Republican analyst Bill Greener wrote, after the 2008 election:
In 1976, 90 percent of the votes cast in the presidential election came from non-Hispanic whites. In 2008, John McCain won this vote by a 56–43 margin. Had John McCain run in 1976 instead of 2008, not only would he have won, he would have won the popular vote before a single non-white vote was cast.17
Greener drives the point home:
So, despite all the chatter about the impact of Sarah Palin, despite the unpopularity of President Bush, despite the difficulty of the same party winning a third consecutive national election, despite the charisma of Barack Obama (and the love shown to him by the mainstream media), despite the financial meltdown of September, despite any other factor anyone can cite, if John McCain had been the candidate at a time when non-Hispanic whites were the overwhelming majority of the voters, he would be president now.18
The message bears repeating. White Americans, who provide nine out of ten Republican votes every presidential year, have fallen to less than two-thirds of the U.S. population and three-fourths of the electorate. Meanwhile, the number of people of color is growing, both as a share of the population and as a share of the electorate. And in presidential elections, people of color vote Democratic—in landslides. Asians vote 60 percent Democratic, Hispanics 60–70 percent, and African Americans 90–95 percent.
Despite the Republican sweep in 2010, the “number of House districts where minorities constitute at least 30 percent of the population has roughly doubled, from one-fourth in the 1990s to one-half now.”19 This means more and more congressional districts are moving to where they will be safely Democratic, even in Republican-wave elections like 2010.
Through its support of mass immigration, its paralysis in preventing twelve to twenty million illegal aliens from entering and staying in this country, and its failure to address the “anchor-baby” issue, the Republican Party has birthed a new electorate that will send the party the way of the Whigs. After Bush’s defeat of John Kerry, Michael Moore consoled liberals:
… 88% of Bush’s support came from white voters. In 50 years, America will no longer have a white majority. Hey, 50 years isn’t such a long time! If you’re ten years old and reading this, your golden years will be truly golden and you will be well cared for in your old age.20
“The demographic that Palin attracts is in decline,” writes Frank Rich. “That demographic is white and non-urban.”21
While he relishes the decline of the Sarah Palin demographic, Rich is not wrong. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz projects that minorities will make up 34 percent of the electorate in 2020.22 Whites will comprise 66 percent. A GOP presidential candidate could then win the same 60 percent of the white vote the GOP won in 2010 and still be 10 points away from a tie in the popular vote.
INDIAN SUMMER OF THE GOP?
On November 2, 2010, the Republican Party swept to its greatest off-year triumph since before World War II, picking up 5 governorships, 6 Senate seats, 63 House seats, and 680 state legislators. As of January 2009, few predicted such a comeback, though some of us said that Obama, like Hoover, would be blamed for the tough times ahead, even though a major recession had been baked into the cake, before he arrived. Many analysts were writing the GOP’s obituary. James Carville’s 2009 book was titled 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.
The issues that caused the defection from the Democrats are not in dispute. They include the 9.5 percent unemployment for fourteen months before the election; the failure of the $787 billion stimulus to stop the hemorrhaging of jobs; fear of deficits of 10 percent of GDP and a national debt surging to a hundred percent of GDP; the public’s rejection of Obamacare; the belief that the federal government is seizing too much power; the sinking popularity of the president; Nancy Pelosi; Harry Reid; and the rise of the Tea Party—not necessarily in that order.
But the real story of the 2010 election is about who stayed home and who came out to vote. The Republican Party rolled to the most stunning off-year election victory in living memory because white America came out to vote and minorities and the young stayed home.
According to a New York Times postelection analysis, the white vote rose from 75 percent of the electorate in the McCain-Obama race of 2008 to 78 percent in 2010, and the Republican share rose from 55 percent in 2008 to 62 percent. In the South, the Republican share of the white vote rose to 73 percent, inundating Blue Dog veterans like John Spratt of South Carolina and Gene Taylor of Mississippi.23
In the Deep South, where segregation endured the longest, segregation has returned, this time to politics. “Of the nine Democratic representatives that remain from states of the Deep South, only one, John Barrow of Georgia, is white. Of the 28 Republicans, only one, the newly elected Tim Scott of South Carolina, is black.”24
Says Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a strategist to Southern Democrats, “Right now in most of Dixie it is culturally unacceptable to be a Democrat. It’s a damn shame, but that’s the way it is.”25
In “White Flight,” his analysis of the 2010 congressional election, Ron Brownstein of National Journal put the Republican share of the white vote at 60 percent and the Democratic share at 37 percent, but he notes that the alienation of white America from Obama and his policies is even more pronounced:
Exactly 75 percent of minority voters said they approved [of Obama’s performance]; only 22 percent said they disapproved. Among white voters, just 35 percent approved of the president’s performance, while 65 percent disapproved; a head-turning 49 percent of whites said they strongly disapproved. (Those whites voted Republican last fall by a ratio of 18-to-1.)26
Republicans again lost the youth vote, 18–29, by a margin of 56–42 percent, but this was a far better showing than John McCain’s, who lost them by more than two to one. Republicans won all other age groups, including seniors by 20 points. However, Democrats carried 73 percent of nonwhites, including Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans.27
Catholics and Protestants were 89 percent of the electorate and the GOP won 55 percent of the Catholics and 61 percent of the Protestants. Once again, the Republican vote was over 90 percent Christian and over 90 percent white.
