Can The Republicans Be The White Party And Win?

The man is, ahem, whistling Dixie. GOP in-ya-face bigotry gives the Dems the non-white vote without the Dems’ having to pander to those voters so much as to alienate whites.

Republican acquaintances assume blacks vote for Dems because of gov’t handouts; they don’t grasp it’s much more voting AGAINST Repubs than voting FOR Dems.

I haven’t clicked through, but an awful lot of the analysis I’ve seen on this glides over the fact that Republicans are old. It gets a lot harder to win elections when your electorate keeps dying off.

(I actually think the Republicans will be able to peel off additional ethnic conservative groups a la Cubans in the ’80s and ’90s and remain a viable party, but it ain’t white folks alone going to keep them there.)

Having now clicked through, I have to say that one thing that jumps out is the trend toward more “red” (conservative) states in the middle part of the US. I really wonder how that squares with the Census data showing that 1 in 3 US counties (1,00o out of 3,100 or so) is now “dying” (more deaths than births/in-migration). Just four years ago, it was only 1 in 4 counties.

Is there any reason to suppose that whites are becoming increasingly racist? Statistics on interracial dating and marriage would suggest otherwise.

The Republicans aren’t making themselves repugnant by their racism alone. Like the Confederates, they’re militantly Christian, which distinctly limits their appeal to the young, 30% of whom consider themselves non-religious, and to women, who their religious strictures would disadvantage. There’s no reason to expect the gender or generation gaps to decrease.

As I said a while ago, you really need to treat “Southern White” as an ethnicity*, providing a bloc vote to the Repubs
https://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/16/southern-white-as-an-ethnicity/

Once you do, it’s apparent that the Repubs don’t have a lock on the (non-Southern) white vote. There’s no reason to think that running against Hispanics will do them much good with this group, and their dominance of the Southern white vote is so complete that there’s not a lot of upside there.

* To restate, not all light-skinned people who live in the former Confederacy regard themselves as Southerners, and some self-identified Southerners now live elsewhere.

Mostly likely everybody’s already seen this, but perhaps it bears repeating:

At about 800 people per square mile, people switch from voting primarily Republican to voting primarily Democratic. Put another way, below 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Republican. Above 800 people per square mile, there is a 66% chance that you voted Democrat. A 66% preference is a clear, dominant majority.

Again we need better data to evaluate the extent of racial polarization. At this point we don’t even know how the vote broke down for Romney. Did he in fact lose the white vote in any state? Maine, Iowa, for example. I don’t know. What Quiggin’s link does show is that Romney did win the white vote outside the South. I think that he did even better with whites than McCain had. Don’t have time to run down the data. I wish the topic hadn’t been broached without someone here with real expertise both on the history of racial politics in the US and recent election data.

Obama won the white vote in ME MA IA WA OR NH CT, i.e. states lacking large minority populations. This appears to be about par for Democrats.

The basis for the majority’s vote in Shelby County becomes that much more clear. See this in the NYT:

“The share of Hispanic voters rose in many states won by Obama. That can be attributed both to the surging Hispanic population in the country and to the Obama campaign’s incredible get-out-the-vote operation. It is less clear why the black vote held steady or grew in many of those states. In Ohio, for example, blacks jumped from being 11 percent of the voters in 2008 to 15 percent this year.”

Republicans see the “minority vote” as skewing the natural (white!) vote; GOP-controlled states can now work to “correct” that.

That may well be true about the list of states that you give, Anderson, and there are not very populous ones.

I would still like to see the data. I doubt that even in those states did Obama win the white male vote. And it would seem that even in most non-Southern states Obama wins just around 50% of the white women vote outside the South (which would give him 46% of the white vote on the assumption that about 42% of white men voted for him outside the South) .

How would you read that? That would indicate to me that the Republican Party does indeed have a lock on the majority of the white vote even outside the South, for if Romney/Ryan did not lead to a mass defection of white women from the Republican Party, then I have a hard time imagining what would.

But I hear Oxford, MS is very nice.

Oops, above, I meant to say I am not convinced that the states outside the South (the non-ex-Confederacy) is well characterized as post-racial. I know that Tedlock and others have questioned the significance of Mahzarin Banaji’s Implicit Association Tests, but my guess is that the results would be dismaying everywhere in the country.

If the Republicans stay far right on issues that matter to non-whites then the Democrats don’t need to ‘pander’ – they can maintain centrist policies that will appeal across the board and still scoop up the vast majority of non-white votes. How would this alienate whites, save for a sudden upsurge in racism? It doesn’t seem to make much sense.

