06-02-2019, 03:25 PM
(06-02-2019, 01:36 PM)David Horn Wrote:(06-01-2019, 09:17 PM)Hintergrund Wrote:(05-30-2019, 12:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: So 1.5% of the electorate that is net 10% R is replaced every year by an electorate that is net-30% D, so the electorate goes 0.6% more D every year, and 2.4% more D from 2016 to 2020.
Yeah... on the condition that the Reps are dumb enough to never, ever change their strategy (say what you want about Trump, but his strategy WAS new), and the Democrats will never, ever piss off their fanbase. (What about the conservative Catholic Hispanics?)
If you're suggesting that both parties are in a repositioning era, I would agree. Based solely on results to date, the Dems are moving toward the future majority and the Reps are solidifying a declining base. That said, it's impossible to say that this is the long term strategy of either party, because one election cycle seems to qualify as a long perspective.
Republicans seem to be more responsive to their large base of poor whites and the white economic elites, and Democrats seem to be juggling politics to accommodate multiple, smaller bases. Democrats have had a more difficult task in piecing together a coalition of groups that have little in common. Well-off Asian-Americans have little in common with poor blacks except for a distrust of the GOP coalition. But think of the New Deal coalition that had Western agrarian reformers, big-city Jews, and 'ethnic' white people ... talk about dissimilarity! In the meantime the Republican base shrinks as it becomes less effective.
The Democratic coalition could grow so large that it could contain people who will become very conservative on economics and insular in culture, and that could create a rift -- once the GOP is irrelevant.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.