This is the final part of my three-part series. This part has been updated from the original piece that I wrote to reflect the new reality post-2008, and I even included Arlen Specter's party-switch in my numbers. In this section, I show how Democrats have been making gains across the nation, and how either they could create a long-term super-majority, or, on the other hand, the Republicans may be able to make a comeback.
Part I
Part II
This is from an essay I wrote nearly a year ago. I wouldn't try to assert now all that I did then, but the essay is what it is. I was attempting to diagnose the disaster that Republicans had put themselves in, and predict where it could take them. Part I discusses the kind of Republican that I feel has taken over their party. Part II will discuss their takeover of the party. Part III discusses how this is a recipe for disaster if they aren't toppled by other Republican factions.
I, too, sing America
But the Southern conservative coalition may have reached its limits. America is not the country it once was, and racially-tinged politics may not be a winning strategy in the future. A new census report notes that the African American population will, according to projections, increase from 14% of Americans to 15%, the Hispanic population will double from 15% to 30%, the Asian population will increase from 5.1% to 9.2% of Americans, and the Native/Indigenous population will increase from 1.6% to 2%, while the "number of people who identify themselves as being of two or more races is projected to more than triple" (Johnson) by 2050. In total, this means that the minority population, currently at 35.7% of the whole population, will equal 56.2% of the population in 2050, a solid majority.
This is a worrying trend for Southern conservatives, as these minority voters are voting more as a bloc than they have historically, and more Democratic. African Americans have voted consistently Democratic, more so than perhaps any demographic. In 2006 they voted 89% for Democratic congressional candidates (Fletcher), and a Howard University professor stated that "90 percent of African-American voters are Democrats and their participation has increased since the 1980s" (Simkins). Hispanics, the largest and fastest growing minority bloc, have recently voted more for Republicans like George W. Bush than they had historically, but in 2006 they voted for Democrats by more than a two to one ratio (Judis), in 2008 are polling roughly two to one for Obama over McCain (Jones), and according to John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, this movement back to Democrats "partly represented a reaction to Republican anti-immigration politics, but it also reflected a shift back to the kind of support that Democrats had enjoyed among Hispanics in the late 1980s and 1990s" (Judis). While historically, most Hispanics supported Democrats, Cuban Americans have supported Republicans because of communism, but even this is changing as more Cuban Americans are supporting Democrats (Adams). Similarly, Asian American voters have traditionally not been a single bloc, with many from places where communism is a bigger issue favoring Republicans, but now Asian Americans appear to be solidly behind Democrats, with Chinese Americans (the largest bloc within the Asian American population) voting at roughly the same rate for John Kerry over George W. Bush in 2004 as Asian Americans generally, at a ratio of three to one, and Chinese American voters were registered Democratic over Republican at a ratio of better than three to one (Chen). And among Native Americans, a recent study found that nearly two-thirds of them identify as Democrats (65.9%), many of those Democrats identifying as "extremely conservative" (27.3%), so regardless of ideology, Native Americans lean Democratic heavily (Becker, 19). Looking at the whole of the population, today we could expect roughly 72 percent of the electorate would be white, 28 percent of voters would be minorities, which should translate into Democratic congressional candidates receiving 52.36 percent of the vote, to 47.63 percent for Republicans, giving Democrats a 4.73 percent margin (this relies on data from CNN’s 2004 exit polls for the preferences of white voters ("U.S. House"), and a census report for African American, white, Asian American, and Latino participation rates (Day)). In 2050, if racial turnout remains roughly the same, the white vote will be merely 53 percent, and the minority vote will be 47 percent. Current preferences among those racial groups would give Democratic congressional candidates 57.85 percent of the vote, while Republicans would only receive 42.15 percent of the vote, giving Democrats a 15.7 percent margin. In other words, if Republicans do not make significant inroads into minority populations, and the growth of these populations continues as predicted, the Republican Party is in for an electoral disaster for a generation or more.