The crisis of the GOP can be stated simply: due to immigration and higher birthrates among people of color, America is becoming less white and less Christian—and, therefore, inevitably, less Republican.
The Democratic base is growing, and the Republican base is dying.
THE DEMOCRATIC BASE
In the early aftermath of Obama’s victory, Brownstein saw GOP hopes of recapturing the White House fading like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And his case was rooted in recent political history:
In the five presidential elections beginning with Clinton’s victory in 1992, and ending with Obama’s in 2008, eighteen states and the District of Columbia, with 248 electoral votes, voted Democratic all five times. In not one of the eighteen states or D.C. did McCain come within 10 points of Obama. In New York, Illinois and California, McCain did not come within 20 points.28
The eighteen states include all of New England except New Hampshire; New York and New Jersey; the mid-Atlantic states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland; four major midwestern states—Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota; the three Pacific coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington; and Hawaii. Moreover, Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico have gone Democratic in four of the last five presidential contests.
Even after 2010, there are only two Republican congressmen in all of New England, both from New Hampshire.
In Massachusetts one sees a Republican party on the way to extinction. Every statewide elected official except Senator Scott Brown is a Democrat, as are all the congressmen. There are four Republicans among 40 state senators and 30 Republicans in the 160-member state assembly. Not since the 1950s has the GOP controlled either house. “Uniquely among the 50 states,” writes analyst Jon Keller, in The Bluest State, “Massachusetts over
the past few decades has been a Democrats’ Burger King: They always have it their way.”29
Consider the nation’s most populous state, with one-fifth of the electoral votes needed to win the presidency. California went for Nixon in all five elections in which he was on the national ticket, and for Reagan all four times he ran. Now, not only has California gone Democratic in five straight presidential elections, McCain’s share of the state vote fell below Goldwater’s. In 2010, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, despite well-funded campaigns, lost by 10 points or more to Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer. Brown, who won the governorship, and Boxer, who won the Senate seat, had been around for decades. While Democrats were shedding sixty-three U.S. House seats, in California they did not lose a single one and added to their strength in Sacramento, where Democrats control both houses of the legislature. California has added ten million people since 1988, but Republican registration is below what it was in 1988. The GOP does not hold one statewide office. As the L.A. Times wrote, in an autopsy of the Republican defeat, “the party’s white and coneservative voter base is giving way to the state’s non-white and nonpartisan population.”30
Adds Michael Blood, of the Associated Press, “[T]he party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is slowly sinking in the West.”31
High among the reasons the GOP has lost California is, again, immigration and the socioeconomic and ethnic character of the immigrants. Nearly 90 percent now come from the Third World and are mostly poor or working class. They rely on government for help with health care, housing, education, incomes. “If there is one group you could say that does not share the Republican small-government philosophy, it’s Latinos,” says Antonio Gonzalez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. “We are Big-Government, government-safety-net, activist-government [voters].”32
Indeed, in “Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties,” written for the Center for American Progress, Ruy Teixeira comes to a conclusion that will be impossible for the party of Reagan to accept:
These data suggest that there is really only one way for the GOP to effectively compete for minority voters, and it’s a way that Republicans have rejected so far. The party must, quite simply, become less conservative. They will have to jettison their bitter hostility to active government, spending on social services, and immigration reform and develop their own approach in these areas that minorities might find appealing.33
If a historian were to write The Decline and Fall of the House of Reagan, he could find no better place to study than Orange County, birthplace of Richard Nixon, home of John Wayne, Goldwater country, and a bastion of the John Birch Society. In this Alcázar of the old Right, Reagan thumped Carter three to one. Yet, Obama ran McCain close to a dead heat, for the Orange County of yesterday is gone. Republican registration has fallen to 43 percent. Forty-five percent of residents speak a language other than English in their homes. Writes Adam Nagourney, of the New York Times:
Whites make up only 45 percent of the population; this county is teeming with Hispanics as well as Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese families. Its percentage of foreign-born residents jumped to 30 percent in 2009 from 6 percent in 1970, and visits to some of its corners can seem like a trip to a foreign land.34
In 2010, Loretta Sanchez, who captured the Orange County seat of Bob Dornan in 1996 in a photo finish in which illegal aliens allegedly provided her margin of victory, raised the specter of Hispanics in peril of losing a seat to a rival ethnic group. Sanchez told Jorge Ramos on Univision’s Al Punto program, “The Vietnamese [are] trying to take away this seat … from us and give it to this Van Tran, who’s very anti-immigrant and very anti-Latino.”35
The old ideological politics of Orange County has given way to a new tribal politics. The county was once a microcosm of and metaphor for Middle America. But immigration has changed its character forever. The new Hispanic poor and working class depend on government and vote for government. Vietnamese, Koreans, and Chinese no longer see the Republican Party as their natural home, as the Cold War anticommunism of the GOP has become irrelevant in the new century. A loss of manufacturing and outsourcing of jobs have changed Orange County from a middle-class bastion into a place where the disparities of wealth have visibly widened.
