The Nation’s Future Demographics Might NOT Hurt the Conservative Cause

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Newspaper editor to U.S. Senator who just informed him that the legend of the senator killing town bully Liberty Valance was factually wrong.
The movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

In 2002, the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” was published. Authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira concluded that the Democratic Party would become more and more dominant over the years because of demographic changes in the nation. To put it simply, they forecast (correctly) that the percentage of whites in the nation would decline significantly and the percentage of minorities in the nation would increase significantly and forecast (incorrectly) that these demographic changes would propel Democrats to political dominance.

Thirteen years later, the Republican Party has its largest majority in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1930 (246-188), a 54-46 majority in the U.S. Senate, control of a GOP record 68 state legislatures to 30 for the Democrats, and 31 governors’ offices to 18 for the Democrats. The Republicans have done so well politically that Judis even recanted his 2002 analysis in 2015.

Despite the facts, though, the liberal media has continued to print the legend. In article after article, it’s reported that the Democrats are going to dominate future national elections, including the presidential election, as well as elections in states with growing minority populations, including ruby red Texas, because of the changing face of America.

Today, I’d like to show you how that is just hogwash.

The argument about GOP success since Barack Obama was elected president has been one lousy excuse after another. “Low voter turnout,” the Democrats complain. “Voter suppression and gerrymandering,” they whine. But the argument that Democrats stick with the most is that any day now the changing face of America will make Republicans a dead political party nationally and in the blue and swing states — although there are tens of millions more whites than minorities and whites will outnumber minorities for decades.

Currently, 62.1 percent of the American population of nearly 319 million people is white but not Latino, 17.4 percent is Latino, 13.2 percent is African-American, and 5.4 percent is Asian, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.

The “conservative cause will soon be dead” meme is based on two facts and an assumption:

* The percentage of whites in the electorate declined from 87 to 72 percent from 1992 to 2012 and will continue to decline. A chart on this website shows the trends.

* The percentage of Latinos rose from 2 to 10 percent during that time and will continue to rise.

* The percentage of whites supporting Democrats and Republicans will remain roughly the same in the future.

While the Democrats have been chortling that the growing Latino share of the electorate spells doom for conservatives and roughly 99 percent of political analysts, including establishment Republicans, pinpoint the Latino vote as the key to the future of American politics, the percentage of whites who votes for Republicans has gone up — WAY up in some states.

Why in the world should everyone target Latinos when the number of whites voting is more than SEVEN times higher than the number of Latinos? It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to figure out that Republicans can negate a 7 percent rise in the percentage of Latinos who vote for Democrats by increasing their share of the white vote by about ONE percent. And, in recent years, Republicans have done WAY better than that.

In the 2008 presidential election, Republican John McCain won the white vote 55 to 43 percent according to this Roper Center report. Four years later, Mitt Romney won the white vote 59 to 39 percent — “a rate no presidential candidate has matched since 1988,” according to the “Race and the 2012 Election” report. In 2012, Latinos backed Obama by 71 to 27 percent, but whites in seven states, including Texas, backed Romney by at least that margin, according to the “2012 Election” report.

The report shows Romney won the white vote by wide margins in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Michigan, and Colorado. Given the trends, why can’t the GOP’s 2016 presidential nominee win the white vote by enough to win these states?

The 2014 Senate elections showed the percentage of whites supporting the GOP is rising. This Newsmax article reports Democratic senators in Virginia, Louisiana, and North Carolina received 19, 15, and six percent less of the white vote than they did in 2008 and young whites supported the GOP in all three races by landslide percentages.

RealClearPolitics has devised a simulation of the 2016 presidential election. It’s on this website. It shows what percentages of whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians voted for Obama and Romney in 2012 and what the voter turnout of each of these demographic groups was. It then allows YOU the reader to hit arrows that change the percentages and turnouts. If the changes are large enough, the popular vote percentages and Electoral College vote numbers change.

Romney won 59 percent of the white vote in 2012, but the interactive chart shows he won 60.2 percent of the two-party vote because votes for third parties are excluded from the simulation. According to the simulation, a Republican will win the presidency even if he only receives 19 percent of the Latino vote if he can win 64 percent of the two-party vote. It also shows that Obama would have won the 2012 election if he received ZERO Latino votes (and Romney also got no Latino votes).

The projection that the GOP candidate will win the presidency with 64 percent of the two-party vote is predicated on voter turnout percentages remaining the same as 2012. In fact, though, the percentage of the Latino electorate who voted plunged from 48 percent in 2012 to 27 percent in 2014, “the lowest rate ever recorded for Latinos,” according to this report in The New York Times. The report details how young people are more likely not to vote than older people and points out that the percentage of young people in the Latino population is higher than the percentage of young people in other demographic groups.

In addition, new voter identification laws in several states could reduce the Latino turnout. The bottom line is that the Republican nominee for the presidency could win the election with significantly less than 64 percent of the two-party vote. An article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “Republicans don’t need a lot of Hispanic voters” that is based on the RealClearPolitics simulation summarized the importance of the Latino and white vote in the 2016 presidential election.

“Hispanic voters are not as crucial to Republicans as conventional wisdom has it,” the article says. “To win, Romney would have had to do a bit better than even Obama did (71 percent) among Hispanics. It would make a real difference, on the other hand, if Republicans increased their share of white voters by only a few percentage points.”

So the GOP might want to add this famous Mark Twain quote as a tag line…

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”

 

 

 

Article Sources;

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/08/26/demographics_and_the_2016_election_scenarios.html

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/11/07/latino-voters-in-the-2012-election/

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/17/its-official-gop-will-have-biggest-house-majority-since-before-the-new-deal/

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/11/11/the_other_gop_wave_state_legislatures__124626.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/13/pemanent-democratic-major_n_186257.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/upshot/yes-latinos-are-rising-but-so-are-latino-nonvoters.html?_r=0\

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Politics-Voices/2016/0122/Sleeping-giants-Is-it-time-to-put-a-hardworking-cliche-to-rest

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-19/hispanic-voting-power-swells-to-record-for-2016-pew-study-says

http://www.sens-public.org/spip.php?article723&lang=fr

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-republicans-dont-need-hispanic-voters-20151229-story.html

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/white-voters-favored-GOP/2014/11/07/id/605892/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_States#Breakdown_by_state.2Fterritory

http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Democratic-Majority-John-Judis/dp/0743254783

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-democratic-majority-not-demographic-inevitability-part-two-politics-immigration-refo/

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-permanent-democratic-majority-not-demographic-inevitability-part-one-antecedents/

http://www.amren.com/features/2012/11/race-and-the-2012-election/

https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-groups-voted/how-groups-voted-2008/

https://allotherpersons.wordpress.com/tables-outside-the-south-obama-gets-almost-half-of-the-white-vote/

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/the-emerging-democratic-majority-dead.html#

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html


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