From a good, in-depth, NBC analysis piece (“Democrats: Left in the Lurch”), the byline of which reads “The curious decline and uncertain future of the Democratic Party”:
Future demographic changes should eventually put Democrats back in the White House, but that will do nothing to solve their problems down ballot and could take more time than they can afford. To win again now, Democrats will have to beat their geographic disadvantage by holding together a diverse coalition that has already shown major signs of crackup.
Pinning hopes on demographic change (translation: waiting on the dying out of whites in America, and the assumption of monolithically voting on the part of non-whites) is actually a strategy.
Of gerrymandering being a factor for the Dems’ precarious state:
Jowie Chen, a professor at the University of Michigan, has run hundreds of computer simulations to compare real election results to hypothetical ones in non-gerrymandered districts. The results show Democrats’ unintentional self-gerrymandering is arguably a bigger handicap than the GOP’s intentional gerrymandering.
In 2014, for instance, Republicans won 247 House seats with the help of Republican-leaning districts gerrymandered after the 2010 census. According to Chen’s simulations, however, the GOP still would have won 245 seat if the election were run again in non-gerrymandered districts.
Gerrymandering can have a big impact on individual states, like in politically divided North Carolina, where snaking districts help Republicans control 10 of the state’s 13 congressional seats. But Democrats also play this game in states they control, offsetting Republican gerrymandering, according to Chen.
Oops.
One underreported aspect of the left’s vaunted ‘demography change’ is that such demographic change is highly concentrated in already-Democratic locales:
Last year, two demographers influential in Democratic circles, Bill Frey of the liberal Center for American Progress and Ruy Teixeira of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, along with statistician and policy expert Rob Griffin, explored a half dozen possible paths for each party in the 2016 election. Most scenarios they ran through their rigorous statistical analysis favored Democrats, given the country’s underlying demographic change in the party’s favor. But one represented the party’s nightmare: Scenario F.
Scenario F predicted a hypothetical surge of white working class voters for Republicans on Election Day, similar to the one that actually helped Trump win. Their prediction nearly nailed the results (they missed the regional nature of Trump’s bump, assuming the surge would be more national), so Teixeira and Fry’s other conclusions should worry Democrats.
If they can keep those white working class voters in future presidential elections, “Republicans could obtain and keep an electoral vote advantage over a number of cycles, despite underlying demographic changes that favor Democrats,” the simulations predicted.
Worse, even if Democrats got a similarly sized surge in minority votes — Scenario E — “Democrats do not pick up any additional electoral votes,” the researchers added.
Unfortunately for Democrats, their geographic and demographic challenges overlap. For instance, Latinos, among whom Democrats have the most room to improve turnout, often live in politically unhelpful places. California alone is home to more than a quarter of the nation’s Latinos while another fifth live in Texas.
One paradoxical observation: The more liberal CA becomes (can it get anymore leftwing?), the more ‘open’ to illegal immigrants (e.g., sanctuary cities) and, by extension, legalized Mexican immigrants (the natural magnet of high-concentration of one’s ethnicity), the more CA will serve to offset the political consequences of demographic change towards Mexicans.
To the heart of the matter:
Since the November election, the Democratic Party has been gripped by an existential dilemma: Does it try to win back white working class voters or cut them loose? While the choices aren’t mutually exclusive, they involve trade-offs in how the party speaks to voters and which ideas it prioritizes.
While Democrats will inevitably attempt to pursue some combination of both — “We don’t need to decide between social justice and economic justice. We’ve got to have all of that,” Democratic National Committee Chair candidate Keith Ellison said — it’s worthwhile to examine the choices separately to clarify the differences.
One strategy of the Obama Coalition was to not devote much resources trying to get white votes. Such votes would be more than offset by fringier groups. But this wisdom of this strategy failed to see the variable in the equation that consolidated this coalition: a cult of personality surrounding The Organizer.
Also, as we have since since Trump’s victory, the Democrats (and their media counterparts) show zero inclination to scale back their ‘racism is everywhere!’ hysteria. In fact, rather than tacking back to the middle, they appear to be quadrupling down on Identity Politics and KKKrazy Glue alarmism.