Among Latinos, one of the key issues is immigration. While many Latinos had voted Republican in 2004, since 2006 they have returned strongly to voting roughly two to one Democratic. USA Today’s Susan Page quoted Millie Linares as explaining "’It was the family values thing’ that persuaded some of her Hispanic friends and co-workers to vote Republican in 2004", and it is often true that many minorities such as Latinos and African Americans are culturally conservative, so on cultural issues they could be moved to vote Republican. However, with the Republican Party taking a stronger stand against immigration, "11% of Hispanics now identify themselves as Republicans, down from 19% in 2005, while the proportion who call themselves Democrats has jumped to 42% from 33%. Including independents who "lean" to one party or the other, Democrats lead Republicans among Hispanics 58% to 20%" (Page). Page reported that "congressional Republicans' remarks on illegal immigrants have offended many Hispanic voters".
Judis and Teixeira also point to a number of other groups which they identified as having trended towards the Democratic Party over the course of the 1990s, women and college-educated professionals. This is often an overlapping group, as a larger and larger share of the college degrees earned are being earned by women. Some studies project that "by the year 2020, females may account for two-thirds of the college population" (Asencio). So at the same time women are becoming more educated than men, women are becoming a larger share of the professional population, and men a larger share of the working class population. With the two trends I’ve discussed so far, it may be conceivable that there could be an intensified "backlash" in the future, with white working class men alienated from a society in which women and minorities are taking more prominent roles which used to be the exclusive right of white men. This could significantly reduce the Democratic take from white male voters, and give Republicans a chance to continue on their current path while remaining competitive. However, Judis and Teixeira also mention that the white working class population is shrinking as a portion of the population, and that in some places, like California, it is as low as 38 percent of the population. In the Midwest, however, where Democrats need to stay competitive, they "need to win between 45 percent and 48 percent of the white working-class vote to carry states like Missouri, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, a little higher for Iowa, and higher still for West Virginia or Kentucky" (Judis). They note that while in 2004 Democrats only received 39% of the white working class vote, in 2006 they received 44%, and this mostly from lower income working class whites. Along with the rejuvenated coalition of minorities, women, and professionals, this gain among working class whites helped power the Democrats to gain three US House seats in Indiana, where according to Judis and Teixeira the white working class makes up 66% of the population, two seats in Iowa, which is 72% white working class, a senate seat in Montana, which is 68% white working class, and a senate seat, the governorship, and a house seat in Ohio, which is 62% white working class.
And Judis and Teixeira mentioned two other groups which are voting more and more with the Democrats, young people (the so-called Millennial generation), and Independents or unaffiliated voters. They also point out that these voters, along with the professionals, tend to be more socially liberal, but somewhat economically conservative, while the minority and white working class voters tend to be not only somewhat more socially conservative but also support more government intervention in the economy. The resulting Democratic coalition must make a balance between economic populism to attract minorities and the white working class, as well as cultural liberalism and limited government to secure the professionals and unaffiliated voters. This may be a tenuous coalition to hold, and, in fact, it may not hold. As I mentioned before, the growth of the minority population, and the growing share of college degrees received by women may create a new backlash which makes it more difficult for Democrats to attract enough white working class voters, and particularly male ones. This may leave room for Republicans to exploit, and break away from what seems a dark path into the future.
But the Democrats may indeed be able to hold onto such a coalition for an extended period. And they would merely need to take a page from historic realignments, such as the New Deal coalition. As Judis and Teixeira point out, Social Security legislation secured the New Deal coalition for decades. If the Democrats are able to pass significant legislation, they say, then they may be able to create a similar situation. The two potential accomplishments they point to are health care and labor law reform, which are coincidentally currently two of the Democrats’ highest priorities in Congress, and which would likely both secure support among minorities and working class voters who tend to favor populist economic policies. As for health care, none other than conservative writer Bill Kristol urged Republicans to oppose the Clinton health care plan because "[i]ts passage will give the Democrats a lock on the crucial middle-class vote and revive the reputation of the party," ("A Detailed"). The white working class who came out for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries this year would solidly back the Democrats on an issue which she has championed for over a decade and a half, and its passage would likely keep them with the party for years to come.
