Republican Party Minority Status

Let us hope that the Republican Party is on its way to permanent minority status.


7 Nov 2012 12:16 PM Obamacare Lives

Jonathan Cohn cheers the survival of Obama's signature accomplishment:



I’ve waited more than two years to write this sentence: The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. It survived the Supreme Court and now it has survived the threat of a unified Republican government determined to repeal it. Implementation of the law will present huge challenges, but, for the first time in a long while, the administration and its allies can focus on those challenges rather than on rearguard political fights to keep the program alive.



Josh Marshall has the same thought:



The most concrete thing that strikes me about this public verdict is that Health Care Reform, Obamacare, a system of near universal coverage that will provide a framework for future reform, is here for good. It withstood the challenge of the conservative judiciary. It survived a national referendum. As Bill Kristol wrote memorably back in late 1993, the reason conservatives fought this so hard is because they knew that once it was in place the public would never let it be taken away. And it won’t. It’s here for good. That alone would seal President Obama’s legacy.



Austin Frakt hopes for further reform:



The only realistic, if still uncertain, way forward for those who find flaws with part or all of the ACA (and I am among them) is to argue for incremental change. Instead of repeal and replace, consider revise and rework. I don’t expect the political climate to change such that this suddenly becomes easy. Repeal may be dead, but Kumbaya is not alive. Still, for the good of the country and those who need and deserve better and more affordable health care, we really ought to try. The people have shown us that we’re a long way from Waterloo. Isn’t it time we all started acting like it?




7 Nov 2012 11:43 AM The Return Of Obama, Circa 2008



Ezra Klein analyzes Obama's speech, which can be viewed in full above:



The Obama campaign found that their key voters were turned off by soaring rhetoric and big plans. They’d lowered their expectations, and they responded better when Obama appeared to have lowered his expectations, too. And so he did. The candidate of hope and change became the candidate of modest plans and achievable goals. Rather than stopping the rise of the oceans — which sounded rather more fantastical before Sandy — Obama promised to train more teachers and boost manufacturing jobs.



What you saw [last night], however, was that Obama didn’t much like being that guy. He still wants to be the guy he was in 2008. He still wants to inspire and to unite. He still wants Americans to feel that the arc of history is bending under their pressure. He still wants to talk about climate change and election reform and other problems that the Senate is not especially eager to solve.

7 Nov 2012 11:23 AM The Republican Minority Has Arrived

First Read looks at the demographics:



What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces. As the Obama campaign had assumed more than a year ago, the white portion of the electorate dropped to 72%, and the president won just 39% of that vote. But he carried a whopping 93% of black voters (representing 13% of the electorate), 71% of Latinos (representing 10%), and also 73% of Asians (3%). What’s more, despite all the predictions that youth turnout would be down, voters 18-29 made up 19% of last night’s voting population -- up from 18% four years ago -- and President Obama took 60% from that group.



Weigel weighs in:



Had Rick Perry not run for president, and been so attackable on college tuition for immigrants, the issue might have stayed dormant. But Romney opened up on Perry and touted his support of the Arizona/Alabama immigration bills. The result: Only 27% of the Hispanic vote, the lowest for any Republican in a generation. Romney won only 39% of this vote in Florida. In 2004, George W. Bush won 54% of that vote. Yes, sure, fine, it's more Puerto Rican and less Cuban than it was eight years ago. But this drop-off is untenable.



Ben Smith and Zeke Miller put it this way:



The groups on whom Obama depended are the ones that are growing; white men, the core Republican constituency, are a shrinking minority. For the first time In 2011, minority births surpassed white births in the United States, and the longer demographic trend places white Americans in the minority by 2041. The Republican party will spend much needed time in the wilderness after this election, even as the open race for unofficially 2016 kicks off today. The future of the Grand Old Party will be determined by how well it adapts to the brand new Liberal America — indeed the Obama America — that is now here to stay.



Massie's view:



Republicans will win presidential elections again – they may well be favourites to prevail in 2016 – but ... the difference now is that when all things are equal in a “normal” election Democrats have a slight but important advantage whereas 30 years ago it was Republicans who enjoyed that minor but significant supremacy. And when the country is evenly divided these small things matter.



And Joyner wonders how long it will take for the GOP to wake up:



The 1980 model Republican Party will not win the White House ever again. Since 1860, when the Whigs fractured and died, our two major parties have managed to survive and even thrive by constantly re-inventing themselves. After a string of defeats, the Democrats rebooted in 1992, nominating a Southern moderate and jettisoning the more unpopular parts of their agenda, at least at the national level. At some point, the GOP will do the same. The only question is how many more elections they’ll lose clinging to a “traditional America” that’s a distant memory.