What has happened historically is that the definition of white has been redefined to include the Other

A potential winning strategy for Republicans would be to redefine white to include black. Everyone seems to assume that it’s Latinos they are going to try to include, leaving African-Americans outside as so many times before. But sometimes things that are 200 years old do die. And white and black Americans probably do share more culturally than, say, white Americans and white Europeans.

What pro-black, anti-foreigner/immigrant wedge issues could be fitted into the Republicans general rhetorical approach?

The Republicans aren’t making themselves repugnant by their racism alone. Like the Confederates, they’re militantly Christian, which distinctly limits their appeal to the young, 30% of whom consider themselves non-religious, and to women, who their religious strictures would disadvantage. There’s no reason to expect the gender or generation gaps to decrease.

Romney won the white under-30 vote (Obama won it in 2008), indicating that Republicans do appeal to young whites, too. Women are generally more religious than men, so the idea that they in particular would be repelled by religious politics does not make sense.

What has happened historically is that the definition of white has been redefined to include the Other: e.g. Catholics, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and Jews.

Why does this ahistorical meme that some groups were initially not but later “became white” in America continue to flourish? It’s as if people didn’t know that federal agencies, courts, schools, private businesses, etc. all used to categorize people by race in America, and that all of them regarded all immigrants from Europe, including Catholics and Eastern and Southern Europeans, as white. Similarly, the racial anthropology of the day considered all Europeans to be white. Being naturalized, voting, or getting married to a white person was often only possible if you were white, but no European-descended person was ever denied any of these rights.

There were certainly ethnic and religious prejudices against different groups of whites by the WASP establishment, for example, but it’s a misuse of terminology to define those groups as non-white. Fox and Guglielmo recently wrote an excellent article on this.

Bad Jim,

1) women are more religious than men, cross culturally. Islam may be an exception, but just about all other religious groups in the US, have more women members than men. this is also the case, historically, in Europe and Latin America.

2) despite what some liberals think (for reasons that are unclear to me) women are just about as equally likely to be pro life than men. they are about 15% less likely to believe abortion should be banned, in the most recent polls I’ve seen, but that’s not a huge difference and I’m not sure it is robust over time.

3) young people are increasingly non religious, but the trend will probably bottom out st 40% non religious eventually, assuming current birth and conversion trends, and that hasn’t been coupled with change in views about abortion. abortion opinion polls are mostly at a stalemate, but young people are actually a bit more pro life than their elders, and there are demographic reasons to expect that to be the case.

I don’t disagree with your broader point, and Republicans are certainly losing young people over the gay issues.

Here is some pretty good evidence that Republicans have never met anyone non-white or under 35.

Republicans have been claiming for decades that they’re going to pick up recent immigrants and non-black ethnics, however all evidence points to the contrary. Besides Cubans and maybe Soviet Jews who have historical reasons for being Republican, even socially conservative new immigrants (e.g. Koreans) are overwhelming Democratic and becoming more so. Republicans think they can court non-Muslim South Asians and East Asians as the “good minorities” while actively being hostile towards Muslims and blacks and assume South & East Asians to be flattered, rather than insulted and disgusted by their racism. Plus add in their Fundamentalist Christian Randianism and there’s really not much appealing there to anyone who’s not already an older wealthy white male.

@ R Bandari
If you want long, wonky, expert posts on U.S. electoral politics, replete w graphs, tables, charts, and regression lines, try The Monkey Cage. It’s usually a bit too much info for my needs, one of several reasons I look at the blog only irregularly, but chacun a son gout [sorry, no accents].

oops, spelling correction: Bhandari

Thanks for the cite to the Fox and Guglielmo piece @25. Here is an interesting claim (and the piece is complex and will take time for me to study):

“no boundary separated SEEs [South and Eastern Europeans] rom whites; SEEs were not widely recognized as nonwhite, nor was such a boundary institutionalized. In fact, where white was a meaningful category, SEEs were virtually always included within it. To be sure, a fairly bright boundary separated SEEs from northern and western Europeans (NWEs) for a time. This boundary was based on religion, national origin, citizenship status, and even intra-European racial categories. It was not, however, based on whiteness or nonwhiteness. One way to think about this is that race and color were not perfect synonyms in the first half of the 20th century: one could be considered both white (color) and racially inferior to other whites (race; T. Guglielmo 2003, pp. 8–9). Instead of a white racial boundary shifting to include SEEs, then, we argue instead that the SEE-NWE boundary blurred significantly over time. Exactly how and when this blurring took place is a subject we leave for others to discuss. The crucial point we emphasize, however, is that the SEE story suggests the remarkable stability of the white-nonwhite boundary, not, as is sometimes assumed, its fluidity.”

So if SEEs were considered to be of an inferior race but still white, then what race were they? What race were the North West Europeans in the mythology of the time? Is this analysis suggesting that an Aryan conception of race, which is distinct from race conceived simply in terms of whiteness or European origins, dissolved sometime in the 20th century? Was it an Aryan self-identity of NW Europeans that led to restrictive immigration laws against the SEE’s in the 1920 (see Desmond King, Making Americans)? So the point would be not that SEE’s came to be Aryan too but that the Aryan self-identity finally dissolved probably sometime after WWII due to the horrors done in its name.

I would recommend looking at Thomas Trautman’s Aryans and British India. In his controversial reading Sir William Jones initially understood by Aryan those peoples who could be understood to share some linguistic root. Over the course of the 19th century the intension of the term “Aryan” shifts to designate some group of those within that language group that–and here is the mythology– broke off from the rest at some point in the deep ethnological past to evolve into a special biologically distinct group.

At this point, it became possible not to consider Indians themselves Aryan. The consequence was that Indians were not allowed into the US (see the Thind case) on the grounds that their claims to Aryanness were bogus. Hitler could kill millions of “gypsies” whose roots may well be in Northern India in the name of Aryan purity.

The capital fact of American politics is the rise of the plutocracy and the economic domination and immiseration that implies. A classic model for reconciling people to a plutocracy was the politics of the American South, with its distinctive racial component and deep resentments and cynicism. Having a racial caste available, to be treated as untouchables, impoverished and exploited, had economic and political dimensions. It allowed a kind of political populism to flourish, and provide an escape valve for the some of the pressures from below and an alternative to the politics of aristocratic pretension, promoted by plantation owners and mine owners, who dominated society.

The politics of polarization and resentment, in our own time, lacking an economy with a use for a racial caste, will have to find different anchors, if it is to work. The new economically dispossessed are in the suburbs and ex-urbs, mourning an economy that died with cheap oil and climate change. They are disproportionately white, that is true. I think they are also reached by the sexual polarization, which is pushed by Republicans with their traditionalist, patriarchal concern with social issues, like abortion, with predictable gains in reaction for the Democrats.

I read racial polarization alongside the sexual polarization and the urban/ex-urb split, as attempts to adapt the patterns of partisan politics to plutocracy. In that context, Obama’s attempt to exploit the on-going political realignment to capture more of the the secular, urban pro-business conservatives for the Democrats, securing for the Democrats a presumptive majority against the Rump Republican Party, risks, as Shah8 says, PRI-ization. That is, a politics of permanent and thoroughly institutionalized corruption, aimed, in economic terms, of minimizing the provision of public goods: no justice, lousy infrastructure, crappy public education and social services, instituting peonization.

Again Fox and Gugliemo’s historical account of the position of Mexican Americans in the US will require careful study. It would seem to me that Mexicanos with indios origins have never been treated as white while those who could claim that their family lines originate in Spain (Hispanics) have straddled the white/non-white line. Famously many activists rejected the designation Hispanic in the 60s and 70s and insisted on being called Chicano.

What a touching story, Gene.

@38
I’ve seen the Horsman bk cited a lot. Never read it.

“In that context, Obama’s attempt to exploit the on-going political realignment to capture more of the the secular, urban pro-business conservatives for the Democrats, securing for the Democrats a presumptive majority against the Rump Republican Party, risks, as Shah8 says, PRI-ization. That is, a politics of permanent and thoroughly institutionalized corruption, aimed, in economic terms, of minimizing the provision of public goods: no justice, lousy infrastructure, crappy public education and social services, instituting peonization.”

It may be worthwhile to point out that every “lesser evil” argument ends up empowering this peonization. One consequence of the GOP having to hold its racist base and being so bad is that the Democrats only have to be a little bit better. Therefore, they can let themselves be captured entirely by plutocratic interests, which is the course of least resistance in any case. Plutocratic interests are fine with e.g. gay marriage: sometimes a plutocrat or their child is gay, after all, and it costs nothing to let people get married.