“[T]he political texture of this county, which is larger in population than Nevada or Iowa,” writes Nagourney, “is changing, and many officials say it is only a matter of time before many Republican office-holders get swept out with the tide.”36 As Orange County goes, so goes California, and as California goes, so goes America.
Another cause of the approaching Republican crisis is the division of the nation into taxpayers and tax consumers. Since Reagan, tax cuts have dropped one-third of all wage earners off the tax rolls. When tax credits are factored in, 47 percent of U.S. workers pay no U.S. income tax. A study by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation found that, in 2009, fully 51 percent of all households owed no federal income tax. If one pays no federal income tax, yet reaps a bonanza of federal benefits, it makes sense to vote for the party of government and against a party that would cut the government. Two centuries ago, John C. Calhoun, who studied the failings and failures of democracies, precisely described our present condition:
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and … bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into taxpayers and tax-consumers.37
Calhoun’s division of the nation describes the America of today. Were the taxing power to be exploited, he warned, “for the purpose of aggrandizing and building up one portion of the community at the expense of the other.… it must give rise to two parties and to violent conflicts and struggles between them, to obtain the control of the government.”38
Calhoun was forecasting the Tea Party revolution. We are today engaged in his “conflicts and struggles,” a synonym for class warfare. For the vast majority of the 4.4 million on welfare, the 22 million on government payrolls, the 23 million receiving EITC checks, the 44 million on food stamps, the 50 million on Medicaid, the 70 million wage earners who pay no income tax, the Democratic Party is their party.
We are approaching the tipping point where there will be more tax consumers than there are taxpayers. Reports the Wall Street Journal:
Nearly half of all Americans now live in a household in which someone receives government benefits, more than at any time in history [while] the fraction of American households not paying federal income taxes has also grown—to an estimated 45% in 2010, from 39% five years ago.39
Thirteen percent of U.S. households do not even pay Social Security taxes.40 Why should scores of millions of people who pay no taxes but partake of a cornucopia of benefits vote for a party committed to cutting benefits? H. L. Mencken’s quip in the 1930s about the New Deal has become reality in the twenty-first century. America has indeed been divided “into those who work for a living and those who vote for a living.”41
The Republican lock on the presidency, crafted by Nixon and patented by Reagan, has been picked. Will 2010 prove to be the Indian summer of the Republican Party before an endless winter sets in?
THE AUDACITY OF HOPE
Consider again the numbers cited above, which raise insistent questions that the Republicans of this generation refuse to address. In 2008, black and Jewish voters each gave McCain just one percent of his vote. Why then the GOP obsession with African American voters who went 24–1 for Obama, but are outnumbered by white voters 6–1? Why does the GOP spend so much time courting Jewish voters, who are outnumbered by Catholic voters 13–1 and by Protestant voters 25–1? And Jews are more deeply dyed-in-the-wool Democrats than are Catholics or Protestants. Even Ronald Reagan never came close to carrying the Jewish vote.
You go hunting where the ducks are, said Barry Goldwater. As whites remain three-fourths of the electorate and Christians four-fifths, this is where the GOP will find victory or defeat. If Republicans can raise their 2012 nominee’s share of the Catholic vote from 45 to 52 percent—what Bush won against Kerry and the party won again in 2010—that seven-point gain would add more votes than would going from 20 percent of the Jewish vote to 100 percent.
Which of these two feats is easier for the party to accomplish?
Not only is the Catholic vote 13.5 times the Jewish vote, it is more receptive to the Republican stance on moral and social issues—for prayer in school and right-to-life on abortion, and against embryonic stem-cell research, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and affirmative action.
Consider again the black vote. By one estimate, Nixon, running in 1972 against a South Dakota liberal who lacked Hubert Humphrey’s heroic standing in black America, won 18 percent of the black vote. In 2010, McCain got 4 percent. For a half-century, 18 percent and 4 percent have been the high and low water marks for the GOP with black voters. In 2012, with Obama running, the GOP figure will likely remain close to that 4 percent.
But if the Republican candidate can raise the GOP share of the white vote from McCain’s 55 percent to the 58 percent Bush got in 2004, that would have the same impact on GOP vote totals as raising the party’s share of the African American vote from 4 percent to 21 percent.
And if the GOP can simply win again in 2012 the same 60–62 percent of the white vote the party won in 2010, a presidential victory is almost assured.
Demographer William H. Frey, of the Brookings Institution, emphasizes this crucial point:
While the significance of minority votes for Obama is clearly key, it cannot be overlooked that reduced white support for a Republican candidate allowed minorities to tip the balance in many slow-growing “purple” states.
The question I would ask is if a continuing stagnating economy could change that.42
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 35