Ronald Brownstein examines demography and destiny:
To grasp how powerfully demographic change is reshaping the political landscape try this thought experiment about the 2008 election.Start by considering the electorate’s six broadest demographic groups — white voters with at least a four-year college degree; white voters without a college degree; African-Americans; Hispanics; Asians; and other minorities.
Now posit that each of those groups voted for Barack Obama or John McCain in exactly the same proportions as it actually did. Then imagine that each group represented the share of the electorate that it did in 1992. If each of these groups voted as it did in 2008 but constituted the same share of the electorate as in 1992, McCain would have won. Comfortably.
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These trends point toward trouble for the GOP if it cannot attract more minorities, especially Hispanics, and reverse the recent Democratic inroads among well-educated whites.The best way to illustrate that prospect is to pitch the thought experiment forward 12 years. Imagine that the major demographic groups voted as they did in 2008, but cast a share of the vote equal to their expected share of the population in 2020. (For argument’s sake, let’s divide whites among college and noncollege voters in the same proportions as today.) In that scenario, Obama beats McCain by nearly 14 points — almost twice as much as in 2008. Demography will indeed be destiny if Republicans can’t broaden their reach.
Arnold Kling believes that the US is taking a giant step backwards toward what Nobel Laureate Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast — in Violence and Social Orders — call a natural state, in which only the members of the governing coalition are fully free to do business and to participate in the political process, rather than an open-access order, in which both politics and economics are highly competitive:
Given this view, libertarians may have the basic economics right when it comes to open borders. Other things equal, more immigration is much better for the immigrants and somewhat better for the native population.But other things are not equal. Taking into account the effect of immigration on the political equilibrium, Steve Sailer may have it right. We may have seen the last of America as a dynamic economy with a competitive political system. Instead, we may be headed toward a stagnant economy and a one-party political system.
Have a nice day.