So, because of the unwillingness of people on the left to do anything more than follow the lesser evil, we’re heading for a two-party state in which the parties are (rural and Southern whites plus plutocracy) and (urban whites and non-whites plus plutocracy). All of the non-plutocratic elements of society are left with non-electoral paths. But these will come to nothing, most likely, because the GOP is already the white party and has been for some time, and provides a reliable worse case to keep the left half of the plutocratic system in line.

Ideas are meaningless within this setup. Demographics will slowly lead to more and more dominance by the left plutocratic party, but at the same time, the country will break. I have no idea which of the many possible ways that will happen, but I don’t necessarily expect something dramatic. Just that, as is already happening, we’ll slide further and further down various statistical lists until we’re like Russia: a dysfunctional backwater with an aging nuclear missile fleet that makes people still take it somewhat seriously. But the real action, globally, will be going on somewhere else.

Last for the day, but I assume that the last post was written by one of the CT blog rollers. I don’t get the point(s),

A few things. Don’t assume that most Latinos identify with, or are proud, of Zimmerman. Or can be made to identify with him by Republicans trying to win Latinos back.

Zimmerman assumed Trayvon guilty and despicable and pursued him against the direction of the police. He created a situation in which a fight broke out. Even during the fight he does not seem to have identified himself as a wannabe cop even though no weapon was pulled against him. He got his nose broken by a guy a lot smaller than him. He’s not in the right shooting a smaller guy who humiliated him. Sometimes you have to take a hard shot and not shoot someone dead.

Whether Zimmerman is guilty, he will cost the neighborhood association a lot of money in the civil suit for being a punk. I don’t see Latinos rallying behind him.

35

Yes, people who debate over whether x group was considered white often miss that white wasn’t/isn’t really a salient category in terms of thinking about race/ethnicity/group identity until relatively recently. According to 19th European racial theory, pretty much everyone from Nepal to Morocco was white, excluding Turkic, Finno-Ugaric, and Basque peoples. However, if you look at how European racial discrimination played out, people who were unarguably white (Jews, Roma, Slavs, Armenians) were the victims of racialized hostility and genocide, whereas people who were considered non-white (Hungarians, Finns, Basques) were generally not. Like “Aryan,” “white” was also based on linguistic categories rather than perceived shared genetics, phenotype, or even culture. Speakers of Indo-European (Aryan), Semitic, and ‘Hamitic’ (non-Semitic NE African) language families were all Caucasian/white. Within Europe itself, people were categorized as ‘Nordic,’ ‘Alpine,’ or ‘Mediterranean,’ a classification system that mapped on rather poorly to the linguistic one. When it came to intra-European racism in the US, this latter was extremely influential, in large part due to Madison Grant. There was a huge panic about letting in “Mediterranean” peoples to the US, but no one thought they weren’t white. I agree that the phenomenon is not that people became white, but that “white” increasingly became the most important racial category in the US. This view primarily focuses on the Northern US, because it seems that in the South white/black were the most salient racial categories from a much earlier time. I haven’t done research, but I wouldn’t be surprised if immigrant panic was less marked in the South.

Gene

I’ve actually encountered this as well, where ‘white’ is a shorthand for generic whitebread American with no identifying ‘ethnic’ features, and anything identifiably ‘European’ is not white.

They are already getting 80-90 in Southern states, which implies close to 100 per cent among self-identified Southern whites, the group most receptive to the kind of appeal proposed here.

Assuming that a third of the white population is Southern (not all physically located in the South), and that Romney won the total white vote 60-40, the non-Southern white vote must have been split fairly evenly.

Trende’s analysis requires that the Repubs get a 65-35 majority among whites, an increase of 5 percentage points in the R vote. But that implies a required gain of 7.5 percentage points among n0n-Southern whites, which is huge, and unlikely to be helped much by racist appeals.

The problem is worse when you disaggregate by age as well as Southern-Northern. Romney won narrowly among young whites, but that implies a loss among non-Southern young whites.

Here is a set of estimates by state
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/10/1159759/-Percent-of-White-vote-won-by-Obama-2012-by-state

which broadly supports this, in my view.

“Don’t assume that most Latinos identify with, or are proud, of Zimmerman. Or can be made to identify with him by Republicans trying to win Latinos back.”

You’re weird. I don’t care about these things. Someone earlier on this thread said the Republicans are doomed as a national party, and I agree, and the sooner the better.

