This is an interesting article. Interesting enough I have been stating telling this to many of my Republican friends. Many do not seem to understand or have the empathy to see how the current Republican Platform comes across to most who do not fit that certain non-inclusive profile. It is not in our minds, it is in the GOP platform and expounded everyday in rhetoric on the echo chamber that is FoxNews and all the Right Wing radio shows. I repeat, when will the real Republicans retake the Grand Old Party.
The Center for American Politics’ Ruy Teixeira, one of the top political demographers in the country, has a new paper out in which he examines the two major party coalitions, with a focus on the current and future prospects of the Republican Party. For the GOP, says Teixeira, things look grim, in large part because the country is becoming less white and more educated. He provides specific data showing how college educated voters are growing, and non-college educated shrinking, as shares of the electorate; likewise for the growing non-white v. shrinking white populations.
"The Democratic Party will become even more dominated by the emerging constituencies that gave Barack Obama his historic 2008 victory, while the Republican Party will be forced to move toward the center to compete for these constituencies. As a result, modern conservatism is likely to lose its dominant place in the GOP," he writes, adding that "the Republican Party as currently constituted is in need of serious and substantial changes in approach."(Emphasis mine; will return to this point momentarily)
OK, not much new or surprising here in terms of the trends; those who follow these political-demographic patterns know the basic contours of the projected population trends moving forward. What’s interesting are the recommendations Teixeira offers–to Republicans, as opposed to Democrats, the target audience for much of previous writings–for how to deal with the challenges of the population changes ahead.
FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right
