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Daniel McGraw writes that based on their demographic characteristics the Democratic and Republican parties face two very different futures. There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older and far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, McGraw calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. About 2.3 million of President Barack Obama’s voters have died too but that leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats. “I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”
Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. "Millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.” Exit polling indicates that millennials have split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday May 20 2015, @04:47AM
Trying to apply straight line projections in a system as chaotic as American politics is pure idiocy. The two parties always manage to seesaw back and forth even if there is the very occasional disaster like the Whigs imploding and the Republicans arising from the wreckage. Remember that it wasn't too long ago that a Republican carried CA, IL and NY. The wheel turns, the battle lines move, alliances shift.
Just to throw out a real flamebaity scenario, look at the trendline in race. White will soon be a minority, what happens if they start 80-90%+ block voting like the other minority groups in a pure winner take all fight? Since Asians get screwed even harder than Whites by the Democrats current flavor of racial spoils (Affirmative Action) it isn't totally insane to imagine they also come over with the right offer, especially since they are pretty capitalist in general. What does that do to the numbers. Ouch.
Or consider this one. The Democratic coalition is a patchwork of interest groups who can't all get what they are demanding. As they gain power and are expected to actually deliver, and can't, things go kaboom. See Hispanics and their demands for unlimited immigration vs the unions. The Democrats had the House, a fillibuster proof Senate and the President in 2009-2010 and didn't do jack on immigration, doubt they will sit for being screwed over like that again... they ain't got Jesse Jackson and Sharpton to keep them on the plantation no matter what. Or look at the potential conflict between the Green demand to dismantle industrial civilization vs the unions. And for a real doomsday scenario for Dems, watch Blacks vs the education system and big city kleptocracies that keep them in perpetual poverty, they ever figure that one out and ho boy!
All it takes is a fracture along just one of those fault lines and the other side to actually be smart enough to exploit it and BOOM! There go those projections.
And those projections are based on the country basically being the same. Not likely. This recession is going to hit the second dip any month now and the Fed ain't got squat left in the toolbox to paper it over. Keynesian economics had a good run, a disastrous one, but a good long one nevertheless; it is about to end. The consequences of that? If anybody knows they ain't saying because they are too busy preparing to get rich off the knowledge. Certain to be political fallout though.
And even if we escape that disaster we have the looming implosion of the low skilled labor market. What will be the political implications of the robot revolution? And may the Force be with us if they actually build a damned AI, the political implications will be the least of our worries.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Wednesday May 20 2015, @07:02AM
Jmorris on race, education, the future. A while ago, someone commented that since it was jmorris, no citations were necessary. Now we see why. Whites a minority, OMG. Best hole up in the Twin Tetons restaurant until the whole thing blows over, or Texas secedes in order to be a majority white by the power of Walker Texas Ranger state, or someone runs over someone's foot with their dang hog! Just got real!
Alright, what I am saying here is that all you refugees from oppression in your native lands, all you "Americans" (Amerigo was Italian, by the way), need to get your shit straight. The racial politics that have prevailed in America since its founding are quite bizarre and unusual. Slavery is the defining aspect of America, but it was not just slavery as practiced in other cultures, such as my beloved Samos. Slaves to us were just people who were owned by other people. In America, it was subhumans who were owned, this is the source of much harm, much hatred, and much suffering. All this, as Yoda once said, leads to the Dark Side. Jmorris is well on his way there.
So what will happen? Well, it is pretty clear that the Republican party is toast. They tied their wagon to racists and scared old people (i.e. Fox News). And they will cease to exist. Not the first time a political party has misjudged history. The Whigs did well for a while, the Loyalists kinda disappeared or went to Canada after the American Revolution. The Free Soil party has not been heard of in a long time, either, though you may have heard of one of its members: Abraham Lincoln?
And then there is this:
The Democratic coalition is a patchwork of interest groups who can't all get what they are demanding. As they gain power and are expected to actually deliver, and can't, things go kaboom.