Now, I’ll type this real slow: JH says Republicans are developing an electoral strategy that…er…does not include outreach to minorities. Maybe the Repubs have despaired of breaking the Democrat strangle-lock on minority votes. Maybe they’re a just bunch of racists who have decided they’re not interested in representing Blacks or Hispanics, and they expect enough whites to go along with that. And that’s “dismaying” because it’s the “first time” that “extreme racial polarization” has been considered as a legitimate political tactic. Which is, of course, “bad for the country”.

My point is, it’s worse than dismaying, it’s far from the first time, and Democrats are by far the worst offenders, with perhaps their most notable atrocity playing out in the news right now. After decades of success using extreme racial polarization as a main strategy, the Democrat party is institutionally, nay, structurally dependent on race hate for its electoral survival. They’ll prevent racial reconciliation at all costs. Democrats and the Mass Media (BIRM) have consistently striven to keep Blacks immiserated, powerless, ignorant and angry. The present administration has taken all this to a new, violent level. Obama’s policies have been devastating to Blacks, and his racially-charged rhetoric has been devastating to race relations. After six years of a Black Democrat President, racial tension is the worst it’s been in my lifetime. And Crooked Timber, to the limited extent possible, has helped this along. When, inevitably, George Zimmerman walks free*, there’s going to be blood in the streets. Some of you deserve some of the blame for that.

Dismaying, indeed.

* If you’d like to know what the witnesses are saying in George Zimmerman’s murder trial, you can read Andrew Branca’s series of posts at legalinsurrection.com. Much of what you think you know is mistaken. Based on the testimony of prosecution witnesses (we haven’t even heard from defense witnesses yet), it seems most likely that Martin attacked without provocation, and the “creepy-ass cracka”, who had no chance to retreat, would be dead today if he hadn’t had a gun. Evidence which has been made public but not yet introduced in Court, shows that Martin was an advanced street fighter with a nasty mean streak. In his own self-characterization, he was the worst kind of gun nut, a racist, a “no-limit nigga”, a “gangsta”, and he liked to beat people up and see them bleed. He sure as fuck wasn’t afraid of the out-of-shape, tub-of-lard Zimmerman. Who, by the way, will never have a life again, guilty or not.

So, you know, it’s kind of bad for the country when you jump in with no facts and say that Trayvon’s killing was a cold-blooded, racially-motivated “quasi state-sanctioned execution” as Belle Waring put it in these pages. In fact that kind of talk is pretty much guaranteed to result in violent reprisals against whites, which we may expect in the near future. Thanks, guys!

Living in the far south, ruled by the same ethno-cultural structural majority party since over 60 years, i have to say, no it is not obvious how this is so bad.

Live is good in Bavaria. Nope, dont see how this has to be bad. Republicans have to move to the left in this scenario, otherwise they cannot catch the entire lower class white vote, so its the rich who are out of better options in this scenario. Cant possibly get any worse anyway.

@52: Obama won. You seem determined to minimize all of the evidence that goes against what you want to think is so. Why? The thesis being debated is that the Republicans can somehow gain a larger share of the white vote in the face of antagonizing all minority groups and against strong demographic trends in the majority. A different Republican party might be able to do something, but they will need to change.

If you want an actual republican, and a window into the thinking that animates the party, the racial resentment in musical mountaneers’ posts is a useful tonic. This stone-cold racism and projection is who they are. It’s why the Democrats = Republicans crap is a lie. And it’s useful to have the hate in front of us to remind us of that.

@58: You’re living in a paranoid fantasy world. A black kid gets killed, and the real problem is that people got angry about it and that blacks will slaughter whites on the street in retaliation.

Please proceed, however. It is instructive for people here to see what the US contemporary right actually is.

I would like to repeat the Belle Waring was incontinent. Very incontinent. Really just grossly, splatteringly incontinent.

Thank you.

Everyone here thanks you for your comment, Marc. I like it because it’s like watching Dumb and Dumber. Others like it because it means they don’t have to read my comment.

Win-win!

Well, Witt, that’s just part and parcel of musical mountaineer’s performative explication of the term “creepy-ass cracker.” Some people weren’t sure what it meant, so he dropped by to act it out.

“Rape”

Okay, here’s something we agree on. There are way too many people in prison in this country. Way too many of them get raped and otherwise severely harmed, without recourse. In many cases, their plight is monstrously unjust.

But if Zimmerman goes to jail and lands in gen-pop, he most certainly will be raped and killed. However you think things ought to be in the criminal justice system, in the real world that’s the stakes Zimmerman is playing for. For my part, if Zimmerman really was the cold-blooded, racially motivated killer you’ve all decided he is, I wouldn’t much care. I’d still prefer to see the system fixed, but not for Zimmerman’s sake so much as for the sake of institutional integrity and justice in general.

