demographics

Red To Purple to Blue States – The Political Migration

March 8, 2013 By mario piperni

We knew it was happening, but this fast?

Trend lines for the California GOP are in free-fall. For example:

• Republican numbers have fallen to 29% of registered voters. Independents have grown to 21%. Democrats are at 44%. At the current rate, independents will surpass Republicans before the end of the decade. And independents tend to vote and think a lot more like Democrats than Republicans.

• Latinos are shunning the GOP. And within months they’re projected to surpass whites as California’s largest ethnic group. Among Latinos, 57% are registered Democrats, 25% are independents and the GOP is No. 3 at 18%, according to the roundtable.

By the end of the decade, the current trend has Republicans relegated to 3rd party status in California. Wow. And unless Republicans make serious changes to their platform in regard to minorities, women and just about every other issue they’re locked into, it’s not hard to imagine the same happening in other states.

Red state Texas (Hispanic population projected to grow by 58 percent by 2016) will soon find itself a lovely shade of purple as a fast-growing Latino population continues to align itself with the Democratic party. Nevada – currently a swing state – will in all likelihood be a blue state by the time the 2016 election rolls around. In four years time, Nevada will have another 100,000 Hispanic voters ready to cast their vote for Hillary.

And then there’s this:

According to a 2009 study by the Center for American Progress: “In 2020 — the first presidential election where all Millennials will have reached voting age — this generation will be 103 million strong, of which about 90 million will be eligible voters. Those 90 million Millennial eligible voters will represent just under 40 percent of America’s eligible voters.”

Guillory points to another 2009 study, from the Pew Research Center, showing that some 22 percent of all people under the age of 18 in the United States are Hispanic. That number is up considerably from 9 percent in 1980.

Is it too late for Republicans to alter course and deal effectively with the demographic demon they now face? Probably. Decades of scorn and neglect for minorities has done its damage and that Rubicon has been crossed no matter what Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz says.

As Dem strategist David Townsend put it.

“Too white, too right and too uptight. That’s why the Republican Party can’t come back in California.”

Or elsewhere, I suspect.

Tom Toles

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Filed Under: Hispanics Tagged With: demographics

Will Republicans Face the New Reality?

February 21, 2013 By mario piperni

What most strikes fear in the hearts and souls of Republicans? Reality.

Unless Republicans step out of their bubble and begin to adopt policies that reflect the new reality that is America, they’re doomed. And so far, everything they’ve done since the election gives indication that the revelation will be a long, arduous and painful process.

Chart by 59liberty.com
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Filed Under: Bubble News Tagged With: demographics

Demographics, Fear and Politics

July 24, 2010 By mario piperni

Evolving demography is creating a political battlefield.

Two of the biggest demographic trends reshaping the nation in the 21st century increasingly appear to be on a collision course that could rattle American politics for decades. From one direction, racial diversity in the United States is growing, particularly among the young. Minorities now make up more than two-fifths of all children under 18, and they will represent a majority of all American children by as soon as 2023, demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution predicts.

At the same time, the country is also aging, as the massive Baby Boom Generation moves into retirement. But in contrast to the young, fully four-fifths of this rapidly expanding senior population is white. That proportion will decline only slowly over the coming decades, Frey says, with whites still representing nearly two-thirds of seniors by 2040.

These twin developments are creating what could be called a generational mismatch, or a “cultural generation gap” as Frey labels it. A contrast in needs, attitudes, and priorities is arising between a heavily (and soon majority) nonwhite population of young people and an overwhelmingly white cohort of older people. Like tectonic plates, these slow-moving but irreversible forces may generate enormous turbulence as they grind against each other in the years ahead.

Republicans are quite aware of the numbers and the effect of those tectonic plates colliding can already be felt.

In Texas, for instance, racial change was a charged subtext of a larger ideological battle this spring over history and economics textbooks in the public schools. In March, the Republican coalition that controls a majority on the Texas Board of Education imposed a more conservative presentation on a wide variety of American history topics. Among the amendments approved was one requiring students to be taught not only about Martin Luther King’s nonviolent philosophy during the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s but also about the Black Panthers’ preaching of violence.

Mary Helen Berlanga, a Latina board member, angrily complained that the textbook revisions eliminated discussion of a 1947 federal Appeals Court decision that barred segregation of Mexican-American students in Texas public schools. About 3 million of the students in Texas public schools are minorities. “Who are we kidding?” Berlanga asked. “These are the children that are going to be reading these materials. You want to talk about the Black Panthers in an ugly fashion? What about the Ku Klux Klan? That was a pretty nasty group. Why aren’t we talking about them?”

Keep watching as conservatives attempt to legislate the end of those “irreversible” forces. That grinding noise you hear in the distance…it’ll only get louder.