I, however, am much more interested in labor law reform. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it much easier for workers to form unions, now has enough votes in the House for passage, and if the Democrats gain a few more seats in the Senate and the Presidency, which both look likely, then they should pass it. A labor leader who I interviewed stated that passage of such a bill would make it easier to organize to the extent that his union would grow by ten percent a year, for an extended period (Allen). Such growth among unions would certainly portend well for Democrats, as in 1996, 2000, and 2004 union members voted for Democrats by eleven percent more than the general voting population ("GOP Makes Gains"). And the affect of its passage would likely be felt far greater in states with Right to Work laws, which includes the old Confederacy, Oklahoma, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada, and other states which have suffered a dramatic drop in union density, like Indiana, Montana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Nevada, and Idaho, some of which are swing states, and others solid Republican states, but a greater union density would likely push them into being more Democratic. Many of these, as well, are states with among the highest percentages of white working class voters. This would also likely commit the Democrats to at least somewhat populist economic policies, which would hold a significant part of the coalition together. While making a Democratic coalition more populist, however, a high union density may even push Republicans to be friendlier to labor, tolerant of the welfare state, and populist economically. This, in return, may make Republicans more competitive among lower-income voters.
The emerging Republican minority is already visible. After the 2008 election, the Democratic Party is unquestionably the majority party in three out of four regions in the country. In the West, Midwest, and Northeast, Democrats will hold most of the power. In the South, Republicans still tend to dominate.
In the Northeast, there are three Republican senators today in that region, to fifteen Democrats (or senators caucusing with them), and there are six Democratic governors, but only three Republican ones. In New England, a large component of that region, Republicans have only three senators, and in 2008 lost their only congressman. New Hampshire has been a major battleground, where Democrats claimed both of its US House seats in 2006, took the state legislature for the first time in over a century, and this year picked up one of its US Senate seats. New York and Pennsylvania, two big Northeastern states, appear to be trending more and more strongly Democratic. Pennsylvania in particular has seen a tremendous surge of Democratic voter registrations (Moore). New York's few remaining congressional Republicans are endangered. This now is the most solid region for Democrats, and has been for many years.
Across the Midwest, there are currently sixteen Democratic senators to only eight Republicans (if one includes Al Franken, which one should), and seven Democratic governors, to five Republicans. While Republicans have been able to perform decently in the 2006 gubernatorial race in Minnesota and did fairly well in the senate race last year, conservative Republicans are close to being unelectable statewide. In other parts of the Midwest, Democrats have picked up three US House seats in Indiana in 2006, and Barack Obama won Indiana, which hadn’t gone Democratic since 1964. In 2006 Democrats swept all statewide offices in Ohio. Iowa, despite being so heavily white working class, elected a more Democratic congressional delegation in 2006. The Dakotas have three Democratic senators, and two Democratic representatives, while the Republicans have two governors and one senator there. If there is anywhere in the Midwest where Republicans can hope to make gains, however, it is in the Dakotas, where by far most of the state legislatures are controlled by Republicans, meaning that they have a much broader pool of candidates for higher offices. Missouri gained a Democratic governor last fall, and just gained Claire McCaskill as a senator in 2006. Kansas had a popular Democratic governor until she was nominated to the cabinet, and a resurging Democratic Party built on moderate Republican party-switchers. This all despite the fact that these Midwestern states have an enormous population of working class whites, who tend to lean Republican. These people should respond strongly to populist campaigns as they have traditionally, and in terms of policy, the Employee Free Choice Act and national health care will likely play a major role in how this region goes. It will likely hit states like Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas hard because they are Right to Work states, and the act will seriously undermine those laws, making it easier for workers to unionize (Allen). It should also reverse the dramatic drop in union-density that Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and other states have experienced (Allen). The EFCA, however, will not have an immediate affect. It will take many years, perhaps decades, for it to have a strong affect in politics. As a result, it is likely that much of the Midwest, which has recently been a swing region, will become more hostile to Republicans, as it has during the last few years. There is one pocket, however, within the Midwest which is strongly Republican, and that includes the Texas panhandle, along with the western portions of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. This pocket, though, is very small in population.
