America Nears the Demographic Tipping Point

Ann Coulter's essay, how shall we say?, spilled the frijoles, at FrontPage Magazine, "'America reaches el tipping pointo'":

I apologize to America’s young people, whose dashed dreams and dim employment prospects I had laughed at, believing these to be a direct result of their voting for Obama.

On closer examination, it turns out that young voters, aged 18-29, overwhelmingly supported Romney. But only the white ones.

According to Pew Research, 54 percent of white voters under 30 voted for Romney and only 41 percent for Obama. That’s the same percentage Reagan got from the entire white population in 1980. Even the Lena Dunham demographic — white women under 30 — slightly favored Romney.

Reagan got just 43 percent of young voters in 1980 — and that was when whites were 88 percent of the electorate. Only 58 percent of today’s under-30 vote is white and it’s shrinking daily.

What the youth vote shows is not that young people are nitwits who deserve lives of misery and joblessness, as I had previously believed, but that America is hitting the tipping point on our immigration policy.

The youth vote is a snapshot of elections to come if nothing is done to reverse the deluge of unskilled immigrants pouring into the country as a result of Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration act. Eighty-five percent of legal immigrants since 1968 have come from the Third World. A majority of them are in need of government assistance.

Whites are 76 percent of the electorate over the age of 30 and only 58 percent of the electorate under 30. Obama won the “youth vote” because it is the knife’s edge of a demographic shift, not because he offered the kids free tuition and contraception (which they don’t need because it’s hard to have sex when you’re living with your parents at 27).

In 1980, Hispanics were only 2 percent of the population, and they tended to be educated, skilled workers who got married, raised their children in two-parent families and sent their kids to college before they, too, got married and had kids. (In that order.)

That profile has nothing to do with recent Hispanic immigrants, who — because of phony “family reunification” rules — are the poorest of the world’s poor.

More than half of all babies born to Hispanic women today are illegitimate. As Heather MacDonald has shown, the birthrate of Hispanic women is twice that of the rest of the population, and their unwed birthrate is one and a half times that of blacks.

That’s a lot of government dependents coming down the pike. No amount of “reaching out” to the Hispanic community, effective “messaging” or Reagan’s “optimism” is going to turn Mexico’s underclass into Republicans.

Any election analysis that doesn’t deal with the implacable fact of America’s changing demographics is bound to be wrong.

Perhaps the reason elections maven Michael Barone was so shockingly off in his election prediction this year was that, in the biggest mistake of his career, Barone has been assuring us for years that most of these Third World immigrants pouring into the country would go the way of Italian immigrants and become Republicans. They’re hardworking! They have family values!

Maybe at first, but not after coming here, having illegitimate children and going on welfare.

More at that top link.

Meanwhile, Coulter sent the progs into fevered apoplexy. See: "Ann Coulter Attacks Latinos In Column, As Conservatives Seek To Reach Out To Hispanic Voters."

Republicans and the Hispanic Vote

Two articles getting some attention: Kim Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal, "The GOP Turnout Myth," and Byron York, at the Washington Examiner, "Hispanics favor Dems but didn't decide election."

I don't think Hispanics are naturally conservative (as Charles Krauthammer argued recently, erroneously), although I do think that Republicans can pick up enough Hispanics to reduce the Democrat electoral advantage in key swing states. Strassel's essay points that out:

In Florida, 238,000 more Hispanics voted than in 2008, and Mr. Obama got 60% of Hispanic voters. His total margin of victory in Florida was 78,000 votes, so that demographic alone won it for him. Or consider Ohio, where Mr. Romney won independents by 10 points. The lead mattered little, though, given that black turnout increased by 178,000 votes, and the president won 96% of the black vote. Mr. Obama's margin of victory there was 103,000.

This is the demographic argument that is getting so much attention, and properly so. The Republican Party can hope that a future Democratic candidate won't equal Mr. Obama's magnetism for minority voters. But the GOP would do far better by fighting aggressively for a piece of the minority electorate.

And that, for the record, was the GOP's real 2012 turnout disaster. Elections are about the candidate and the message, yes, but also about the ground game. Republicans right now are fretting about Mr. Romney's failures and the party's immigration platform—that's fair enough. But equally important has been the party's mind-boggling failure to institute a competitive Hispanic ground game. The GOP doesn't campaign in those communities, doesn't register voters there, doesn't knock on doors. So while pre-election polling showed that Hispanics were worried about Obama policies, in the end the only campaign that these voters heard from—by email, at their door, on the phone—was the president's.

