Electoral Nonsense

Now that the elections are over, we are seeing an endless stream of articles from the media about the problems facing the Republican party. We are told that demography will kill the GOP; only whites will vote for the party and blacks and Hispanics are wedded to the Democrats. We are told that large states like California, New York and Illinois as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania will only vote for Democrats. We are told that Democrats have women's votes locked up. The truth is that there is an old legal term for this analysis. Simply put, the entire discussion is crap.

There is no doubt that the Democrats won the presidential election this time. It was a lot closer than in 2008, but the size of the margin does not change the result. The Democrats picked up two seats in the senate, but the Republicans maintained their majority in the House of Representatives. The GOP also increased the number of governors it holds while it lost a few state legislative bodies, although it maintained a control of a majority of them.

So was 2012 the last hurrah of the GOP as many, particularly on MSNBC, would have you believe? No. The tide will turn again. It always does.

The truth is that even the so-called demographic divide will shift in the future. Think about it. If the 2016 ticket includes Marco Rubio as the first national Hispanic candidate, how many Hispanic voters will vote for him? When president Obama was first running in the primaries in 2008, he was leading among African Americans, but the race was close with Hilary Clinton. Once Obama won in Iowa and it was clear that he had a real chance, his margins in the black community went up to numbers like 90%. The same thing will happen among Hispanics.

The truth is that the issues of 2016 and beyond are what will drive the voters in their selections. It is foolish to decide today that one or another group will be wedded to one party or the other.

Let me illustrate: In the 1950s, the South was totally Democrat. It had been that way since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Over the next 60 years, that region moved to being totally Republican, a move that is still happening at the local level; Arkansas now has a Republican majority in its legislature for the first time. All the southern states have GOP majorities. At a national level, however, states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia are moving towards parity. In the 1960s Catholic voters were firmly Democratic; the selection of John Kennedy had cemented them into the party. By the Nixon years, however, Catholics were no longer sure Democrats. When Reagan ran in 1980, the so called Reagan Democrats were largely Catholics. They moved with the issues.

I do not know how the various groups will line up in 2016. No one does; no one can know. We do not know what the issues will be in that election. Will today's terrible economy continue? If so, it will be hard for the Democrats to blame Bush after 8 years of failure. Will there still be a serious terrorist threat? The extent of such a threat may make people choose on issues that hardly played a role this time. Will Obamacare have failed by then? Will Obamacare be viewed as a success by then? Will the surge in the national debt have led to high interest rates and inflation? There are so many questions that have to be answered before one can tell how the voting will play out, that it is just a fool's errand to try to proclaim the future right now.