GOP: A Party that is Rotten to its Core

By Dan Balz
Sunday, June 14, 2009

There has been much chatter about who now speaks for the Republican Party, and whether the GOP has a message or an agenda to combat President Obama's popularity. Those questions are important to the party's future, but the most serious problem remains the deeper demographic and political forces at work in the country.

For the past few months, political analysts and demographers have been poring over the results of the 2008 election and comparing them with presidential results from the past two decades. From whatever angle of their approach -- age, race, economic status, geography -- they have come to a remarkably similar conclusion. Almost all indicators are pressing the Republicans into minority status.

Republicans are still capable of winning individual elections, but until they find a way to reverse, or at least minimize, these broader changes in the country, their chances of returning to majority status will be severely reduced.

The American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution convened a stellar cast on Friday to review what has been learned since November. The panel included Robert Lang of Virginia Tech; Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress; William Frey of the Brookings Institution; Bill Bishop, a Texas writer and author of "The Big Sort"; Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center; and Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media. They presented a wealth of data about what happened in 2008 and offered conclusions that would alarm any Republican hopeful of a quick turnaround in the party's fortunes.

Democrats have won the popular vote in four of the past five elections, though in one case (2000) they did not end up in the White House. In years in which they have also won the electoral vote, Democrats have racked up sizable margins. Obama bested John McCain by 365 to 173, and Bill Clinton's two victories were in the same range. George W. Bush's two electoral-college victories were narrow; he won 271 votes in the disputed election of 2000 and 286 in his 2004 reelection.

What has brought this about? It's not just one thing -- it's everything. Start with the Democrats' success in the suburbs. Lang's formula is that demography and density have combined to help Democrats: They dominate not just the cities but also the urbanized suburbs that contain the largest share of the suburban population in America.

Democratic strength in the counties around Philadelphia, around Detroit and in Northern Virginia have squeezed Republicans dramatically. Increasingly, Republican strength outside the urban areas counts for less. "There's just not enough rural folks and small-city people left in America in the key states that determine the electoral college to offset that difference," Lang said. "You're out of people."

That's one geographical reality. The other, which became acute in 2008, is that outside the South, Republicans are in trouble. McCain won the South in November, but Obama swept the rest of the country by an even bigger margin. The same pattern holds now for House and Senate seats. Republicans may continue to win governorships in Democratic-leaning states, but in congressional and presidential elections the geographic divides are sizable.

Brownstein reeled off a list of statistics that all arrived at the same place: The South now accounts for a greater share of Republican strength than at virtually any time since the party's founding. That base is too narrow, as even Republicans know.

Demographically, the forces at work have chipped away at what was once a GOP-leaning majority in the country. The most important is minorities' rising share of the vote. Whites accounted for 76 percent of the overall electorate last November, down from 85 percent in 1988.

In the last election, there were more than 2 million additional African American voters, about 2 million more Hispanic voters and about a million more Asian American voters. All are groups in which Obama increased the Democratic share of the vote over 2004. Frey estimated that minority voters in nine states made the difference in Obama's victory margin.

Republicans can't reverse the demographic trends; their only solution is to increase their share of the minority vote. Opposing Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee, because of her pride in being a Latina won't help solve that problem.

There was much attention paid to Obama's trouble winning the votes of white working-class voters. The bad news for Republicans is that these voters represent a declining share of the electorate.

Since 1988, that group's proportion of the national electorate has dropped by 15 percentage points. In Pennsylvania, Teixeira reported, it has declined by 25 percentage points. Teixeira reported that Obama actually won the votes of working-class whites ages 25 to 29; at this point, they appear more culturally liberal than their elders.

As the working-class vote shrinks, the college-educated vote increases, and Democrats are gaining a greater share of these voters. Democrats lost white college graduates by 20 percentage points in 1988 but by four points last November. That is another big reason they have gained strength in the suburbs.

Obama's strength among young voters was a staple of coverage throughout his bid for the White House, although as Keeter pointed out, he could have won in November without the votes of anyone younger than 30. But his margin was the biggest in several decades and that alone should worry Republicans.

Obama may appeal to younger voters, but their shift toward the Democrats predates his candidacy. "This really is not Obama," Keeter said. "Young voters were John Kerry's best age group. They were the Democratic candidates' best age group in the 2006 elections, and they were the best age group for other Democratic candidates in 2008."

Younger voters are more diverse demographically than older voters. In 2008, 62 percent were white, compared with 74 percent eight years earlier. Projections show young voters will become increasingly diverse. They are also less religious and more culturally liberal, two indicators of Democratic support.

GOP strategist Mike Murphy described this in Time magazine as a coming Republican ice age. Republicans will need a major shift to begin to reverse these trends. That could start if there is a backlash against Obama's governance -- and the president's agenda certainly will test the country's tolerance for a big dose of government. But Republicans will need to retool in other ways to make themselves more appealing to a changing population. That debate has barely begun.

By: Garry South
June 10, 2009 04:49 AM EST

Question: What is Oil of Olay to a California Republican? Answer: petroleum from Mexico! This joke, making the rounds among Democrats, pretty well sums up the major Republican problem with Latinos in the state with the largest Hispanic population.

A recent national Gallup Poll showed 89 percent of Republicans are white, while a Pew Research Center survey found that the white share of the electorate in 2008 was at an all-time low of 76.3 percent. It’s obvious that Republicans are caught in a time warp and an increasing demographic bind. If they are to survive, they must broaden their appeal to minority voters, especially Latinos, the largest U.S. minority group.

Republicans could start in the state with the largest number of Latinos. But since the early 1990s, California Republicans have been tone-deaf and dumbstruck when it comes to the fast-growing Latino vote. One of the common Republican Party gambits to appeal to Latinos in recent years has been hiring mariachi bands to play at their overwhelmingly white events.