Often missed in talk of the GOP's "demographics problem" is that it would take relatively modest minority-voter shifts toward Republicans to return the party to a dominating force. The GOP might see that as the enormous opportunity it is, rather than a problem. The key to winning turnout is having more people to turn out in the first place.

Katie Pavlich Analyzes GOP's Electoral Prospects

An interesting discussion, and note that Pavlich eschews the Democrat Hispanic realignment thesis.

RELATED: At Legal Insurrection, "Demography Schmemography."

Red America Forced to Reconcile the Emerging Democrat-Secular Majority

I've been coping with last week's defeat with equanimity and humor, but it's hard, so I won't beat around the bush. If folks are discounting the thesis of the Democrat partisan realignment, they might find a reality check in the political future of California --- which looks to have a permanent progressive majority until we sink into the sea. Conservatives have to find a way to keep up the fight and not despair. My hunch is that the values of the founders, of liberty, self-government, law and free enterprise, will triumph one way or another, and the country will remain a beacon for those escaping tyranny around the world. But only time will tell, for the progs have got their claws into the system, and deep. A lot of conservatives can only find consolation in faith and family, and if things don't change they'll be an oppressed and persecuted minority whose traditional values are shunned.

This is the sense you get from reading the story of Beth Cox in Tennessee, at the Washington Post, "GOP’s Red America forced to rethink what it knows about the country." (Via Memeorandum.)

And then to get a sense of how vehemently Ms. Cox's values are condemned and ridiculed, read Kaili Joy Gray at the hate-site Daily Kos, "Republicans still having a sad about America's decline into socialism and decay because Obama."

I'm by nature an optimist. The election results are still sinking in for me, although, again, the California example is not all that heartwarming. The demographic divisions will be lasting, and I don't believe that Hispanics are a natural constituency for conservative values. I'll explain why in future posts, but in California the Hispanic demographic is deeply embedded in the welfare state regime and its voters backed Democrats to keep both benefits and taxes high. Political consultants can plug that fact into their magical vote-aggregating prediction machines, and choke on it.

I'll have more later...

Image Problem: Cathy McMorris Rodgers Says GOP Needs to Become 'More Modern'

This is interesting.

McMorris Rodgers is making the case for better salesmanship, or "saleswomanship," as the case may be.

At The Hill, "McMorris Rodgers: GOP needs to be more ‘modern’ not ‘moderate’":

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) on Sunday said the GOP didn’t need to adopt “more moderate” positions, but rather needed to become “more modern” by being better inclusive of women and minorities.

“I don't think it's about the Republican Party needing to become more moderate. I really believe it's the Republican Party becoming more modern,” said McMorris Rodgers, during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

More at the link.

Former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, seen at the longer clip at the link, is having none of it. He blusters about how moderate vs. modern is "a distinction without a difference."

Right.

My sense is that McMorris Rodgers is hesitant to sell out conservative values --- she's been a leader on fiscal conservatism in Congress --- and wants to make the case for the better articulation of conservative principles. I don't know if the "modern" argument is the winner, but ether way, adopting "moderate" positions will only strengthen progressivism. This is the left's meme since the election, that the GOP is extremist, although it's just more of the same "Operation Demoralize," only of the post-campaign variety.

Email Shows Difficulties of GOP Hispanic Outreach

I meant to post on this the other day, from Robert Stacy McCain, "You Stay Classy, Luis Cortez!":

Unless luiscortez@hotmail.com is a parody account, I think the e-mail he sent me eloquently refutes certain Republican arguments for “Latino outreach”:

Nice article pal. Let me simply explain what happened to your pathetic white party. yes, white party. not white republican party, just white party. it all boils down to laziness. first, you jackasses brought the black as slaves to work your fields because you were too fucking lazy to do it yourselves. what happened? the slaves fucked your white women and multiplied their population while the white man was getting drunk and fishing. then, incredibly, after not learning your god damm lesson the first time, you import latinos in the latter part of the 20th century to work your construction and blue collar jobs. and what happened, they fucked your white women and multiplied their populations while you were getting drunk and watching Nascar. But worse for you, this time you really did yourselves in! why!!?? because the last time, you imported slaves from Africa. A long ways from here. This time you imported them from Latin America!! Now they are not only coming to America to work, they are bringing their whole families and starting families here!! When will you jackass white people learn???!!! Mccain, you are not “The other Mccain”. You are just another fucking idiot white man! Now get the fuck out of the country and let the latinos lead you jerkoff!

