Can a Republican ever be elected president again?

May 1st, 2010 - File under Blog - 19922 Comments;http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filibustercartoons.com%2Findex.php%2F2010%2F05%2F01%2Fcan-a-republican-ever-be-elected-president-again%2FCan+a+Republican+ever+be+elected+president+again%3F2010-05-02+03%3A49%3A56J.J.http%3A%2F%2Fwww.filibustercartoons.com%2F%3Fp%3D1992

Modern political commentary is basically a game of overgeneralizing the present in an attempt to hastily predict the future. There’s just too much column, air, and blog space to fill these days, so if you want to be a good pundit, idle speculation is where it’s at.

Thus, you cannot talk about immigration in the United States without also heaping on a big dollop of partisan futurology. The basic speculative narrative goes something like this:

“Since the Republican Party consistently opposes even the most modest proposals to legalize any portion of America’s vast illegal population, and instead chooses to endorse extremely reactionary counter-measures, such as the recent ‘show us your papers’ law in Arizona, the Republican Party will never win the votes of immigrants.”

It’s a big generalization, obviously, and one Republicans have an understandable instinct to dismiss outright. In the context of a political culture that’s always making a lot of sweepingly ignorant predictions about the future, there’s a strong tendency to regard cynically any speculation about who will or will not be able to win the votes of immigrants (which is to largely say, Latinos) in some hazy theoretical future. After all, the Republicans say, once you look beyond the petty squabbles of the present, are not many of these immigrants basically conservatives-in-waiting? They’re good Christians and business owners and they respect the rule of law. Why, I got a letter the other day from this Latino guy who said he supported the Arizona law, and all his friends and family members did too!

Fair points, and the skepticism is justified. But in this particular case I’m actually included to believe that the conventional narrative, one-sided as it may sound, is true. And in being true, it may mean that no Republican president will ever be elected again, barring an enormous internal realignment of the party’s ideology.

Peter Brimelow is a man I have an enormous amount of respect for. He authored what I believe to be the single greatest tome of modern Canadian politics, The Patriot Game, and in doing so earned a well-deserved reputation for political prescience. Writing in the mid 1980s, Brimelow described Canada’s moderate two-party system as fundamentally unstable, and declared it was destined to collapse following the emergence of two new federal political parties, one strongly right-wing and western-oriented, the other focused on French-Canadian separatism. And that’s exactly what ended up happening, as we all know.

Since then, Brimelow has moved to the States and spends most of his time writing about immigration, which he opposes (and is aware of the fundamental irony in doing so).

He now has a grand dramatic thesis regarding the future of American politics, too. Basically, Brimelow argues that the voting patterns of nonwhite Americans (which is to say, immigrants and their descendants, as well as blacks) are so solid and uncompromising that they represent the single most predictable slice of the US electorate. As that slice continues to grow through immigration (and high immigrant birth rates) more and more power is afforded to the demographic community it represents. Since they all vote Democratic, that means bad news for any future GOP presidential candidate in a very profound and permanent way.

At this point the argument sounds a bit conspiratorial, because obviously non-immigrant whites still vastly outnumber nonwhites and immigrants in the United States by a nearly 8 to 2 ratio. But there are two important related trends.

The first is that people don’t really vote much these days, and the 50% or whatever that does is frequently not a perfect snapshot of the demographics of the country as a whole. Secondly, the largest demographic community, the whites, are split up in a multitude of ways and vote all over the place according to various ideological, religious, class, and intellectual identities that transcend ethnicity. Both the Republicans and Democrats must cobble together workable coalitions from these white subcultures. The GOP coalition, which Howard Dean crudely — but accurately, according to the polls — described as “white Christians males” is simply not as strong as the Democratic coalition, which consists of liberal, secular, educated, wealthy, and youthful factions that are either growing larger, or vote in higher numbers than their alternatives.

Brimelow has made a simple chart predicting how future presidential elections will go, in the GOP’s best-case-scenarios (assuming all the demographic groups who voted Republican in Reagan’s 1988 landslide continue to do so in the same percentages). As the GOP demographic base is crowded out, their share of the popular vote erodes like this:

• 2000- 50.7% (Republican can win)
• 2004- 50.8% (Republican can win)
• 2008- 49.9% (Republican cannot win)
• 2012- 49.5% (Republican cannot win)
• 2016- 49.1% (Republican cannot win)
• 2020- 48.7% (Republican cannot win)

… and then further downward from there.

