Washington Post (The Fix)
By Chris Cillizza
September 23, 2015
Summer is over. And Donald Trump is -- still -- at the top of the 2016 Republican primary field.
That
makes lots and lots of Republicans with an eye on winning the White
House in 2016 (or even 2020) very, very nervous. That unease -- and its
origins -- are explained
brilliantly in this paragraph, taken from a broader piece entitled "The
GOP is Killing Itself," by former Bush administration official Pete
Wehner:
The
message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by
people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and
inevitable) demographic nature
of our nation. The GOP is longing to return to the past and is fearful
of the future. It is a party that is characterized by resentments and
grievances, by distress and dismay, by the belief that America is
irredeemably corrupt and past the point of no return.
“The American dream is dead,” in the emphatic words of Mr. Trump.
Wehner,
whose honesty and insight about his party and its prospects I've
praised before in this space, nails a sentiment I've heard expressed by
countless Republicans
in the Summer of Trump. The concern is that a candidate like Trump is
running a campaign based on the 1980 electorate, not the 2016 one.
Sure,
appealing to white voters with a message that things aren't as good as
they used to be -- the boiled-down appeal that Trump represents -- might
work in a Republican
primary. But, there is NO mystery or debate that the changing
demographic face of the country makes an appeal to the "old ways" an
almost-certain electoral loser.
Consider
that the white vote as a percentage of the overall electorate has
dropped in every election since 1992 -- and dipped to 72 percent in
2012.
And,
even as the white vote has become increasingly less influential in
presidential general elections, Republicans have grown increasingly
unable to compete for the Hispanic
vote, which is growing by leaps and bounds. In 2004, George W. Bush won
(a somewhat-disputed) 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. That dropped to
31 percent for John McCain in 2008. Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of
the Hispanic vote in 2012.
This chart tells the story of just how white Romney's support was in that election.
This, from the brilliant Dan Balz, sums up what all those numbers mean for Republicans in 2016:
If
the 2016 nominee gets no better than Romney’s 17 percent of the
nonwhite vote, he or she would need 65 percent of the white vote to win,
a level achieved in modern
times only by Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide. Bush’s 2004 winning
formula — 26 percent of the nonwhite vote and 58 percent of the white
vote — would be a losing formula in 2016, given population changes.
Simply
put: There is no long-term coalition for a party that touts "the way
things were" and pushes a policy of rounding up and deporting the
millions of undocumented
immigrants in the United States. None.
Strategists
like Wehner know this. The problem is that people like Trump not only
have a much bigger megaphone but also a vested interest in pushing
policies that appeal
to a niche -- albeit a somewhat large niche -- of the Republican base.
Trump
is playing the GOP primary game better than anyone else in this race.
But he is putting his party in a losing position -- or taking them to
the verge of it -- when
it comes to a general election in which we know a message like his will
(or already has) turned off large numbers of people that the GOP
desperately needs to build a national coalition.
The
problem with all of this, of course, is that Trump could care less
about what Wehner thinks. In fact, Trump would likely tout Wehner's
argument as evidence that the
Washington party establishment is a failed, clueless lot.
The
only person who can control or manage Trump is Trump. And he seems to
have little of the party's long-term interests in mind at the moment.
Commence panic.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment