that of many Congressional Democrats is the Republican Party's apparent death wish as it continues to take positions that will alienate the demographically changing population of the USA. The GOP is obsessed with courting a shrinking element of the population - i.e., older white voters who hate gays, blacks, Hispanics and pretty much everyone else - with the possible result that no matter how incompetent the Democrats are, they may nonetheless cling to power. Politics used to be about fielding candidates that had a chance of winning in the general election, yet the GOP base is more concerned about "litmus test" purity than whether the nominee is sane and electable. Harry Reid is no doubt thanking the GOP for the loon that has been nominated to oppose him come November. For LGBT Americans the down side is that Democrats figure that they can jerk us around and throw us under the bus and still get elected. Here are highlights from a piece from FiveThirtyEight thal looks at a paper by the Center for American Politics' Ruy Teixeira (While perhaps a little too optimistic about the GOP's demise, the paper hits on what seem to be valid points):*
"The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP," he writes, adding that "the Republican Party as currently constituted is in need of serious and substantial changes in approach."
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Specifically, he recommends that the GOP do some or all of the following (taken verbatim from the report):
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Move to the center on social issues. The culture wars may have worked for a while, but shifting demographics make them a loser for the party today and going forward. A more moderate approach would help with Millennials, where the party must close a yawning gap, and with white college graduates, who still lean Republican but just barely. The party also needs to make a breakthrough with Hispanics, and that won’t happen unless it shifts its image toward social tolerance, especially on immigration.
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Pay attention to whites with some college education and to young white working-class voters in general. The GOP’s hold on the white working class is not secure, and if that slips, the party doesn’t have much to build on to form a successful new coalition. That probably also means offering these voters something more than culture war nostrums and antitax jeremiads.
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Another demographic target should be white college graduates, especially those with a four-year degree only. The party has to stop the bleeding in America’s large metropolitan areas, especially in dynamic, growing suburbs. Keeping and extending GOP support among this demographic is key to taking back the suburbs. White college graduates increasingly see the party as too extreme and out of touch.
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What's interesting to me about most of Teixeira's suggested changes is that the GOP is either not doing them, or doing something close to the opposite. If anything, the opposite is happening. Indeed, the single biggest storyline of the past year for conservatives and the Republican Party is the rise of the tea party protest movement.
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There seems to be less Republican focus on hot-button issues like evolution/creationism or global warming--which presumably turn off many college-educated whites by dint of their anti-empirical and anti-intellectual content--but that is a matter of salience and decibel level rather than a transformation in the party's issue positions or platforms.
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The nature of the GOP's demographic-electoral problem is three-fold. First, the challenge of trying to evolve and adapt is itself limited by demographics because the GOP's older and whiter residual white minority coalition is simply less amenable to the sort of changes it would take to modernize the party. Second, so many of the figures within the party who might be able to lead a center-right revival have been beaten in recent cycles, with the old Ford/Dole/Rockefeller wing decimated by the 2006 and 2008 cycles. (Relatedly, it doesn't help when people like Frum are cast out from their intellectual circles.) Finally, it is simply not in the nature of conservatism to foment change or be out in front of demographic and social changes: Conservatism works best as a reaction to--not necessarily reactionary, but a reaction nonetheless--to oncoming, rapid changes.