From Gov. Pete Wilson pushing the draconian anti-immigrant measure Proposition 187 in 1994 to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger praising the border-vigilante Minutemen in 2005, the GOP has proved itself incapable of competing effectively for Latino hearts and minds in California.

One major problem is the Republicans’ public face. The party of the elephant has become the party of white elephants. Republicans hold just 19 of the state’s 53 congressional seats, and not a single one of the party’s incumbents is Latino — or any other racial minority, for that matter.

Historically speaking, this state of affairs is supremely ironic. The first Hispanic ever to represent a state in Congress actually was a Republican from California, Romualdo Pacheco, elected in 1876. He also happened to be the first Hispanic ever to serve as chairman of a standing congressional committee, the Committee on Private Land Claims. But California Republicans haven’t elected a Latino to Congress since Pacheco — a drought of nearly 130 years.

The GOP has 29 members in the 80-member state Assembly and not a Latino among them. Of 15 Republican state senators (out of 40 total), there’s only one lonely Latino.

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The current situation in the Assembly also represents backward movement. In 1996, a Republican Latino was elected to the Assembly — the first in modern times. In 1998, three more gained office. These four started a Hispanic Republican Legislative Caucus. Then, from 2004 to 2008, there was only one Republican Latino. Now there are none and, obviously, no caucus, either.

By contrast, of the 34 congressional seats held by Democrats, Hispanics fill eight. Former Rep. Hilda Solis is the new secretary of labor. Sixteen of the 51 Assembly Democrats are Latino, including the current majority leader. Since 1996, there have been three Democratic Latino speakers of the Assembly. Of the current 25 Senate Democrats, nine are Latino — again, including the majority leader.

From 1999 to 2007, California had a Spanish-speaking, Democratic Latino lieutenant governor. A Spanish-speaking, Democratic Latino mayor governs the state’s largest city, Los Angeles. And for the past 13 years, a Spanish-speaking Latino chaired the California Democratic Party.

In the other corner? The last Republican Latino statewide officeholder held his position in 1875 — the aforementioned Romualdo Pacheco, who served several months as governor that year. The 2006 Republican general election ticket consisted of seven middle-aged white guys. The California Republican Party is now on its sixth straight middle-aged, white male chairman.

It also didn’t help that the GOP presidential field in 2008 consisted at one time or another of 11 white males, with one of them, Tom Tancredo, viewed as perhaps the most anti-immigrant member of Congress. Or that nasty debates broke out among the candidates about who was tougher on illegal immigrants and who had supported sanctuary cities.

To demonstrate how out of sync all of this is with the demographics of California, consider these facts: In 2000, a few years ahead of schedule, California became the first majority-minority state besides Hawaii. Census estimates indicate Latinos now make up 36 percent of the population, with Caucasians at only 43 percent.

And the trends are pretty startling. The California Department of Finance predicts that, within a couple of years, Caucasians and Latinos will be equally represented in the state, at 39 percent each. By 2050, Latinos will make up 52 percent of the population, versus only 26 percent for whites — a ratio of 2-to-1.

In terms of the electorate, Latinos are also the fastest-growing segment (with Asian-Americans the second-fastest-growing). Whites are declining in terms of the composition of the turnout, and have been for years.

More ominous for Republicans, Latinos in California have become reliable Democratic voters, regardless of the strength of the Democratic candidate. In the 1996 presidential race, California Latino voters gave President Bill Clinton 75 percent of their vote, compared with 18 percent for Bob Dole. In 2000, Al Gore beat George W. Bush 73 percent to 23 percent among Latinos, and John Kerry won among Latinos in 2004, with 68 percent of the vote.

But perhaps last year’s presidential race provides the most telling data about the Republicans’ dire predicament with Latinos. In the California primary on Feb. 3, Hillary Clinton won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote over Barack Obama’s 32 percent.

This 35-percentage-point margin led to much GOP cluck-clucking about how it might represent an opening for the Republican nominee in the fall. Would Latinos actually vote for, uh, a black man running for president, especially since they had shunned him in the primary? Even when Obama was mathematically on the brink of capturing the nomination in May, a Field Poll showed Latinos still preferring Clinton over Obama, 63 percent to 29 percent.

By July, another Field Poll showed presumptive nominee Obama with a 64 percent to 21 percent lead over John McCain. And in November, Obama beat McCain among California Latinos 74 percent to 23 percent. So much for that swell opening. Nationally, as well as in California, no other major demographic voting group swung so heavily from Clinton to Obama between the primary and the general as did Latinos.

Some blocs in California are consummate swing voters — but not Latinos. In the 1998 gubernatorial election, for example, independent voters, moderates, whites and Asian-Americans all supported Democrat Gray Davis in his landslide win over Republican nominee Dan Lungren by margins of up to 40 points. In the 2006 governor’s race, all four groups flipped and voted overwhelmingly for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Latino voters, tellingly, stuck with the hapless 2006 Democratic candidate for governor. Even with Democratic nominee Phil Angelides getting shellacked by Schwarzenegger 56 percent to 39 percent, Latinos still went with the Democrat, 61 percent to 33 percent.

In the historic recall election of 2003, Latino voters even opposed turning Davis out of office, 55 percent to 45 percent, although the recall passed by the same percentages — only in reverse.

Republicans, already down to only 31 percent of registered voters in the Golden State, are courting long-term political irrelevance if they fail to grasp and contend with the continuing emergence of the state’s Latino voting power. And with President Obama’s nomination of the first-ever Latina to the Supreme Court, Latinos have even more reason to solidify their already-strong Democratic predisposition.

Time to drag out the mariachi bands again, I guess. Olé!

Garry South is a longtime Democratic strategist and commentator who is senior adviser to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign.