Thankfully for the Democrats, the Republican Party is current powered by stupid and crazy. Blaming Mitt Romney for what happened earlier this month might be every bit as much fun as it looks, but it doesn't answer the question of which of their declared candidates would have done better. I'm on the record (along with the Obama White House) that Jon Huntsman would have, but this simply wasn't the year for a sane person in your Republican Party. I have a feeling that, unless the GOP gets its shit together soonest, it's going to get a lot worse in the years ahead.
For roughly forty years, the Republicans has a virtual lock on the former Confederacy, the southwest, the Plains and Mountain states and won California pretty regularly. Unless a southern moderate, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton was the Democratic nominee, the Republicans were more or less invincible. Even after the GOP lost California outright in the mid-90s, they were still capable of winning without it, although it made the races much closer. As we've seen in the last couple of presidential cycles, demographics are rapidly making that map obsolete.
The southwest is pretty much gone, with Arizona being the lone holdout and I expect that to start getting much closer in 2016 if the Democrats don't actually win it. New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are probably gone forever. So is Virginia, and I expect North Carolina to remain a swing state as it gradually turns bluer.
Even Florida doesn't look promising in the medium to long term. Republicans are never going to carry Jews, blacks and non-Cuban Latinos. But they could still build a winning electoral coalition with a majority of (non-college graduate )whites, seniors and sweeping Cuban-Americans.
The federal government has a "wet foot / dry foot" immigration policy for Cubans that doesn't apply to other Hispanics and made them more likely to support the GOP on other issues. However, Romney lost Cuban-Americans on November 6 and with them, Florida's 29 Electoral College votes.
The fact that the Sunshine State is singularly incapable of holding elections or counting votes means that we may never know what happened. Rick Scott, the Republican governor, is unimaginably unpopular and spent the entire campaign touting the miracles he's performing with the state economy, which may have damaged the presidential ticket. But it stands to reason that narrowly losing the Cuban vote cost Romney the state.
Cuban-Americans are now in their third generation. As the generation of initial refugees from the revolution die, policies toward Cuba (particularly in the ineffective embargo) become less important to the community and it seems to be voting more in lockstep with other Latinos.
Florida was already a swing state. Bill Clinton won it in 1996 and George W. Bush lost the statewide popular vote there in 2000 (although he did win the contested counties in the recount by the famous 537 votes.) John McCain and Mitt Romney both lost the state to Obama. Just as is true nationally, the GOP has only clearly won the popular vote in Florida once since 1992. This is a trend that should scare the hell out of any rational Republican. And it's not the only one.
But even losing Florida, as bad as that is, isn't the nightmare scenario. Texas is. It isn't easy, but you can build a winning Republican map without Florida (although that means winning improbable states like Pennsylvania while continuing to hold Ohio, which the GOP has lost in four of the last six elections.
That's just not true of Texas. Without the Lone Star State, it becomes mathematically impossible for a Republican to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If Texas goes, Florida and Arizona will have already been long gone. It would also be difficult to see how North Carolina and Missouri would stay red in that scenario.
Here's what I imagine this year's map would look like if that happened.
Since at least 2007, I've been warning about the coming apocalypse in Texas. Now serious journalists and political types are talking about it, too.
Nate Cohn poo-pooed the idea in this week's New Republic, saying that it'll be at least 2028 until the day of reckoning arrives. Still, that's only four cycles away.
Ryan Lizza has a fascinating article in the November 19 New Yorker which I think is far more realistic and scarier. In it, he interviews the Chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Steve Munisteri, who is in a full panic.
He was suffering from an allergy attack, and while fighting back a fit of coughing he searched through heaps of papers strewn behind his desk and handed me some charts that foretold the demise of the Republican Party, first in Texas and then nationally. One graph showed four lines falling from left to right, measuring Republican voting trends in Texas. “Look at that; it’ll show you the decline of the Republican Party over ten years,” he said. Actually, there was a significant bump up in 2010, a gift from President Obama, who helped reverse the slide by energizing the Tea Party movement, but what frightened him was the downward slope of the lines from 2000 to 2008. There were fewer and fewer white voters as a percentage of the electorate.
“If I say to you, your life depends on picking whether the following state is Democrat or Republican, what would you pick?” Munisteri asked. “The state is fifty-five per cent traditional minority. Thirty-eight per cent is Hispanic, eleven per cent is African-American, and the rest is Asian-American, and two-thirds of all births are in a traditional minority family. And if I was to tell you that, nationwide, last time, Republicans got only roughly four per cent of the African-American vote and about a third of the Hispanic vote, would you say that state is Democrat or Republican? Well, that’s Texas. We are the only majority-minority state in the union that people consider Republican.”
Immigration from Mexico only partly accounts for the change. More than a million Americans have moved to Texas in the past decade, many from traditionally Democratic states. More than three hundred and fifty thousand Californians have arrived in the past five years; since 2005, over a hundred thousand Louisianans permanently relocated to Texas, mostly in Houston, after Hurricane Katrina. The population is also skewing younger, which means more Democratic. But Munisteri is more preoccupied by the racial and ethnic changes. He turned to a chart showing Texas’s population by ethnic group over the next few decades. A red line, representing the white population, plunged from almost fifty-five per cent, in 2000, to almost twenty-five per cent, in 2040; a blue line, the Hispanic population, climbed from thirty-two per cent to almost sixty per cent during the same period. He pointed to the spot where the two lines crossed, as if it augured a potential apocalypse. “This shows when Hispanics will become the largest group in the state,” he said. “That’s somewhere in 2014. We’re almost at 2013!” He added, “You cannot have a situation with the Hispanic community that we’ve had for forty years with the African-American community, where it’s a bloc of votes that you almost write off. You can’t do that with a group of citizens that are going to compose a majority of this state by 2020, and which will be a plurality of this state in about a year and a half.”
He told me that he had a slide that he wouldn’t show me, because he didn’t want Democrats to know about his calculations. He said that it depicted the percentage of the white vote that Republicans would have to attract if they continued to do as poorly as they have among Hispanics.
“By 2040, you’d have to get over a hundred per cent of the Anglo vote,” he said.
“Over a hundred per cent is not possible,” I offered.
“That’s my point!”
Munisteri travels around the country with his slide show, urgently arguing that Republicans will wither away if they don’t adapt. In the spring, he briefed Republican members of Texas’s congressional delegation. After half an hour, a congressman rose to summarize the material.
“What you’re saying is that if the Republican Party is not doing its job attracting Hispanics to the Party, the Party in a very short time nationally and in Texas will be toast?” Munisteri replied, “That’s it, Congressman.”
Ted Cruz, the state's senator-elect and current Tea Party hero, doesn't think that any serious immigration reform effort is necessary to save the GOP with Latinos. To his mind, Hispanics will just naturally be drawn to the party's " appeals to traditional values of hard work. "
Good luck with that. That's been the extent of Republican Hispanic outreach for years now, and the Latino vote for Republicans has been cut in half in the last two cycles.
President George W. Bush was on to something, as unpalatable as that is to the alleged conservatives in the party. It doesn't matter if 100% of evangelical Christians support Republicans if they don't also get Bush's roughly 43% of the Latino vote.
The problem is that I can't see a scenario where Paul wins presidential primaries. You see, Republican primary voters - very few of whom are intellectually consistent on much of anything - like the idea of "small government" and "devolving federal powers to the states" much more than they do it's actuality.
Because primary voters are older, whiter, more religious and, yes, dumber than the general electorate, it's hard to see them embracing Senator Paul's views on social issues, the national security state and foreign policy.
Then there's the more pressing problem of entitlements. The GOP has pretty much embraced the various Ryan plans, which call for young voters to pay full benefits to not only current retirees, but those a decade away from retirement a decade upon enactment, while knowing that they're going to get drastically less themselves. And this will be happening as the first generation in American history to be financially worse than their parents starts voting in large numbers. They'll be the only ones asked to sacrifice anything at all, which isn't exactly a palatable political message.
