Tag Archives: Republican

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Whites Only?


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The GOP’s Demographic Doom

Some in the Republican Party continue to argue that the party can make up for its abysmal standing with minority voters by becoming more conservative in order to attract and turn out more white voters.

CAP Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira lays out fresh evidence why this whites-only strategy is destined to fail:

5. White voters are increasingly likely to be single and secular. The idea that the GOP can get higher and higher levels of support from white voters presupposes that the white population is likely to get ever-more conservative and therefore inclined to vote Republican. But what if the reverse is true? Two factors that could make the white population more liberal are family and religion. Thirty five percent of white voters in 2012 were unmarried, compared to 30 percent in 1984. Unmarried whites are far more likely to vote Democratic than married ones.

And in just a five year span from 2007 to 2012, the percentage of whites who are religiously unaffiliated rose from 15 to 20 percent. According to Brownstein, Democrats have averaged a 32 point advantage with white secular voters since 2000.

4. A smaller and smaller proportion of white voters are working class. Working class or non-college educated voters are among the most conservative white voters, regularly giving Republicans a 12-14 point larger margin than they receive among white college graduates. But white working class voters are declining precipitously as a share of voters (down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012) while white college graduates are increasing their share (from 31 to 36 percent over the same time period). That means that the white working class is also declining as a share of white voters. Back in 1988, 64 percent of white voters were white working class; by 2012, that figure had dropped to just half of white voters. This trend is likely to continue for many years making the white vote a harder not easier target for GOP appeals.

3. The rise of the Millennial generation. The Millennial generation, as has been widely documented, is the most liberal generation in the electorate by a considerable margin. This is also true of white Millennials—they are considerably more progressive than their older counterparts.  In the last two elections, the Republic margin among white Millennials has averaged 20 points below that among white voters as a whole.  And Millennials are becoming a larger and larger proportion of the white electorate with every passing year. By the time the 2020 election is held, they’ll make up about two out of every five (37 percent) of all white voters.

2. White Republicans are too concentrated in the most conservative areas of the country. Even assuming Republicans can get past the factors above and continue inflating the national support among whites, that will not necessarily yield success against Democrats’ domination of the electoral college. As Brownstein points out, “Romney’s national margins among the various groups of white voters are inflated by Obama’s utter collapse in the country’s most conservative regions, particularly the South.” This chart makes his point plainly — Obama did much better among white voters in competitive states than in the South or Appalachia:

whites by state1. Every year, the pool of white voters shrinks. The most important reason why the GOP’s desperate quest to squeeze ever more voters out of the white population is doomed to fail is that every year there are fewer of them. How Republicans can look at charts like this one:

minority-growth

Or this one:

pop-projections-by-race

and still place their faith in a white people forever strategy is beyond me. But they do.

Republicans seem to think they will soon be matching the Gipper’s 64 percent share of the white vote in his 1984 re-election victory and then some. But, as Karl Rove (!) put it, “it’s unreasonable to expect Republicans to routinely pull numbers that last occurred in a 49-state sweep.” Unreasonable the white voters strategy may be, but since when has that stopped the contemporary Republican party from believing something?

BOTTOM LINE: Instead of demanding more damaging austerity and pursuing an endless series of unpopular attacks on Obamacare, Republicans should attempt to broaden their appeal by pursuing policies like immigration reform with a pathway to earned citizenship.

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OBAMACARE by the Numbers …

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Guess how some members of Congress are spending their August vacation:
They’re touring the country, going state by state and district by district to convince people that Obamacare isn’t working — never mind the benefits that millions of families are already feeling.
After trying and failing to repeal the law (40 times!), they’re starting to get desperate. OFA’s Truth Team is here to set the record straight.
Fight back against the cynical opponents of Obamacare by sharing some truth about how Obamacare is already helping folks all across the country — here’s a perfect graphic to get started:

 

Check the real facts on Obamacare.

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Is your member of Congress afraid of Regulatory agencies


just another rant …

What we need are MORE Regulatory agencies doing their jobs … period

If you hear the noise, the fear mongering coming from Teapublicans you might want to laugh first, tilt your head to the side then furrow your brow and ask where were you when the reports came in that we were losing 750,000 jobs month after month, that several financial institutions crashed due to some big time corruption.

