The historic 2008 presidential election is over. It brings the possibilities of enormous change, not just because the next administration will be run by Barack Obama instead of George Bush, but in longer term political realignments.
The main casualty is the Republican Party. The Party unraveled politically mainly because it created the conditions for the real estate debacle, mishandled the response, and was correctly blamed for the major mistakes of the past eight years. Most Americans may not know much about the economy, but, like their grandparents who experienced the thirties, they now understand that unregulated, free market forces and Reagan's promise of getting government off people's backs don't necessarily produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Republican trickle-down ideology has been fatally wounded.
An even greater blow to the Party's future is about to land -- the demise of racial politics. The Nixon-Reagan southern strategy, which successfully used race to drive white working class voters in the South and nationwide into the Republican fold, may well have seen its last. An America led by an African-American President will change America, just as Obama's election reflects a changing America.
So here are three things you need to watch as the Republican's era ends:
1. The demise of race-wedge politics. Southern and some Northern whites turned against the Democratic Party in the 1960s when the Democrats backed the Civil Rights Movement and consciously became multiracial. Richard Nixon was the first to understand that Republicans had an opening in the South, and he exploited it by sending signals early in his first term that he opposed school desegregation. A Southern Democrat, Jimmy Carter, delayed the shift, but Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both ran successful campaigns that used race ("welfare cheats" for Reagan; Willie Horton for Bush) to solidify the Republican base among working class whites. Another Southern Democrat, Bill Clinton, broke through the strategy again, but when two Southerners--W and Al Gore--fought it out in 2000, Gore lost every southern state (maybe not Florida).
Obama made key inroads in the South and among many northern working-class whites, this despite admitted racism keeping some registered Democrats from voting for him. Even so, Obama got a bigger fraction of the white vote than Clinton, Gore, and Kerry. By winning the presidency and winning it so convincingly, Obama's victory forever changed the race equation in American politics. In many different ways, he has unified a large fraction of white and black Americans around a symbol of racial unity -- Obama himself. Obama not only campaigned on the message of change, he is the message of change.
Further, once he becomes President, Obama will implement policies that help less educated whites economically. And he will be their commander-in-chief. If he is moderately successful over the next few years, it will be all that much harder for Republicans to get white votes by appealing to racial stereotypes and fears. It also will bring many more African-Americans into the mainstream.
2. Obamanomics will replace Reaganomics as the economic paradigm. You can already see the handwriting on the wall. Sarah Palin may have screamed Socialism, but Americans didn't buy it. When Paul Krugman and David Brooks agree (see the editorial page of the NYT, October 31) that the new economics needs to be based on government investments in infrastructure, alternative energy, new technologies, education, and health care, you know that Reaganomics is history.
We are at end of the great experiment with market deregulation that began in the 1970s. Most Americans are more than ready to accept Obama's political economic model. They want the government to oversee private companies so that they don't pollute or lie about what's in their products, don't threaten the health and safety of their workers, and don't engage in activities that threaten the public at large. When President Obama delivers that new regulatory economy and those new government investments, some segments of the Republican base will identify with the newly relevant Democratic agenda.
3. Demographics, demographics, demographics. Three demographic trends are hurting Republicans, and unless the Party turns on its "real American" base, these will make more states blue.
• Increasing numbers of Americans are better educated. You would think that this would help Republicans, since the better educated earn higher incomes. Trouble is, most of these educated voters are pro-choice, more secular, information oriented, and have a more global perspective. Not typical Republican fare in recent years.
• Increasing numbers of voters are Latinos (12 million registered this year, up from 9 million in 2004). Again, given that Latinos are likely to be Catholic or evangelicals (both anti-abortion), this should be fertile ground for Republicans. Yet, immigration is a hot button issue for white Republicans, and not in a way that pleases most Latinos. This seems to more than offset any Latino embrace of pro-life Republicans.
• Young people under thirty have traditionally not voted proportionately to their population. Yet Democrats have now learned to use the Internet as an involvement tool, registering millions of young people into the Democratic Party. Young people tend to be more tuned in to multiculturalism and non-traditional lifestyles -- more Democratic than Republican values.
Since the end of the 19th century, when they came to represent corporate wealth, the Republican Party's dilemma has been to recreate themselves as a majority party. They have achieved success by appealing to core American notions of individualism, entrepreneurship, and, more recently, "traditional" values. But now that the latest model to generate that appeal has failed, Republicans will have to scramble for new ideas to build a majority. I don't think that developing a more retrograde version of the culture wars -- Sarah Palin style -- will do it, at least not without the racial wedge. And if Obama-led Democrats can make white and black lower middle and middle class voters better off economically, it could take many years for Republicans to get themselves out of the political backwoods.