The West has been trending Democratic since perhaps the late 1980s. The region will lean Democratic strongly after the upcoming election. There are sixteen Democratic senators to only ten Republican senators in the West. Democrats enjoy a slim majority among governors, at seven to six. California is solidly blue, aside from their liberal Republican governor, but there are few other prominent Republicans in the state. Oregon is trending more and more Democratic, as Democrats picked up five seats in the state house last fall, four out of five congressional districts are mostly Democratic in voter registration now, Portland's two suburban counties both flipped from mostly Republican to mostly Democratic, and in total, Democrats went from being the plurality party by roughly 70,000 party members in the state, to now leading Republicans by around 210,000 registered voters. Democrats were also successful in flushing out the last Republican senator on the West Coast of the lower 48, Gordon Smith. Even Alaska elected a Democrat to the senate in 2008. The West Coast is looking more troublesome for Republicans than it had in the past.
New Mexico has a very popular Democratic governor, just elected another Democratic senator to join its current one, and elected Democrats to all three of its congressional seats, whereas only one had been held by a Democrat recently. Arizona had a very popular Democratic governor until she was nominated to the cabinet, and now there are more Democrats in the US House representing Arizona than Republicans. Both of their Republican senators are in danger of being pushed out in the next couple cycles, as Senator Kyl faced a late and unexpectedly stiff challenge in 2006, and McCain has polled poorly for re-election ("New Poll"), as the region and state become much more comfortable to Democrats. Nevada is similar in this regard, as party registration has gone from deadlocked to a significant Democratic plurality ("Democrats add"). Democrats made gains there in 2008, including Barack Obama’s towering victory in the state.
The Mountain West is a Republican stronghold still, but that stronghold is shrinking. Democrats have in Montana both senators and the governor, the governor of Wyoming, and won one of Idaho’s two congressional districts in 2008. However, in Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah, Democrats have a lot of trouble getting anywhere. In Colorado, they are similarly positioned as in Montana. They elected a new Democratic senator this year there. Much of the region is still heavily Republican, but that is mainly centered on the areas with a high number of Mormons, principally Utah, with significant numbers in Idaho and Wyoming, and to a much lesser extent in Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona.
The West is diverse. In many of these states there are large and growing Hispanic populations, and these will likely strongly lean Democratic. If passed, the Employee Free Choice Act will likely have strong affects in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho, which are Right to Work states, and should reverse the dramatic drop in union densities in Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and other states. The West should be on a path to voting more Democratic. But that leaves only one region to Republicans, and it is a region in which they already seem dominant.
The South should be safe for Republicans, but it is not. Believe it or not, in the census-defined South, there are nine Democratic governors, and only seven Republican governors, though there are just thirteen Democratic senators and nineteen Republicans. This is after Democrats won seats in North Carolina and Virginia last fall, and closely contested races in Georgia and Kentucky. Across the South and its border states, though, in 2006, a Gallup poll of thirty thousand Americans noted that at least ten southern states had more registered Democrats than Republicans, with double-digit Democratic advantages in Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, and Kentucky, and in each of these states Democrats held an outright majority (over fifty percent) of the registered voter population (Moulitsas). Surely, many of these are conservative Democrats, and many of them often vote Republican, judging by election results, but it should be noted that in many southern and border states like North Carolina, West Virginia and Arkansas, Democrats control the state government, and hold most US House seats. All three of the above have Democratic governors, and Arkansas and West Virginia both have two Democratic senators, while North Carolina has seen a drastic rise in Democratic and unaffiliated registration this year, with meager growth in Republican registration (Moore). As Bob Moser recently wrote in The Nation, "[a] poll of Southern voters on election day 2000 found 35 percent identifying as Democrats--just 26 percent as Republicans... The parity between the parties, unprecedented in the South's history, was neatly symbolized by the total tally of state legislative seats in the old Confederate states after the 2004 elections: 891 Democrats, 891 Republicans," (2). And early 2008, Democrats claimed two congressional districts in special elections in Mississippi and Louisiana, districts which have heavy Republican registration advantages, by running socially conservative but economically populist candidates.
Whither Solid South?
The South is the only region where Republicans largely held their own in 2006. But with the reverse of the Great Migrations of blacks out of the South (Frey), the fact that Latino populations are growing faster in the South than anywhere else (Kocchar), and the growth of what Judis and Teixeira call ideopolises, or centers of knowledge and cosmopolitan culture, in the South, such as the oft-cited Research Triangle in North Carolina, may make even much of the South difficult to hold for Southern Conservatives in the coming years. It’s possible that in Mississippi and Alabama, growing minority populations could become a majority, whereas it is already the case in Texas, and growing professional populations in urban centers could provide enough in areas with lower minority populations to make Southern states competitive for Democrats, rather than a sure thing for Republicans. And all of the states of the old Confederacy have Right to Work laws, which EFCA would eviscerate, likely leading to significant increases in union density. The South could become a Democratic region as well, or at least a tough battleground for Republicans to hold.
It is difficult to imagine, however, a situation in which demographic preferences or political coalitions remain static over an extended period. There will certainly be change, but how long will it take for the emerging Democratic majority to unravel? How soon will the Republican Party be able to save itself from marginalization?
What if the conservative coalition witnessed resurgence in libertarianism? What if the Republican Party turned socially moderate, and focused on fiscal conservatism and markets? This may be a strategy that regains them some ground in the West, and perhaps the North. What if Republicans in the South take populist stands on both cultural and economic issues, like Mike Huckabee, supporting the welfare state, government intervention in the economy, and legislation that intrudes into our private behavior? This would be a return to the politics of George Wallace, the New Deal segregationist Democrat. Could such a party stick together, despite its diversity? What if some or all of the Republicans were able to divorce their positions from race?
A libertarian movement would likely bring back many of the professionals and well educated people whom have recently been preferring Democrats, and especially in the land of the pioneering spirit and free enterprise, the West. But right now, the libertarian take on economics is not likely to get a lot of play, in my opinion. A recent Pew survey found "[s]upport for government programs to help disadvantaged Americans, as well as sympathy for the plight of the poor, have surged since 1994 and returned to levels last seen in 1990 prior to welfare reform, with gains occurring among virtually every major social, political and demographic group" (Morin), and with such a change in public opinion, I do not think that right now is the optimal time for a libertarian resurgence. There just may not be enough of a population of people who subscribe to those ideas right now. However, if Democrats do take power for the long term, there is the danger for them in going excessively far in expansion of the government, which could lead to a libertarian backlash. At the same time, though, Democrats in recent years have been moving more towards classical liberal positions, with the neoliberalism of Bill Clinton’s administration, or the recent support for civil liberties and limited government expressed by Democrats such as Senator John Tester. When Tester was challenged by his opponent, who accused him of wanting to weaken the USA PATRIOT Act, a law which libertarians and liberals alike despise, Tester responded "Let me be clear. I don't want to weaken the PATRIOT Act. I want to get rid of it" (Frank). Could this movement among Democrats be as a result of the recent and general rightward trend in politics, and the Democrats will just swing back left, or could this mean that the Democratic Party is actually in the long term moving in the direction of neoliberalism and libertarianism?
Certainly, though, the Republicans could retake some lost ground by running libertarians in some areas. More traditional conservatives, perhaps somewhat pragmatic and moderate compared to the Southern conservatives, could rise in much of the nation, and I find this likely, as Republicans try to distance themselves from the excesses of the Southern conservative Bush administration and Delay-run congress. Libertarians or traditional conservatives may be able to make inroads into middle and upper-middle class minorities if they can break free of racial issues, but Republicans already perform better among upper-income minority voters.
I find most compelling the vision of a populist Republican Party in the future, and it is intriguing to consider a Democratic Party moving further towards libertarianism and a Republican Party towards populist cultural and economic policies. I think that Mike Huckabee was on to something. If he or someone else were able to decouple race from the other stands of the Republican Party, then they may be able to integrate their economically populist, culturally conservative group to include many Latinos and African Americans who tend to have those positions, and vote Democratic because of economic issues, despite their cultural preferences. I believe that if the Republican Party is going to survive as a national party over the next few decades, it will be by becoming more racially inclusive, and I think a racially integrated populist movement is probably the most likely way for the Republican Party to regain dominance.
The Republican Party has been taken over by Southern conservatives. In their drive for power, they have surpassed all others within the party, and now left behind, the others are marginalized, or have gone. Southern conservatives stand nearly alone. They can stumble into a situation in which they lose in landslides in every election, or they can change. Southern conservatives, however, have proven very resistant to change. If the Republican Party will be saved, I think it will be saved from the South, rather than by it.
Part I
Part II