Thank you for explaining this, Mr. Cortez: Hispanics who vote Democrat don’t do so because of policy issues, but because they identify the Republican Party with white people and a lot of Hispanics hate white people.

Continue reading.

2012 Election Marks a Political Realignment

Here's more along the lines I argued the other day, at the Los Angeles Times, "Nonwhite voters and cultural shifts make 2012 election pivotal":

The 2012 election marked the point at which a new American electoral coalition solidified its hold on politics, one built on the country's growing nonwhite population and on cultural changes that have given younger voters of all races a far different outlook on political issues from that of their elders.

The impact could be seen not just in Obama's reelection and Democratic successes in the Senate, but also in statewide referendums on same-sex marriage in which advocates of equal rights for gays and lesbians unexpectedly won four out of four. In 2004, conservatives put marriage referendums on the ballot in hopes of boosting their prospects; just eight years later, the political impact had completely reversed.

If the new coalition holds, future historians will look back at this campaign as one, like Franklin D. Roosevelt's in 1936 and Richard M. Nixon's in 1972, that marked a long-term realignment of the nation's politics.

If it holds. One enormous difference separates Obama's reelection from Roosevelt's and Nixon's: Those were landslides; Obama won narrowly. Millions of votes remain uncounted, but the president's victory margin probably will be about 2.5 percentage points. Nor did he succeed in carrying large numbers of House candidates into office with him.

That difference measures the enormous weight of a poor economy, which pulled down Obama's prospects and imperils the support he assembled.

"One way to interpret this involves changing cultural values and demographics. When those things come together, you get these pivot elections, and that's what this was," said UCLA political science professor Lynn Vavreck.

But "the economy is a huge thing here," she added. The economy this year grew just fast enough for a candidate with the advantage of incumbency to win. "If it doesn't grow more quickly, the Republicans will win in 2016," she said.

As noted, the thing about realignments is that the evidence for them is in future elections. If the GOP takes back the presidency in 2016, or even 2020, the current Democrat resurgence will look like a function of a particular time and a particular candidate --- not a long term secular trend toward large-state progressive governance. It sure does look like something deeper and structural, no doubt. But Republicans still control the governorships in a majority of the states, and they retained control of the U.S. House of Representatives. We won't be seeing Democrat Party hegemony in government, which is the true hallmark of realignment. And we're still too polarized around competing conceptions of the role of government in society. That's quite different from the years of the New Deal realignment, where government continued to expand even during the 1950s under President Eishenhower.

Speaker John Boehner Caves on Amnesty

Lame.

At the New York Times, "Speaker ‘Confident’ of Deal With White House on Immigration":

WASHINGTON — Fresh off an election in which Hispanic voters largely sided with Democrats, Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday that he was “confident” Congress and the White House could come up with a comprehensive immigration solution.

Immigration reform is “an important issue that I think ought to be dealt with,” Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said in an interview with Diane Sawyer on “ABC World News.”

“This issue has been around far too long,” he said, “and while I believe it’s important for us to secure our borders and to enforce our laws, I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”

The words conveyed a new sense of urgency from Mr. Boehner, who said earlier this year that he thought it would be politically impossible to tackle a Republican proposal on the Dream Act, which sought to open a path to citizenship for some students in the United States illegally.

According to exit polls by Edison Research, President Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote compared with Mitt Romney’s 27 percent, a gap greater than Mr. Obama’s 36-point advantage with those voters over John McCain in 2008.

Though Mr. Boehner did not elaborate on his ideas, nor give a time frame, many lawmakers want to tackle immigration legislation in the next session of Congress. The lame-duck session starting next week will be devoted to dealing with pressing tax and deficit issues.

Well, let's face it: Obama's got political capital and he's collecting dues from the opposition. But frankly, the political benefits of immigration reform (open borders amnesty) will accrue to the Democrats. No matter what Republicans do they'll still be attacked as racist. That's the way it is. We may get reform. But the Democrats will only pad their electoral constituencies.

See Jeff Goldstein for more on that, "'Why Hispanics Don’t Vote for Republicans'."