Unfortunately, knowing job creators are sitting on trillions of dollars due to what they call “excessive regulation” and “uncertainty” in a time when lack of it created our financial crisis is quite offensive as some Americans continue to lose homes, jobs and health care. The fact is that members of Congress actually needs to invest in their fellow Americans.  It is not lost on me that Teapublican members of Congress have conveniently  forgotten about the Bush agency parties, drilling permits approved of with tankers that probably were just on the edge of being technically safe.  How remarkable is it to hear the current nonsense about the Keystone XL pipeline after all that happened and was exposed during the BP spill is a lesson in what members of Congress will do say and push when their personal investments are involved. It is obvious they have forgotten what led up to the Massey Mine disaster as well.

Fact is, there are things that need strict guidelines, most parents want Clean Air, Clean Water and not only affordable health care but some of us would actually pay a smidge more to make sure that food, flights and anything else that seems too big to handle for an individual can be by the Government and not privatized.  If Teapublicans believe privatization is the only way to create more jobs remember; that it also means your cost for services may go up which folks are complaining about now … right; an increase in insurance premiums could be just a start. I like having firefighters, cleared roads, police, the EPA and FEMA and most thing it is worth paying the Government to act for everyone, not just a select few. I will not forget the man who failed to pay his protection fee which resulted in his house burning down; that is what privatization does. I expect the Government to be our children’s watchdog for their health, our future and corrupt regulators need not apply.  While the Heritage Foundation is the Teapublicans training ground with quite different attitude about regulations, it is my contention that the Heritage Foundation opinion should not be driving what Republicans in Congress say do or vote.

Yet,  folks and organizations like the Grover Norquist’s and the Heritage Foundation just do not understand that they only represent a small percentage of voters and after having read the article it definitely sounded like the Heritage Foundation would love to go around the voter if they could. I find it almost amusing to read how conservative groups rationalize their feelings about regulations. The Heritage Foundation subscribes to wanting a new society. That should scare us all.  Then again, it just sheds light on how out of touch the Heritage group is and if this is the meme being pushed on members of Congress who are not only supposed to be working for the People paid by “We the People”,  it is truly a  sad example of what being a member of Congress means.

I totally get Capitalism. We all strive to be self-sufficient. I just happen to believe it should be with a lower case c, which includes small businesses, and those who aspire to get ahead not just or only for big Corporations who more often than not seem to send opportunities and jobs overseas to avoid regulations .

The featured picture Is called “Faces”  taken from the National Museum of African American History and Culture article

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52 Clinics Closed


Going Backwards on Women’s Equality Day

Today is Women’s Equality Day, which marks the anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It’s now been 93 years and while much progress has been made, everyone’s right to vote is under attack and women are still far from equal.

Unfortunately, we also got fresh evidence today that the GOP’s war on women is taking a discernible toll on women’s reproductive rights. An analysis by the Huffington Post found that 52 clinics have closed since the recent record-breaking assault on abortion rights accelerated in 2010.

Check out their graphic to get a sense of the coast-to-coast assault on access to abortion:

2013_08_AbortionClosures-555x1019

Evening Brief: Important Stories That You Might’ve Missed

The latest on the GOP’s latest manufactured crisis.

Millionaire congressmen are giving up government-sponsored health coverage (and forcing their low-level staffers to do the same).

BP thinks it’s done enough following the worst offshore oil disaster in history and it’s not shy about saying so.

Video suggests hurricanes be named after politicians who deny climate change.

The Republican Party’s obsession with killing Obamacare is killing the Republican Party.

Latest news on insurance rates from the states shows that Obamacare is working.

The Tea Party is now covering news at the Washington Post.

GOP senator says food stamps are like slavery.

Justice Ginsburg calls the Roberts Corporate Court “one of the most activist in history.”

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Burning Down the House


Will GOP Obstructionism Hand the House to Democrats?

The Progress Report

As we’ve been discussing, the Republican Party is in the midst of a meltdown over Obamacare. The party is united in its irrational opposition to the law’s offer of health security to millions of Americans; however, the GOP is nevertheless engaged in an all-out civil war over whether or not to shut down the government in a last ditch effort to try and derail the law.

(Ironically, even Republicans admit that shutting down the government won’t actually stop Obamacare from moving forward.)