And this is the best case scenario. If the Republicans have a bad candidate (like, say, some sort of elderly, out-of-touch Arizonian senator) the white Christian Republican base itself won’t be unified enough to maintain the grand coalition of 1988, and the GOP could lose much more substantially (in 2008′s case, 45% to 52%). The Democrats could conceivably have a bad candidate too, but the thesis is that their nonwhite base is much harder to alienate or fracture — and it’s always growing.

Anyway, the basic conclusion is that Republicans need to win Hispanic or black votes on a fairly substantial scale to ever hope to regain the White House. The Obama Presidency makes it extremely unlikely blacks will migrate to the GOP any time soon (not that it was ever considered a particularly likely scenario to begin with, considering they voted 88% for Kerry), but what about Latinos? What about a Republican in the George W. Bush style, who goes out of his way to “reach out?”

Brimelow says:

Innumeracy blinds some commentators to the full horror of the Republican predicament. When an ethnic bloc is growing rapidly, as the Hispanics are because of immigration, it is possible to increase your relative share of their vote and still be no better off in terms of their absolute contribution to your total vote. This is what happened to Bush. He increased the Republican share of the Hispanic vote by ten percentage points, [31%] but because the overall number of Hispanic voters increased so much, the net effect was that he lost the Hispanic vote by essentially the same absolute number as Dole did (2.8 million vs. 2.9 million).

It’s similarly important to recall what an enormous toll Bush’s overtures took on his own party. To use the most politically-correct explanation, the GOP base is simply too deeply tied to mantras of law and order to ever tolerate any form of compromise on any issues relating to illegals. Congressional Republicans largely rejected their president’s comprehensive immigration reform legislation in 2007, and “I disagreed with his approach to illegal immigration” is now one of the mandatory talking points for any high-profile Republican seeking to respectfully distance himself from the Bush legacy. Other right-wing critics are less subtle; according to the New York Times‘ famous Tea Party poll, 82% of Tea Party people see illegal immigration as a “very serious” problem, and 42% think legal immigration should be decreased. Assuming these people represent a demographic the GOP absolutely must maintain, it’s hard to see how another GOP-sponsored amnesty bill could survive a strategic cost-benefit analysis.

So it’s a true paradox, and you can see it reflected by the nervous way super-establishment Republicans like Karl Rove have reacted to this recent Arizona law. He’s said he “has concerns” about it, which is a wonderfully coded way of saying “I hate it, and it will ruin my party but I don’t dare say so openly.” But Rovian compromise failed, and the hardcore Arizona approach, which is the logical alternative (and what Brimelow says would actually work best, since it could potentially drive up conservative white turnout) is too unpalatable for America’s inherently moderate political elite to embrace.

At best, the Republicans could simply ignore immigration altogether, and never talk about it either way. This is a bit like the Canadian Conservative Party’s stance on abortion. Say nothing, do nothing, and just let the voters imagine whatever they want to about where the party stands on the issue, and hopefully you’ll get a lot of ignorant votes from both sides. Even if the status quo is awful, it’s better than opening the Pandora’s box of alternatives.

The important thing to understand is that the Brimelow thesis only concerns itself with presidential politics. The American presidency is the only nationally-elected office of the United States, and thus the only office subject to the quirks of America’s national demographics. Republicans can be elected at all other levels of government, and doubtlessly will be for a long time to come, because there are still many, many pockets of base support in electoral districts, or even entire states, across the country. If the US had a parliamentary system, Republican control of the executive branch could probably continue for generations.

The lesson, essentially, is that the head of state in a multicultural nation cannot be elected by a party that is perceived to oppose the interests of the two biggest minority cultures or by a majority-culture party that alienates its own base. He could be elected by embracing an agenda of intense, uncompromising, open-borders, pro-immigration liberalism, or intense, uncompromising, racially-charged, us-against-them, closed-borders nativism, but never some half-assed compromise mixture of the two philosophies.

That’s the trade-off that has to be understood.