PHOTO: "'Phoenix Rising' for SB 1070 at Arizona State Capitol."

Do Dems Really Have an Emerging Majority?

From Megan McArdle, at The Daily Beast, "Is Demography Destiny?"

There's no pullout quote so read it all at the lnk. She's skeptical and raises a lot of provocative issues.

And see William Jacobson as well, "Hope already on the horizon":

I will have more in coming days on the flawed demographic narrative.

You know, the one which liberals love to push particularly since Tuesday that because the percentage of non-white people is growing, Republicans are doomed. Because skin color is destiny to them.

I'll be interested to see how all the numbers shake out. But two things I know. (1) If California's a model for the Democrats nationally, I wouldn't discount the realignment thesis too quickly. Republicans are facing a tough political environment. (2) That said, Americans can't keep spending like a drunken sailor (or they can't keep having bare-backer sex like a Castro District homosexual, to choose a different metaphor) without the bills coming due. Something will change. Political alignments could shift. And the Republicans could once again lead the charge toward both good government and political sanity.

I too will have more on this. I think there's more to the demographic tide than left wing talking points. Tuesday was a big election. It wasn't just that Romney was a flawed candidate or what have you. There's some tectonic shifts taking place. Conservatives indeed have some serious thinking ahead of them.

Is College Really for Everyone?

Well, the educational system just assumes that it is. Mostly, though, kids have to find out for themselves, and that wastes a lot of people's time and resources. Perhaps there's a better way.

In any case, from Patrice Apodaca, at The Daily Pilot, "Is College Really For Everyone?"

Romney Opens Up Decisive Lead in Florida

At the Tampa Bay Times, "Times/Bay News 9/Herald exclusive Florida poll: Romney 51, Obama 44":

Barack Obama's lackluster debate performance last week has dramatically altered the presidential race in Florida, with Mitt Romney opening up a decisive 7 percentage point lead, according to a new Tampa Bay Times/Bay News 9/Miami Herald poll.

The survey conducted this week found 51 percent of likely Florida voters supporting Romney, 44 percent backing Obama and 4 percent undecided. That's a major shift from a month ago when the same poll showed Obama leading 48 percent to 47 percent — and a direct result of what Obama himself called a "bad night" at the first debate.

The debate prompted 5 percent of previously undecided voters and 2 percent of Obama backers to move to Romney. Another 2 percent of Obama supporters said they are now undecided because of the debate.

"There's no question in my mind that debate made people stand up and pay attention, and it really wiped away any questions people had about Romney, whether they were undecided or soft for Obama," said Brad Coker of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, which conducted the poll for the Times and its media partners.

Keep reading.

And see Alana Goodman, at Commentary, "New Florida Poll Bad Omen for Obama."

Very bad.

Alana breaks it down, especially on the Hispanic vote, purportedly the Democrats' biggest constituency after the "back in chains" blacks.

Supreme Court Oral Arguments in Major New Affirmative Action Case

Althouse reports on the coverage from SCOTUS blog, "Justice Breyer directly asked whether Grutter — the case approving of a type of affirmative action admissions — should be overruled?"

And then going straight to SCOTUS blog, see the roundup, "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin." And especially, Lyle Denniston, "Argument recap: Will Grutter be reshaped? (FINAL UPDATE)":

Affirmative action is alive but ailing, the idea of “critical mass” to measure racial diversity is in very critical condition, and a nine-year-old precedent may have to be reshaped in order to survive. Those were the dominant impressions at the close of a one-hour, nineteen-minute argument in the Supreme Court Wednesday. There is almost no doubt that the University of Texas’s affirmative action plan for admitting its freshman classes is in trouble with four Justices, but has at least qualified support from three others. The one most in doubt among the eight taking part: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. He wanted to be convinced that the program does not use race at all costs, and it appeared that he was not.

Continue reading.

Plus, Jess Bravin at the Wall Street Journal, "Justices Clash on Affirmative Action." And from David Savage, at the Los Angeles Times, "Ruling out race in college admissions: How far will high court go?"

And from earlier at the Times, from Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr., "Do race preferences help students?" And a rebuttal from Rachel Godsil, FWIW, "Affirmative action and the unprepared minority myth."

But see Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit, "A LIBERAL CRITIQUE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Richard Kahlenberg has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, evaluating the insanity of today’s affirmative action efforts by universities and colleges..."