The Republican "coallition" is even more packed with dynamite, and in fact has already exploded. Fundamentalist Christians, being a bit slow, even realized under the Bush administration that they had been used and had. Libertarians, as illustrated by the earlier posts in this thread, are coming to the same conclusion. Bankers? Well, where else are they going to go? And then there are the just plain old (and I do mean "old") racists, who thanks to Nixon's "Southern Strategy" are now firmly dying Republican instead of Yellow Dawg Democrats. But as the Fine Article points out, we just have to wait for them to die, knowing the future will go against everything the believe in.
AI? Jmorris brings up AI? Jmorris may be an AI, albeit a poor implementation. Hmm, what if politics were a rational pursuit, where disagreements were settled by appeal to reason and data? I imagine that any AI Americans could come up with would be Black, and thus would face the same resistance of stupidity and unreason as Obama has. Hey, wait a minute! jmorris may be too late?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday May 20 2015, @12:24PM
Do you actually have anything on "what happens if they start 80-90%+ block voting like the other minority groups in a pure winner take all fight" other than what boils down to they aren't doing it now?
Whats interesting to look it is the hidden assumptions that you both believe in. Multiculturalism is dead dead dead as is the melting pot. Governments don't survive too long under those conditions. Its quite possible we'll end up like the ottoman empire or austrohungarian empire or roman empire or pretty much all the others.
Something carefully not considered for obvious political reasons is the original federalist system and constitution and all that 1770s thinking came about in a country not much bigger than England although it was on an immensely larger land mass. Then the luck of history and enormous amounts of very temporary cheap energy and you get a continent sized homeland empire and a world wide empire. But cheap energy is ending and all historical continent sized empires always collapse and fracture. The north american continent is "naturally" on a long time scale going to tend toward political divisions a lot more like the continent of south america than the continent of australia. So "real long term" (although maybe thats only a decade?) its going to be interesting seeing how the USA breaks down into smaller countries.
Once that happens, and humans being humans, the ethic cleansing and refugees, a lot of the multicultural stress will disappear and that will totally mess up existing political balances, the whole "divide and conqueror" thing doesn't work when you're no longer divided. So a nearly 100% black south as a separate, poor, poorly governed (think of a country the size of Detroit, run just like Detroit, aka Somalia), and poorly educated country will not have the internal stresses our cities have today. And whatever western nation arises still won't have water and probably won't speak English either and probably won't like anyone that speaks English (thanks, ronald reagan for making them all hate us via your little proxy wars and support of dictators). Its going to be an interesting political future for the north american continent. What does it mean politically to the democratic party if the country of "new england" no longer has blacks or hispanics in its boundaries, for example? What does it mean for the republicans if the southern evangelical whites all get kicked out of the south as refugees because they're white?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2015, @05:48PM
Because of course any 100% black area will be poor, poorly governed, and poorly educated. I mean, they're black, how could it be anything else, right?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 20 2015, @03:39PM
To me it looks like the passionate people in both parties, the Christian Coalition folks in the Republican Party, and the progressives in the Democratic Party, are both played for fools by the establishment in the Democratic and Republican parties, which is really the same establishment. We've seen apparent total control of the federal government switch from Republicans to Democrats in the past decade, but nothing changed because the establishment maintained its actual power throughout. That control gets tighter and tighter at a faster rate as government employees cycle out to lead corporations and back again, and as government and corporations' control over the lives of citizens grows more pervasive.
Unless that core reality changes, demographics don't matter one whit.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by albert on Thursday May 21 2015, @05:16AM
It is a given that first-past-the-post voting will result in exactly two significant parties with near-equal power.
Suppose one party moves away from the center. The other party can move in the same direction, thus winning all elections. Obviously no party would be dumb enough to allow this, so as we see today there are two parties with little room between them.
Suppose the demographics change, moving the center away from the parties. The winning party can now safely afford to move in the direction of that shift. They will do so because most of their people are way over on that side, and the other party will follow. Very rarely, they don't move fast enough or well enough, causing massive upheaval, but the end result is the same: two parties in the middle. By "massive upheaval" I mean something like the losing party (or a replacing successor) jumping right over the party that initially benefits from the demographic changes. This is very possible because political concerns aren't really 1-axis; both parties are doomed to have internal ideological stress that helps to make these rare realignments possible.
So no, the Republican party isn't doomed. The current platform may well be doomed, as was the Democrat's old pro-slavery platform. Someday you might find yourself an enthusiastic Republican.