Evangelical Christians - who can't stop reminding everybody that there is now federal role in education in the Constitution, but somehow think that "protecting family (and/or 'Judeo-Christian') values" is - and old people, who the Republican Party has thoroughly convinced are entitled to their entitlements, are over two-thirds of the Republican base in primaries. But you can't win young voters without potentially alienating the religious and the elderly.
And on the economic front, the same people who oppose ObamaCare support federal "right to work" laws, which also aren't supported by any sane reading of the Commerce Clause. It's tough for smart, principled conservatives to continue supporting the GOP, let alone intelligent independents and swing voters. "Reagan Democrats," you ask? Well, they've all been been Republicans for twenty years, so forget about them.
I think a nominee like Rand Paul could represent that party's future. It's too bad that the party's present is going to kill him before he gets a chance.
That leaves Hispanics as the last, best growth area for the party, certainly in terms of the Electoral College map.
It's almost impossible to look at the last two presidential elections and not conclude that the GOP didn't destroy itself with that demographic when they killed McCain-Kennedy in 2006-07. Because of the stupid goddamned base and the stupider conservative blogosphere, John McCain and Mitt Romney lost over half the Latino support that Bush the Younger had, and with it Virginia, Nevada, Colorado and very probably Florida.
I predict that Arizona's next. And after that, Texas.
Keep in mind, Democrats don't even have to win states like Arizona and Texas for the immediate future. They just have to make them competitive. When that happens, Republican time and resources will be divided between holding once reliable states and winning back swing states, such as Virginia and Ohio.
There are too many conservatives out there who think that McCain and Romney hit the basement of Republican support. Not true. The party can very easily drop further, possibly to the point where the idea of winning presidential elections defies basic arithmetic.
Regardless of how you feel about illegal immigration, there are certain realities attendant to it that can't be ignored.
- There are between 11 and 13 million of them there that aren't going to be deported. The last time mass deportations of that size occurred was under Nazi Germany, which not only didn't end well for the deportees, it didn't end well for Germany.
- I would imagine that a majority of those illegals have children that were born in the United States, which makes the children citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Red state conservatives like to play intellectual games with what the language of the amendment means, but they're exactly the same people who opposed the ratification of it in the first fucking place.
- It's a difficult to portray yourself as the "party of family values" while using federal police powers to tear apart as many as four million families. Furthermore, that'll play much worse with moderate swing voters than you think it will once they start seeing the reality of it on TV. Also remember, the United States wet the collective bed over Elian Gonzalez not that long ago.
- Big business, specifically in the agricultural, hospitality and service industries love illegal immigration because they keep costs down. If you think that the leadership of either party is going to long defy the interests of business in a significant way, you're kidding yourselves.
- The idea that people will "self-deport: is ludicrous when there are still jobs for them. And if illegal immigration is as serious a problem as illegal drugs, why is no one proposing extended jail time for the businessmen that knowingly hire illegals?
- Basic political wisdom suggests that you don't run on a platform of threatening to forcibly deport somebody's family, friends, neighbors and co-workers, to say nothing of their nannies, gardeners and home renovation workers, while expecting them to still vote for you.
The numbers tell the story. George W. Bush won almost half of the Hispanic vote (44%) in 2000 and 2004, after doing exactly the same thing in Texas. With John McCain, it went down to 31%, and Romney drove it down to 27%. And that's as Latinos are becoming a larger share of the vote, mostly in natural Republican states.
Losing 17% of a given vote in just eight years should set off the loudest alarm bells imaginable, if you're even halfway smart. That's even more true when that vote is concentrated in states that you have to win to remain a viable political party.
And it's not like there isn't a clear timeline of what happened and when. Bush proposed an eminently sensible bill, and Republicans not only killed it, they killed it in the loudest and most graphic way possible. Reading blogs and reading floor speeches at the time wasn't unlike watching a snuff movie.
