*bump*
Or, to play into the expectations of someone on another forum I lurk through: *das bumpski, Comrade*
(Mongoose knows who I'm talking about.)http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=qPK
Obama wins, 324 to 214. The casting of ballots, at this point, is a formality necessary only to verify this result. (Actually, I'm waffling on Virginia and Iowa, but give me my moment.)
I do so enjoy being right, especially when it produces so many delicious Republican tears. Okay, okay, so I did give the Romney-Ryan ticket too many electoral votes in that projection. I admit that I did not consider that duo to be as useless and incompetent on the campaign trail as they turned out to be.
Bravado aside, there is something that the media beat to death on election night and that I touched on early in the thread that deserves one more whack:
I included Reagan as proof that a conservative candidate could win elections...
...twenty-eight and thirty-two years ago. The political landscape has changed significantly. Voters and candidates both tend to be more polarized; information disseminates more rapidly, and the nation's demography is radically different than in the 1980's.
(Emphasis added.)In the 1980's, over nine-tenths of the electorate was white, and the Republicans were still very effectively using an electoral holdover from 1964, the Southern Strategy. In its basest terms, the Southern Strategy was the use of dogwhistles to trigger racial and social prejudices in the white electorate to turn them against Democrats. Remember when the death penalty was a big issue in national politics in 1988? It's something that I recommend looking into, if you haven't already, but in short the elder George Bush's ad campaign about Dukkakis being "soft on crime" is now considered a textbook example of the kind of dogwhistle politics that were iconic of the later days of the Southern Strategy. Specific to Reagan, was the mythical Welfare Queen, the black woman who used her welfare cheque to buy herself a new Cadillac. She's still brought up by the modern GOP, albeit behind a slightly thicker veil, when Republicans remark about the "makers and takers" or Romney's infamous forty-seven percent.
These dogwhistles don't work as well anymore, though, since the electorate is now seventy-percent white, instead of ninety. Moreover, as the strategy is more easily recognized, it becomes less effective, both because knowledge of the strategy innoculates people against it (i.e. you recognize and are disgusted by it) and because the implementation has to become more subtle and narrowly targetted.
That twenty percent drop in the national proportion of white voters, though, belies the actual effect on Presidential politics. Because of the way electoral votes are apportioned, you have to dig into the geographic distribution of these growing minority populations. Consider New Mexico: Prior to the 1990's, this was a rural, white state that tended to swing as the national electorate swung. From 1972 to 1992, the state defied the election results once, in 1976, favoring Gerry Ford over Jimmy Carter. Beginning in the 1990's, the population of Mexico-born, naturalized citizens living in the state began to spike, and the state quickly changed from swing to blue. Case-in-point, Obama held a double-digit lead in New Mexico, in both of his electoral victories.
What other states have rapidly-growing populations of Mexican-Americans? Arizona, Colorado, and Texas all have Hispanic populations growing at three to four times the rate of the Caucasian population. If the GOP does not make themselves attractive to this demographic, then they are going to see Colorado's nine electoral votes slip beyond their grasp before the next national census. Shortly thereafter, they'll find themselves fighting for the forty-nine (likely more, after subsequent censuses, given the overall population growth) electoral votes that used to be safely in their pocket.
Pile on Virginia. As the District of Columbia continues to expand south, across the Virginia state line, more D.C. residents/voters will technically be Virginians, pushing their electoral votes more and more firmly into the Democratic column. Virginia could potentially cede more territory to the District, but this would have the unfortunate side-effect of expelling members of the state's tax base, purely in the name of national politics. Barring a Republican governor from the state giving very serious thought to running him/herself for President, I don't see that happening. Chalk up another thirteen for the Democrats, regardless of GOP attempts to draw in Latinos.
Finally, Puerto Rico: The population of this protectorate has begun to warm to the notion of statehood. They tend to favor liberal candidates as well. In joining the Union, they would add two members to the Senate, and gain at least one seat (likely three or four) in the House, the latter at the expense of another state. The electoral vote(s) lost would likely be lost from a blue state, as it is the populous blue states that are shrinking in population (or not growing as quickly as the rest of the nation), but this would still be a net-gain of two electoral votes for the Democrats. (Note that this also moves the goalpost from 270 to 271 to win.)
By 2032, then, we're looking at a map, where the Democrat has 277 electoral votes safely in his/her column, compared to the GOP's 163, assuming North Carolina and Iowa swing their way, without contest. There's 100 electoral votes to fight for, future censuses not withstanding, found in Arizona, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and New Hampshire, but it doesn't matter, because the Democrat only needs to win the safe states in order to win the election. By 2052, if the trends continue, and the GOP doesn't undertake major reforms to appeal to minority groups, the numbers become 326 safe Democratic electoral votes to the same 163 safe GOP electoral votes, with only fifty-one to fight over. The GOP are effectively setting the Democrats up to win the White House in landslide after consistant landslide in the second half of the century.
This prediction is by no means infallible. The younger George Bush managed to win about forty percent of the Hispanic vote, but since then, the GOP has become dogmatically anti-immigrant, at least in part because the far right wing of the party has taken the leadership by a short leash and is leading them down this path to national irrelevance.
Oddly enough, less than a month after the election, there is foreshadowing of what the GOP intends to do with its immigration position: House Resolution 6429, the STEM Jobs Act of 2012. On initial inspection, this looks like a decent bill for the GOP to put forward, as it offers a new visa program for people seeking entry to the United States with a graduate degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (hence, STEM). Then, you get to the very cryptically written section three. When you dive into the Immigration and Nationality Act to read all of the text being struck from that law by section three of H.R. 6429, you see that what's being eliminated is a lottery that allows about 50,000 applicants per year to receive a visa, without sponsorship of an employer or spouse. How many visas would H.R. 6429 create? About 50,000. So the message being sent by this resolution is something to the effect of, "Send us your mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, but keep the rest of the rabble to yourselves."
Why am I characterizing that as a Republican message? The bill was introduced in the House by Richard Nugent, Republican, from Florida's fifth district. The bill passed the House with 218 Republicans supporting the bill to five opposed, with seventeen not voting. By contrast, only twenty-seven Democrats voted in favor of the House version of the bill. President Obama has threatened to veto the House version of this bill, should it reach his desk, but that is unlikely to be necessary, as the version circulating in the Democrat-controlled Senate provides a STEM degree as an additional avenue to getting a visa, rather than an exclusive alternative to the lottery system.
Now, it is two years before the next Congressional election and four before the next Presidential election, so it's possible that the GOP is going to try to make a course correction closer to one of those dates, banking on the short memory of the American voter. This may prove to be a blunder, though. The Lilly Ledbetter Act, the first bill President Obama signed into law in 2009 over unified Republican opposition, was chronologically distant from the 2012 election, but when women's issues entered the spotlight in the Presidential and several Senate races, so too did that piece of legislation. Romney ignored it, saying that he could not comment on a bill he hadn't read, and then he apparently refused to read it at any point in October, because when he was asked about it again in early November, he still said he couldn't comment on legislation he hadn't read. I can't help but feel that STEM or something similar will do in 2016 and beyond what Ledbetter did in 2012.
tl;dr - I need to build a bottling plant, just outside the White House gates, because if the GOP doesn't make some major changes to its immigration stance, starting yesterday, then traditional methods of gathering their delicious tears, after each election, will be inadequate in the years and decades to come.