As it is, I very much doubt he even remotely deserves it. If you’re categorically opposed to prison rape (which is reasonable), maybe you ought to be more circumspect before condemning someone to that fate.

Conversely, I think Obama’s performance on the economy did him much more damage than the standard models suggest. After getting a limited stimulus through in 2009 he dropped the ball on the issue and handed it to the Repubs. And, while measures like GDP show some recovery, the variable most relevant to voters is the employment-population ratio, which hasn’t recovered at all.

So, if the Repubs were at all electable, Obama should have been crushed. (Conversely, if had run hard on the economy, and against Bush, from the moment he took office, he could have swept the board, maybe even in the South)

Clinton, or whoever runs for the Dems in 2016 won’t have such a problem with economics. The economy should have picked up a bit, or else the drop in employment will be the new normal.

BTW Rakesh, I agree with what you say about race and class.

The many ways to slice and dice argued here persuade me that nothing is already written. It is up to us — each and all — to make things happen right. And think local, from school board to state legislature. (Charlie Pierce is eloquent on the local/state groundwork, which progressives have been mostly lazy about.)

For what it’s worth, in canvassing for Elizabeth Warren in western MA last fall (and for Markey a week or two ago — really, that recently? feels ages longer), my husband and I were both struck by the nice (truly — really nice!) Polish and French and Italian older women (add the hyphenated American). Their retired husbands usually very pro-Dem because they were strong unionists (ah, those were the days). But the wives: quiet, good Catholic housewives, and boy did they support Warren (birth control, even abortion — rock-bottom feminism, folks!). These women knew better than many younger women what was at stake, but the younger women (and men) will catch up if the Repubs keep at their current game.

It is not already written, people! Get out and work! Think Wendy Davis!

Rakesh,

I really don’t see the Republicans reining in their misogyny. Besides the few rape comments, Republicans don’t understand why defunding Planned Parenthood, restricting access to affordable contraception, or requiring women to carry unviable or even already dead fetuses to term is unappealing to women. On top of this is their opposition to the Lily Ledbetter act, and I don’t see any sign of growing awareness on this either. After the last election, they chalked up their loss of younger white women as due to them being sluts with Jungle Fever (check out NRO right after the election), so if anything it shows them heading in the opposite direction. This is on top of all the other reasons why someone wouldn’t support Republicans, such as their opposition to a stimulus, job creation, and affordable healthcare.

Posted my last before I say Britta’s 75—which is exactly right, I think.

OK many Republicans push horrible anti-woman policies,as Britta and JS say, but still the Republicans won something like 50% of the white women vote outside of the South! And they could well improve on that number if Limbaugh can restrain himself from calling anyone a slut soon before an election and the fringe can keep to itself its biological theories about the reproduction system after rape in the same way that it keeps to itself its concerns about the Elders of Zion (who may be believed to have played some role in manufacturing that birth certificate given the way their derivative bets pay off iff there is a Muslim socialist in office).

I think a large part of the problem is that Republicans assume their policy positions would very popular if their words weren’t twisted by the PC-Nazi Liberal-Islamofascist media. As js noted, they think it’s a marketing or PR problem, not a substantive problem with their positions. As long as they keep assuming that this is their problem, they are going to keep alienating women, young people, and minorities.

Also, while white women broke for Romney, single white women voted for Obama 2:1, and made up 18% of the electorate. Since marriage among heterosexuals is rapidly on the decline, inability to pick to pick up the unmarried female vote will be a growing problem in the future.

“even the most prominent members of the “libertarian” wing of the party are resolutely anti-reproductive rights … It’s going to be somewhere between extraordinarily difficult and downright impossible to closet this”

But why would they want to closet it; this is just a matter of framing, like most of these culture-war things. They are ” resolutely anti-reproductive rights” and you are resolutely anti-“rights of the unborn children”. When you frame it your way, it feels like the opponents must be at a disadvantage, but it works both ways. And that’s the whole point. Politicians don’t really care about abortions.

Rakesh, the incompetence of Romney was a direct result of the extremism of the Republicans. So these things are not independent. A Republican candidate could not appeal to a (much) larger share of the non-Southern white, end certainly not minorities, for the simple reason that such appeal would not allow him to get into the general election in the first place. Appealing more to their core Southern-white voters and against minorities only makes this problem worse.

