The Democrats are concentrated in the big cities where they have a pool of reliable minority and professional voters to keep them in power there. But they don’t have a base in the rest of the country. And unless they can expand their base, they will remain in the minority for the foreseeable future.
Supposedly Churchill, but probably not:
Any young man who is not a liberal has no heart, any grown man who is not a conservative has no head.
“Is the Electorate Moving Right? A response to Ruy Teixeira and Ed Kilgore. “
It seems that way because the framework is shifting radically leftward.
The former two fluctuate on either side of a 5% range, the later on a 3% range which, more or less, makes sense given their respective proportions.
At one time, we had a Democrat Party which was basically left-center and a GOP which was basically right-center.
When the far left took over the Democrat Party, the GOP moved center or even left-center to counter, leaving the conservatives on the fringes.
As the chart shows, the Liberals are the ones who should be driven to the fringes. The GOP could consistently win by appealing to the conservative core and, occasionally, drifting toward the center to pick up enough of the moderates, particularly on certain issues.
OTOH, the Democrats cannot consistently win by appealing solely to their Liberal base-- they need to take mostly moderate and, even occasionally, conservative positions. Their political advertising shows that they clearly understand this concept. Their governance shows, however, that they do not respect it.
The Emerging Democratic Majority is based on the theory that Democrats can hold the voters already in their camp. In reality, the expanding Hispanic electorate out West that has the Democrats so excited is offset by elderly Whites in the Midwest voting more Republican.
Good article. I’ve found Jay Cost to be very informative on the electorate.
One thing I think he overlooks however is that many people are now defining themselves as “Conservatives” because the left has moved the definition of “liberal” so far to the left.
For example, at one time (not long ago) if one supported civil unions for gays and a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for gays in the military - that was the “liberal position.”
now that’s the “Conservative” position.
So, even if you hold the exact same beliefs about “gays” that were trumpeted by sax playing perv Pres Clinton as “progressive” you are now a radical right winger.
Yes, there might be a shift in the electorate - but there’s been a bigger shift in where we draw the “center-line.”
...there is a subtle but significant change of subject from the title to the guts of the piece. Ed Kilgore (who introduces Teixeira's argument) writes at the beginning: "It's becoming more and more obvious that the big dispute at the heart of most arguments about the larger meaning of the 2010 midterms elections is whether the U.S. electorate is moving ideologically to the Right (sic) in a way that gives Republicans a natural majority in the future. And the very core of that dispute involves the behavior of self-identified independents, who obviously shifted towards the GOP between 2006-08 and 2010, and who seem to be exhibiting more conservative attitudes generally."