Republican leaders awoke Wednesday to witness their grim future. Without a makeover, a party that skews toward older, white and male voters faces political peril in an increasingly diverse and complex America.Read the rest here.
President Obama’s decisive victory over Mitt Romney served as a clinic in 21st-century politics, reflecting expanded power for black and Hispanic voters, dominance among women, a larger share of young voters and even a rise in support among Asians.
Nationally, the steady and inexorable decline of the white share of the electorate continued, dropping to 72 percent, down from 74 percent in 2008 and 77 percent in 2004.
The Hispanic share grew again, encompassing one in 10 voters nationally and reaching higher levels in states such as Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico, which have become comfortable turf for Democrats in presidential politics.
In Colorado, a state many Republicans thought they could win, Obama won three-quarters of Hispanics, up from 61 percent in 2008. Obama increased his Hispanic performance along similar lines in Florida as well, a result that included Democratic dominance in the heavily Puerto Rican swing precincts around Orlando and the election of a Cuban American Democrat to Congress, symbolizing the end of the GOP’s decades-long lock on that community.
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9 comments:
The GOP may need to take stock. After all, like any organization, I'm sure it contains many people whose primary interest is making sure it continues as a going concern, principles be damned.
Speaking as a conservative, I'm not sure how much stock-taking is needed. After all - how soon we forget - it was only two years ago that we experienced a polar-opposite election and similarly decreed the demise of liberalism, with talk of a permanent center-right country and the like. Even this year, the Electoral College system will be used to bury the fact that fully half the country wanted nothing to do with the garbage Barack Obama was selling.
Somehow, voters decided that the same things that enraged them in 2010 - brutal unemployment, Obamacare and the threat of skyrocketing premiums for those whose insurance wasn't dropped entirely, trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, systemic cronyism and corruption, and a cult of personality President in all opposition to our founding principles - were positives to be continued and built upon.
I don't want those things. If I'm the last person who feels that way, so be it. I'm tired of financial difficulty, tired of not seeing opportunity to see business growth that's good for all of us, tired of seeing this country spend its way into and far past bankruptcy, and tired of seeing the President act like a king - and be treated as such by citizens of a republic, for God's sake, who should know better. And I'm sick that my children will have to grow up in a crooked, broke country and a world made more dangerous by America's navel-gazing and greedy class warfare that keeps everyone focused solely on "how I can get mine, from you."
I have no desire to take stock of anything that means buying into that. I'd rather go down with the ship, with tearful apologies to my kids that I didn't do more to stop it from sinking.
I don't want many of the things enumerated above either. The difference between myself and Phil is that he seems to think that cronyism and corruption, the crooked brokeness of this country, will go away under Republican leadership.
John, I would say it's unlikely that cronyism and corruption is going to go away under any party when the federal government is throwing around $3T of money it ripped off from American citizens and allowing unelected bureaucrats to write tens of thousands of pages of rules to tell us how we should all live. Forming special interest groups and seeking favors in such a world is rational, practically the only way to survive.
But you're the one who got his wish to have the hated Republicans go away. So how about it? Do you think your hero is going to get rid of the corruption - things like the Solyndras and selective, racially-based enforcement of the laws that he himself originated? And what exactly is the logic that explains why he has any incentive to do so, given that way of doing business just got him re-elected?
Phil
The post you are responding to is from a different John. But for the record for every Solyndra you can name I can throw back a Blackwater or Halliburton. So please spare me the holy than thous. The GOP is no different than the Democrats. They are both political whores bought and paid for by various special interest groups. And they are ideological twins... big government, huge debt, crony capitalism, perpetual war as a foreign policy and telling people how to live their lives as a domestic policy.
Thanks but I will pass.
I should thank the neo-cons and theocrats who ran us out of the Republican Party. You all did us a favor.
Thanks. I know it's a different John.
Please don't include me in the "you," though. Those views aren't mine. Nor am I a "neo" con; I've been one all my life.
It's ironic that the Dems, most of the time, take the lead on market-based initiatives like NAFTA-type trade agreements and immigration reform. Even the Mises Institute folks fall behind on trade agreements like WTO. Immigration is an economic growth issue. I see no reason why I should pay some entitled Mayflower Society ass tenfold to cut my grass.
W was correct on both of these important issues.
What Phil said...al three times.
Immigration is an economic growth issue. I see no reason why I should pay some entitled Mayflower Society ass tenfold to cut my grass.
Because while you're busy privatizing the savings and socializing the costs, we're stuck with an immigrant group with no particular loyalty to the place, high rates of social pathology, and a 70% preference for Democratic politicians. All because your kids and your neighbors' kids are too precious to mow the lawn. Thank you George W. Bush.
Unless they can undercut the immigrants' price, the urchins get squat.
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