Republican rule could hold well past 2016
Demographics alone may not be enough to support Democrats’ presidential hopes
After elections, politicians always profess to have heard the message sent by voters. In the wake of the Democrats’ big defeat in last week’s congressional polls, President Barack Obama added a twist, saying he had heard a message from people who had not voted as well.
Mr Obama would much prefer to listen to these non-voting voters for good reason. The predominately young, female, black and Hispanic eligible adults who did not cast a ballot are big Democratic supporters.
As self-serving as Mr Obama’s comment was, the bifurcation of the US electorate underlines a profound weakness for the Democrats that has been overshadowed by the endless Republican infighting of recent years.
The Tea Party movement piled on the pain throughout by electing in Republican primaries non-electable candidates and joining evangelicals to promote policies seemingly tailor-made to turn off women and minorities.
The much-maligned Republican establishment has started to steady the ship, and their efforts paid off with the selection, and then election, of enough credible candidates to give them a majority in the Senate.
The Republicans’ dominance of the House of Representatives, aided by their redrawing of electoral boundaries after 2010, is such that Democrats privately admit they have no chance of regaining the majority until perhaps as late as 2022, four elections away.
Even if the Senate swings back and forth, the US “has entered a long phase of electoral volatility and divided government”, in the words of Ruy Teixeira, of the Democratic-aligned Centre for American Progress.
According to this thesis, the Republicans retain an advantage in congressional and many statewide elections, while the Democrats retain the upper hand in presidential politics.
The Democrats have won the popular vote in five out of the past six presidential elections and believe the country’s inexorable demographic and social trends – in short, more liberal and less white – overwhelmingly favour them.
But demographics are not destiny in politics, and a Republican party lithe enough to moderate its rhetoric, if not its policies, on issues ranging from abortion to immigration could pick apart the coalition that elected Mr Obama twice.
To take one example, about half of the attack ads run by the Democrats’ Mark Udall in the Colorado Senate race revolved around the Republicans’ “war on women” and abortion. Mr Udall lost badly.
Mrs Clinton does much better than Mr Obama with white men, the constituency that continues to depart from the Democrats in droves. In Louisiana, the Democrats won about 16 per cent of the white vote, and are expected to lose the seat in a run-off election in December.
Louisiana may be part of the old confederate south, but Mr Clinton won the state twice when running for president. It looks out of reach for his wife now.
Mrs Clinton’s prohibitive status to win the Democrats’ 2016 nomination itself hides a weakness – that besides her, the party has no one else capable of stepping up to the plate.
Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, acts as a spear carrier for the anti-Wall Street left and little more. The air went out of another rival, Martin O’Malley, the outgoing Maryland governor, after Republicans beat his highly favoured successor on Tuesday in the heavily Democratic state.
The Democratic congressional leadership, highly effective in its day, is looking sclerotic. The Democratic governors’ ranks are thin.
In the words of commentator Ron Brownstein, Democrats remain dangerously dependent on a boom-and-bust coalition of young people and minorities.
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