Every time I go back and read my December 2015 piece on Donald Trump and the missing white voters of the 2012 election, I get a sick feeling in my stomach. I had identified exactly how the Republicans could win the 2016 election, but I just couldn’t bring myself to believe they would pull it off. In truth, that piece should be bracketed by two other pieces of analysis I did on this subject. The earliest came in July 2013 when I wrote about the Republicans’ decision to drop “the idea that they need to do better with Latinos and adopt the idea that they need to do even better with white voters.” The latter one was written a few days after Donald Trump was elected president. I called it “Avoiding the Southification of the North.”
All three articles talk about the future of the Republican Party in the context of their demographic challenges. As the country becomes more ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse, the GOP loses market share. The same happens as young people replace old people in the electorate. The Republicans could respond by abandoning some conservative principles. But they would rather try every other option first. One strategy is to use their power to shift the electorate in their favor. By making it harder for young people to vote and by using every available tool to discourage minority voting, they hope to win a few more elections before they have to actually appeal to these voters. Another strategy is to get white people to think as white people. Here is how I described this in my 2013 piece:
Accusing the Democrats of socialism, which is a race-neutral way of accusing the party of being beholden to the racial underclasses, has been proven insufficient. The only hope for a racial-polarization strategy is to get the races to segregate their votes much more thoroughly, and that requires that more and more whites come to conclude that the Democratic Party is the party for blacks, Asians, and Latinos.