So McCain, who actually wrote Bush's bill, subsequently lost 13% of the Latino vote. Romney, who stupidly thought that going to he right of everybody else in the lunatic primaries, unsurprisingly wound up winning even less of that vote than McCain did.
To think that adding a Spanish face to Mitt Romney's policies, like Ted Cruz's or Marco Rubio's is only going to add insult to injury. After all, Sarah Palin didn't exactly help the GOP with women, did she?
Smart Republicans are finally coming around to what I've been saying for over five years.
Unfortunately, smart Republicans aren't the problem. Since at least 1992, smart Republicans are becoming an endangered species. When they haven't been wiped out entirely in ridiculous, self-defeating primaries, they've been marginalized by self-interested talk-radio hosts and craven asshole bloggers. And those fuckheads don't know their history. They remember the victories of 1946, '94 and 2010, but shoot the defeats that came just two years later down the goddamned memory hole.
Let's stop counting on the idea that Democrats are stupid, okay? They are no longer the party that nominated George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. This is now the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Jesus, John Kerry only came within 180,000 votes of winning and you can factually argue that Al Gore actually did win the country, if not the election.
These people know messaging and demographics, which means that they know how to win elections.
The GOP is in a bad, bad place right now.
Winning single women and voters under 30 would certainly be nice, but they're so demographically spread out that it's hard to pinpoint specific states that they bring with them. Maybe Wisconsin. Besides which, proposed Republican electoral reforms make it difficult for them to vote even if they would support the GOP. But to win single women and young people, the party would have to basically abandon evangelicals and old people, without whom the nomination can't be won.
There was a time when Republicans could run to their base in the primaries and swing to the middle for the general, while tagging Democrats as monsters. Now the opposite is true. Clinton and Obama proved that rather convincingly, and Gore and Kerry came closer than they had any business doing to pulling it off.
Just look at the maps, people. Look at where previously natural Republican states are going. Are they going your way or their way?
Those maps represent something more important than demographics. More than anything else, they represent the triumph of "conservative" ideology over reality. They represent the idea that subtraction is a more powerful political tool than addition.
Those maps represent that Republicans learned exactly the wrong lessons from Ronald Reagan. The modern GOP paid too much attention to Reagan's rhetoric than they studied his presidency or the political times that he governed in. But they fail to recognize that Reagan's presidency only rarely ever reflected his rhetoric. Reagan was a pragmatist who spoke the base's language.
They also fail to recognize that the nature of both the country and the Democratic Party have radically changed in the last 32 years. It's been an awfully long time since the Democrats fought ideological civil wars and marginalized itself to it's activist base. Can you remember the last time a Democratic presidential nominee was held hostage by his base?
Republicans are now in exactly the same position that Democrats were twenty-five years ago, but they haven't learned the lessons that the Democrats did.
After Dukakis was humiliated, they disentangled themselves from FDR, LBJ and more importantly, McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis. They gambled that they could move away from their activist base and still win. After all, where else was that base going to go? Remember, Ralph Nader didn't cost Al Gore the presidency, Gore's refusal to broaden the Florida recount did.
The GOP today has effectively become what the Democrats were in the 1970s and '80s; a bitter, activist base that's pissed not only with the country, but with simple mathematics.
I hated George W. Bush as both a war president and an economic manager, but at least he was smart enough to understand the demography of politics. If nothing else, he didn't rabidly insist on being a modern George McGovern. He, like Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan before him, knew that he had to convince a certain number of soft Democrats to trust him not to be crazy.
Today's GOP doesn't. And their map is shrinking in ways that that the demographics don't suggest that they can recover from.
History's a funny thing. I'm not discounting the idea that there could be a Watergate-style event that throws the presidency to the Republicans in the next decade, but I don't see Barack Obama or his likely Democratic successor taping themselves committing felonies. I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't seem likely.
Instead of focusing on improbabilities, they should focus on holding Texas. If they lose that, they cease to exist immediately.
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