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Filed Under: Immigration, numbers Tagged With: demographics, Immigration, political issues

Demographics Favor Democrats

July 5, 2010 By mario piperni

Ruy Teixeira begins his study on the impact of changing demographics with this summary paragraph.

The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting. A powerful concatenation of demographic forces is transforming the American electorate and reshaping both major political parties. And, as demographic trends continue, this transformation and reshaping will deepen. The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP.

And what exactly are these “concatenation of demographic forces” forcing the shift?

…the United States will be majority-minority nation by 2042. By 2050, the country will be 54 percent minority as Latinos double from 15 percent to 30 percent of the population, Asian Americans increase from 5 percent to 9 percent, and African Americans move from 14 to 15 percent.

Other demographic trends accentuate Democrats’ advantage. The Millennial generation (those born between 1978 and 2000) is adding 4 million eligible voters to the voting pool every year, and this group voted for Obama by a stunning 66-32 margin in 2008. By 2020—the first presidential election in which all Millennials will have reached voting age—this generation will be 103 million strong, and about 90 million of them will be eligible voters. Those 90 million Millennial eligible voters will represent just under 40 percent of America’s total eligible voters.

To this mix you can add white college grads (68% voted for Obama and by 2015, one in five Americans will be a college-graduate professional). Specific female subgroups is another demographic favoring Democrats. An example of such a subgroup is unmarried women of which 70% voted for Obama. They currently constitute 47% of adult women, up from 38% in 1970.

The growing number of secular Americans is another group you can count on the Dem side of the ledger. Seventy-five percent of them voted for Obama and it is projected that one in four U.S. adults will be unaffiliated by 2024. The author adds…

This trend—combined with growth among non-Christian faiths and race-ethnic trends—will ensure that by the 2016 election (or 2020 at the outside) the United States will have ceased to be a white Christian nation. Looking even farther down the road, white Christians will be only around 35 percent of the population by 2040, and conservative white Christians, who have been such a critical part of the Republican base, will be only about a third of that—a minority within a minority.

What all of this implies is that while Republicans might see gains in the 2010 midterms, the long range forecast is gloomy. A reversal of the current move to the right will be required if they are to remain a viable political force.

In short, the “party of no” has a limited shelf life. That strategy might help the party make significant gains in 2010, but it will not be enough to restore it to a majority status. For that, a conservatism must be built that is not allergic to government spending when needed and even to taxes when there is no responsible alternative. The party must paradoxically find a way to combine its standard antigovernment populism with pro-government conservatism.

In short, the contrived teabagger phenomena will be a short lived one.

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Filed Under: conservatism Tagged With: conservatives, demographics, politcal issues, politics

Obama and Seniors – Not A Great Mix

August 31, 2009 By mario piperni

dont-know-what-to-draw

Matt Bai breaks down the demographics of age in an Obama era.

For all the shouting that has dominated these town hall meetings on health care lately, they have yielded a few important insights. The first is that the town hall itself has probably reached the end of its usefulness in the Internet age; if you’re looking for thoughtful dialogue, you might as well hold your next meeting on the stern of a Somali pirate ship. The second is that we now have a visual sense of the kind of voter who is militantly opposed to Obama’s health care agenda and, more broadly, to the president himself.

The typical anti-Obama activist tends to be white, male and — perhaps most significant — advanced in age. A poll conducted earlier this month by CNN and Opinion Research showed a rather stark age divide when it came to health care: 57 percent of voters under 50 said they favored the outlines of a Democratic plan, but that number was a full 20 points lower among voters over 65. In three Pew Research Center polls going back to April, senior citizens consistently gave Obama’s job performance lower approval ratings than did than any other age group.

[...]

The good news for Obama and his party, of course, is that they still enjoy an enviable level of support among voters just breaking into the work force and among those now drifting into middle age. And that means that if reigning Democrats can manage to get health care policy right this time, and maybe even add some fundamental energy reforms, they might still be able to cement more hopeful attitudes about government for generations to come, much as Roosevelt did in his day. Today’s younger voters might never be as party-affiliated as their grandparents were, but neither may they turn out to be as cynical about their leaders as their parents often seem to be. If the president has his way (which is to say, if the worst nightmares of Republicans come to pass), those voters may someday live out their retirements in Arizona or Nevada, spinning stories for their grandchildren of the days when Barack Obama was twice elected president, when government managed once again to make things better instead of worse and when politicians still bothered with these things called town halls.

It is exactly the over 60 crowd, the most vulnerable demographic, which conservatives have been targeting with their lies over health care. Talk of death panels, as ridiculous a notion as it may be, has been affective in taking the debate away from facts and into the realm of the absurd. Fear works.

If the president can sustain the short term pain associated with getting both a health care reform bill off the ground as well as seeing a measurable turnaround in the economy, Republicans will be bitching from a minority position for a long time to come.

(Hat tip: Balloon-Juice)

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