And a good chunk of the GOP base is bigoted against blacks, as I detail at americanmoralspublicreality.org/index.php/shocking-news-anne-coulter-lies-about-number-ameroracists. Because the Republican Party is the right wing ideological party it cannot bring in voters by finding out what is their thinking and then trying to work that into the party line. Instead it is the lecturing and hectoring party that spends its time telling everyone that dares disagree with their conservolibertarian line -- which is the great majority of blacks -- that they are wrong, that they need to recognize that they are wrong, and that they must then become right thinking Republicans in order to be true blue Americans. That works just great. They are slapping blacks across their faces.
The GOP is the southern white party because that's the strategy they opted for back in the 1960s. It worked well enough to keep the party in contention as long as southern whites made up a big enough portion of the electorate. But they no longer do, and blacks resent the Repub southern strategy, the GOP's being the refuge of racists, and being told that their progressive opinions are errant. So the GOP can kiss off the black vote.
And there is the atheism vote. It's growing. Fast. God believing theists still make up 80% of the population, but only a minority of them are dedicated church going theoconservatives (click here). The mainline churches have long been withering, nowadays so are the conservative sects as they prove unable to recruit sufficient youth who are increasingly irreligious and atheistic. Atheists have expanded fourfold since the 1960s, far outpacing the growth of Mormons. Perhaps a quarter of atheists are Ayn Randian libertarians, but even some of them won't vote GOP because of the party's being in bed with the religious right. The great majority of atheists are progressives who won't vote GOP for both religious and socioeconomic reasons (http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx). This problem is only going to get worse for the Republicans as the country secularizes like the rest of the west.
Then there are your singles. There are more of them, and the never married tend to be more Democratic than the married. The Democratic Party is the modern Rainbow party of the still new century.
The GOP is running on demographic fumes without a station to pull into to tank up -- kind of like many living in the post-Sandy fuel shortage that helped out the Obama campaign (note that climate change boosted the Democratic victory). But by no means is the great Republican problem just demographic. Their toxic doctrine is also poisoning their prospects. The GOP has gone way too far into right wing land for the American majority. They have become the radical party of a Bizarro World amalgam of social Darwinist, Ayn (uberatheist) Randian little government individualism on the economics hand (click here), and Biblical Godly social values imposed by big government on the cultural hand.
It's a recipe for electoral minority status because most Americans are either social and economic progressives, or moderate centrists. As David Brooks is pointing out to his fellow conservatives, Hispanics, blacks, Asians, Indians and so forth tend to be culturally more attuned to collectivist economics than whites on the right. The chronic belief of those on the far right that the American silent majority is really a collection of conservatives who will someday vote to make a new Reagan president and the Senate and House solidly and perpetually GOP if only the "liberal" lamestream media will stop deceiving the nation -- and they can find the right candidate to entrance the voters -- is sheer delusion. It is a misapprehension that repeatedly blows back on the Republicans.
In that hardline Repub fantasy land, all true Americans that they hope and dream are the majority want lots of economic liberty with little in the way of government business or environmental regs or socialism, tiny taxes especially for the wealthy "job creators," a minimal safety net so those in distress can rely on private charities, free market health care in which the insurance industry charges what it can and excludes those with preexisting conditions, culminating in an end to Medicare sooner or later, plus ultimate elimination of social security, combined with the government making abortion murder, and teaching youth abstinence until marriage while suppressing use of contraceptives. And the godly masses will all flock to church on Sabbath mornings while rejecting
Actually, those on the hard right are conflicted about what they want
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