Despite all the misogeny, racism and other deficiencies the Republicans have still managed to win a clear plurality of governorships (39 I think) and a similar number of state houses – this doesn’t suggest a party that’s on the verge of becoming obsolete despite its abundant deficiencies.

While gerrymandering and other factors are likely to be a part of the story, its likewise possible that there is still a sizeable swing vote in many states that are prepared to vote for candidates that are individually appealing regarless of the related party politics. Or maybe said differently, state by state party mobilization and blocs are apparently weaker than national blocs.

Virginia is a good example of a state that has swung back and forth between Democrat an Republican governors and not always in-line with national trends despite swinging decidedly Democrat in each of the last two general elections. Their two senators are democrat, yet they also elect Eric Cantor in the House (in a hugely safe seat).

On a national level the Republicans are in clear disarray and it is on this level that the deficiencies are most evident. The fact that an article about completely ignoring the Latino vote can even be contemplated as a strategy is evidence of the rot within the national party thinking.

These things seem very obvious:

They can be the racist white party where that works for them and win enough districts to stop bills in Congress they don’t like.

Gerrymandering and vote suppression will be very helpful in some places.

Republicans can be the white party and still field charismatic, seemingly moderate candidates exactly as they do now. People will vote for the candidate and forget about the party.

Demographics are shifting but not extremely fast so whites will still vote for them and–this is where I am wondering why there is the assumption things have changed so much–whites are not going to base their votes on eschewing racism. When have they ever done that?

They’ve worked this strategy for 50 years. I don’t see things changing fast enough for any worries to arise about the strategy. There are questions about what else they’ve got to offer. In the places where racism doesn’t work, a smart Republican candidate will offer the moderate Centrist Lite deal. As puzzling as it is to some, even some people who considered themselves well-informed (but who were missing some key facts) honestly could not tell the difference between Bush and Gore in 2000. Why think this won’t happen again?

I wouldn’t put it exactly like johnnybutter puts it but I think the Dems make the bushwacking strategy very easy by running away from anything that looks too liberal, thus becoming less distinctive. I think Obama’s victory was due to the few things he did that didn’t follow this model but the Dems are so wedded to this model that we can’t expect this to happen every time.

John Quiggin said: “There’s no reason to think that running against Hispanics will do them much good with this group” I don’t think you are right. In the Southwest and the South this works extremely well if you run against Mexicans and Central Americans. No one runs against Cubans.

I see no reason to think this strategy of Centrist Lite where necessary and racist dog whistle where possible won’t work like it has for many more years to come.

Rakesh: ” That Romney did so well after a disastrous campaign–he won bigger white majorities than McCain–suggests that the future of the white vote outside the South is still uncertain. ”

Somebody compared Romney’s performance to GOP Senate candidates; Romney did better.

Republican extremism meant that Romney had to run against his own record as governor of Massachusetts, instead of on it.

True. But Romney was politically incompetent on top of being in a bad postion. Probably doesn’t matter that much, just entertaining.

But Romney was politically incompetent on top of being in a bad postion.

Oh, absolutely…I didn’t mean to imply an either/or.

“I find it remarkable that no one was mentioned environment here. I know this discussion is about race, but it is amazing how hostile house Republicans are to anything remotely good for the environment. This strikes me as even more outrageous than their racial and sexual positions.”

Indeed. Even right-wing assholes have to breathe!

Half those wingnuts think the Rapture is going to come in their lifetimes anyway. Followed by the Tribulation. Drowned hippie pagans = feature, not bug.

That was meant to be a smile instead if a wink, but I think the wink looks better..a little bit saucy though

More power to Trende, I hope he wins the Republican establishment’s ear and that it works out as well as his 2012 analysis did.

The reality is that the Republicans probably reached their ceiling with white men in 2012 (62%) and they have little to offer the white women who voted for Obama (42%). The missing white voters are far more likely to be disaffected, poor Democrats hurt by high unemployment (remember white Republicans were highly motivated in 2012), but as Karl Rove pointed out even if Republicans won the missing whites at 62% they still lose the election by a substantial margin.

Well, looks like they’re pretty much over denying they’re solely the party of white people:

http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/352689/how-partisan-demographics-shape-policy-thinking-reihan-salam

If you don’t want to read an NRO article, here is a line that pretty much sums up the argument:

“Republican governors of states with large numbers of uninsured individuals generally don’t represent the uninsured population, which is disproportionately Latino and black and low-income. “

I grew up hearing about Morris Dees, because he is a hero who figured out how to target hate groups as a whole rather than just arresting individual offenders. Unless the argument that putting Aryan Nations out of business and bankgrupting White Aryan Resistance (the hate group whose members murdered Mulugeta Seraw) is racist, I’m not sure how Morris Dees is racist. But…I suppose up is down, hatred is love, war is peace?

