RIP GOP

July 1, 2019
If demography is destiny, then it would appear that the Republicans are in big trouble. Democratic pollster Greenberg takes up the argument he began to unfold in America Ascendant (2015): The GOP is fighting a war, mostly on the cultural front, that it cannot hope to win, its "original sin" being the much-in-the-news war on women's rights to control their own bodies. This culture war is being waged by a bloc of evangelical states that are ever less important in the electoral mix, in large part because millennials, who tend to be socially liberal, are moving to the big cities, depopulating the countryside, and turning that culture war into an urban-vs.-rural battleground that the moribund white majority will eventually lose. Try as it might, the Trump administration cannot change the fact that the foreign-born populations of the U.S. is growing, with 12 million foreign-born migrants swelling the population of the nation's cities and suburbs. Given that "every religious denomination is coping with drops in the number of those who are religiously observant," and given that younger people generally support gay marriage and multiculturalism, it's the GOP's world to lose. That said, as Greenberg notes, there's still the business of messaging: The Democrats, he argues, have to change their notion that government can be a ladder to lift the poor and instead hammer on the more robust point that American workers need a level playing field. "Working people are no fools," writes the author, and they're now seeing the effects on their paychecks and lives of tariffs, cuts in health care and social services, and the like. Winning the blue-collar white vote won't be the easiest thing, Greenberg allows, but Trump lost significant numbers of those voters between 2016 and 2018--and 2020 is coming up fast. Prognostication is always a risky business, but Greenberg makes a good case for a near-term future in which tea partiers and Trumpies will be largely irrelevant.

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