Dozens and dozens of Congressional Republicans have signed onto letters advocating a government shutdown over Obamacare.

Yesterday, Heritage Action began a national pro-government shutdown tour that NPR reports even Republicans think means “political suicide” for the party. The former Tea Party Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), now the president of the Heritage Foundation, told a town hall audience that any Republicans who are afraid of shutting down the government ought to be “replaced.”

DeMint may get his wish, sort of. Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira, an expert in political demography, explains how the GOP’s “coordinated campaign to alienate anyone interested in functional governance” could hand Democrats control of the House of Representatives in 2014.

Teixeira’s analysis is a bit of a longread for this space, but it’s worth it:

Why are Republicans so freaked out?

At this point, they have a good chance — perhaps around 50-50 — of picking up enough seats to take the Senate, while Democrats’ chances of picking up the 17 seats they need to regain control of the House look considerably smaller than that. And yet, as one Politico story put it, “it is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be.”

Politico suggests the reason for the glumness is fear about the political fallout from the GOP’s unyielding, nihilistic approach to governance on issues like Obamacare and the debt ceiling. That problem may be far worse than they imagine. A close scrutiny of the data reveals several demographic weak points that the current wave of Republican crazy could activate, leading to the outcome they dread the most: Democratic control of both houses of Congress.

Start with minorities. It’s not well-known, but Republicans in 2010 benefited not only from relatively low minority turnout (standard for an off-year election) but also from relatively low minority support for Democratic candidates. Emphasis here is on the relative: minority support for House Democrats in 2010 was 73-25 — high, but below the 77-22 margin that minorities averaged in the three off-year elections that preceded 2010. If minorities snap back to 77-22 Democratic support as a consequence of Republican misbehavior, and the expected 2 percentage point increase in the share of minority voters from population trends emerges, then the Republican 6.8 percentage point margin in 2010 will be immediately sliced in half. And if the minority vote goes even stronger for the Democrats, reaching 2012 levels, that would eliminate about three-quarters of the Republicans’ 2010 advantage all on its own.

Another demographic problem for the GOP comes from a more surprising quarter: seniors. As Erica Seifert of Democracy Corps noted in a recent memo:

There’s something going on with seniors: It is now strikingly clear that they have turned sharply against the GOP. This is apparent in seniors’ party affiliation and vote intention, in their views on the Republican Party and its leaders, and in their surprising positions on jobs, health care, retirement security, investment economics, and the other big issues that will likely define the 2014 midterm elections.

We first noticed a shift among seniors early in the summer of 2011, as Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare became widely known (and despised) among those at or nearing retirement. Since then, the Republican Party has come to be defined by much more than its desire to dismantle Medicare. To voters from the center right to the far left, the GOP is now defined by resistance, intolerance, intransigence, and economics that would make even the Robber Barons blush. We have seen other voters pull back from the GOP, but among no group has this shift been as sharp as it is among senior citizens.

It is therefore quite plausible that the GOP will benefit far less from senior support in 2014 than in 2010. If the senior share of voters returns to normal levels (19 percent) and the Republican margin among this group drops to its post-2000 average (6 points, about where it is right now in the Democracy Corps polls) that would take care of the rest of the GOP margin from 2010, getting the Democrats slightly past the break-even point in the popular vote.

Of course, given the well-known GOP advantage in translating seats to votes, Democrats probably need to do substantially better than breaking even to attain a majority in the House. That won’t be easy, but there are certainly potential avenues to shift the 2014 House vote even farther in Democrats’ direction. There is the youth vote, for example, which was relatively poor for the Democrats in 2010 (55-42) and could certainly improve, as well as possibly turn out in larger numbers. The latter could also be true of the minority vote, whose projected 2 point increase in voter share, is due solely to population increase. If relative minority turnout is better in 2014 than 2010, then there will be an even larger increase in minority vote share over 2010, pushing the Democrats’ margin farther toward what they need to take the House.

Make no mistake about it: the Democrats face an uphill climb. But the possibilities outlined above inch closer to reality every day the GOP continues its coordinated campaign to alienate anyone interested in functional governance.

BOTTOM LINE: If Republicans shut down the government over Obamacare or their demands for more damaging austerity, they might get to personally experience repeal and replace after all.