The fact that the Republicans are on the intellectual skids (or about two meters further down the skids than the Democrats) has little to do with who wins President. President (or state governor) is usually about personality and leadership stature. Appearances count, big time. Romney could have won the election. If I had been his campaign manager, he would have won. Not that I would ever do that.

Swing voters do not care much about party platforms, because they already figure that both parties are lying. Swing voters are way, way past the supposed realizations in comment threads like these, that the Democrats are secretly another party of the rich. Golly, you think? Everybody else already KNOWS this, people.

For years, Republicans weree elected President, then acted as moderate Democrats, just as all Democratic presidents act as moderate Republicans. There is some slight gain for the preferred policies of the home team in the Oval Office of course, but not really that much, and also now and then, some horrifying idiot will declare a war, but in general, all Presidents tend to move to the middle of the road and play it safe. (For two very good reasons: the System is much bigger than you; and when you become President, you become an historical figure who is supposed to look after everyone.)

The Republican Party has entered an historical cul de sac, however, for another couple of very strong reasons. First, they have been preaching a phony economic theory that had a good run for about 30 years (i.e., supply-side Reaganomics) but now is appearing in direct opposition to the unavoidable reality of the welfare state, whereas before this time, their rhetoric could paper over the contradictions. Second, their base voters — not the swing voters, but the 25-27% of the population that the Republicans must depend upon, to come out in the elections — seriously believes the phony economic theory. Thus the “mainstream Republicans” in the leadership (Boehner, etc.) must continue to serve up this swill to the masses, while not believing it themselves, and while being cut off at the knees while trying to get any serious governmental business performed.

(To put it in terms of some of people here, supply-side Reaganomics is only half of neoliberalism. The other half is the necessity of a rather large welfare/environmental state to address inequity, risk, and exterior environmental uncertainties.)

In a nutshell, the Republican Party is pulling itself further to the right than it really wants to go, to continue to win elections, except in certain districts. They do not appear to know how to pull themselves out of this mess. Current symptoms?: 1. Hoping that Marco Rubio turns into something he is not (i.e., a man with the answers). 2. Waiting to see if Rand Paul can pull off a libertarian resurgence while avoiding any mention of the need to address increasing equality (good luck in selling that!) 3. Banging on abortion with renewed fervor, to shore up the social-conservative part of a base that is at risk of staying home in future elections. 4. Sudden silence on the topic of the national debt, after projections since the sequester (plus the little tax hikes on the wealthy) prove what a silly illusion the supposed monster really is, and how easily a little more taxes will defuse the whole issue. And, 5. Hoping (against hope) to somehow neutralize Obamacare, before the state market exchanges prove to every last clod in the country that the private insurance companies are charging 20% on top (and had been charging up to 40% !!) for NO VALUE ADDED — none! — and after that, the U.S. votes for a single payer in the following national election. Good luck, trying to stop the inevitable!

Oh, yeah, Happy Independence Day!

The problem with supposing that the ultimate evil of the thing is all you need to know, is that you won’t be able to change the system without lots more people getting killed. Either that, or else you are hoping to scream loud enough so that everyone has some sort of religious revelation in response, and the whole System suddenly changes course. (The U.S. did not suddenly become a kleptocracy, but has been one since at least the middle of the 19th century. On the other hand, the Democrats are no longer overtly racist, as they were then.) By contrast, the virtue in NOT worrying about who is stuck in the category of irredeemable evil, but instead learning what is going on and figuring out how to use it to your advantage for a few steps forward, or at least until somebody pushes back the other way, is in seeing them squirm when you hold them to their supposed principles, and in making things a little better maybe without so many people getting killed. You get to make the road go a little bit in your direction. That is all you get. That is the purpose of the U.S. democracy as the founders appear to have envisaged it. Now, you can also try to change the game, i.e. change the Constitution, and that’s okay, though I won’t be with you personally, because sometimes people prefer poker over bridge, but you are still end up in some other stupid game. You can also think outside of the game, i.e. change the intellectual premises of political thought, but then the categories of and good and evil compose a mere preliminary distinction, not the heavy lifting that is required.