John B. Judis is most famous for proclaiming that rising minority populations would make Democrats America’s natural majority party before too long, a theme he expounded upon in The Emerging Democratic Majority (with Ruy Teixeira) in 2002.
Now Judis has taken a look at trends from the last few elections and said Whoa! Not so fast Jose…
At the time, some commentators, including me, hailed the onset of an enduring Democratic majority. And the arguments in defense of this view did seem to be backed by persuasive evidence. Obama and the Democrats appeared to have captured the youngest generation of voters, whereas Republicans were relying disproportionately on an aging coalition. The electorate’s growing ethnic diversity also seemed likely to help the Democrats going forward.
These advantages remain partially in place for Democrats today, but they are being severely undermined by two trends that have emerged in the past few elections—one surprising, the other less so. The less surprising trend is that Democrats have continued to hemorrhage support among white working-class voters—a group that generally works in blue-collar and lower-income service jobs and that is roughly identifiable in exit polls as those whites who have not graduated from a four-year college. These voters, and particularly those well above the poverty line, began to shift toward the GOP decades ago, but in recent years that shift has become progressively more pronounced.
The more surprising trend is that Republicans are gaining dramatically among a group that had tilted toward Democrats in 2006 and 2008: Call them middle-class Americans. These are voters who generally work in what economist Stephen Rose has called “the office economy.” In exit polling, they can roughly be identified as those who have college—but not postgraduate—degrees and those whose household incomes are between $50,000 and $100,000. (Obviously, the overlap here is imperfect, but there is a broad congruence between these polling categories.)
The defection of these voters—who, unlike the white working class, are a growing part of the electorate—is genuinely bad news for Democrats, and very good news indeed for Republicans. The question, of course, is whether it is going to continue. It’s tough to say for sure, but I think there is a case to be made that it will.
Never mind that Judis is a fairly hardcore Democratic Party partisan, or that some of his “advice” to Republicans is off-base. To basically reverse himself on his biggest prediction is rather like Charles Murray going “I’ve changed my mind, the Great Society welfare programs were great!”
The piece is heavy on demographic shifts and very light on the causes of those shifts. He makes some noises on tax burdens (which I’m sure is true), but makes little or no mention of ObamaCare’s deep unpopularity, widespread opposition to illegal alien amnesty, or the counterproductive, alienating effects of the Democratic Party’s Social justice Warrior cadres alienating “core swing voters,” i.e. the “70 to 75 percent” of middle class voters who are white.
Maybe Judis is using this as an opportunity for concern trolling (as when he suggests the GOP’s ideal 2016 nominee “soft-pedals social issues, including immigration”). But for him to not only say he was wrong before, but to come to conclusions that can’t help but alienate significant fractions of the Democratic Liberal Mediopolitical Complex, he must be seeing something in the data even more momentous than what he’s already describing, and he wants to get ahead of the curve…
