The Future Of The Republican Party: Short And Brutish

The latest Gallup poll shows that 76% of Americans favor raising the minimum wage-- including 58% of Republican voters. A bill doing so will pass the Senate and probably be blocked by Boehner and Cantor in the House where it won't even be voted on. Americans are noticing a pattern emerge-- the Senate passing popular bills and the GOP House refusing to take them up. Instead the House voted 44 Votes to Repeal #Obamacare, and voted on an equal number of anti-Choice bills, 99 other crazy religion bills… but zero bills to create new jobs or do anything to relieve the burdens of a weak economy created by conservative policies from the Bush years. This is what is behind Cathleen Decker's piece in the L.A. Times Monday on how Republicans are being obliterated by demographic changes.

Decker suggests that if Republicans want to see what their future will look like, they look closely at what the Republican Party already looks like in California, which not all that long ago used to be reliably red. She was riffing off a poll by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. Acknowledging that California is "more ethnically mixed and younger than most states, and riven for 20 years by a hobbling GOP civil war," she predicts that this is an accurate reflection of long-term problems for the GOP nationally.

Take party registration: Among white California voters, almost four in 10 are Democrats and four in 10 are Republicans. But among Latinos 55% are Democrats and only 15% are Republicans. Among black voters, 76% are Democrats and 4% are Republicans. There were not enough Asian voters to accurately assess, but overall, minority voters are 54% Democratic to 14% Republican. (Just more than one-quarter of minority voters are registered independents, a group that generally votes Democratic in California.)

The collision between ethnicity and age is even more lethal. Six in 10 white voters are over 50, making them prized in the present but not dependable in future decades. The reverse is true for Latinos, 64% of whom are age 49 or younger. Overall, among all voters, 35% of those 50 and over are Republicans; of those younger, only 23% were.

Already those younger and minority voters-- 38% of the voter pool-- are propping up Democrats in California. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has a positive job approval rating of 55% overall. Among white voters the rating is 51%. Among black voters, it is 61%, Among Latinos, it is 67%.

Other poll findings suggest no end to that imbalance. Asked their political ideology, 52% of those ages 49 and younger describe themselves as liberal, to 40% who say conservative. That is close to the opposite of those over 50, only 47% of whom say they are liberal to 58% conservative.

…At this point, Republicans in the state largely continue to weigh against immigration reform and Obamacare, two key issues that help to define candidates for minority voters. And there’s not much to remake the GOP from the inside: The growing numbers of Latino voters in their ranks have applied consistent policy pressure on Democrats, but there’s no parallel pressure on the overwhelmingly white Republican party.

Last year California Democrats defeated Dan Lungren, Mary Bono Mack and Brian Bilbray and picked up Elton Gallegly's seat when he retired. This year there are only 15 Republicans among the mammoth 53 member California House delegation. Polls show that at least 6 of them are electorally vulnerable this cycle and, if there were a competent DCCC is place, would be knocked off this cycle or next:

• Gary Miller
• Buck McKeon
• Dave Valadao
• Darrell Issa
• Jeff Denham
• Ed Royce

It's just a matter of time before Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes, Dana Rohrabacher, Ken Calvert and whoever wins John Campbell's seat next year are all added to that list. Ready for a 53 seat delegation with 49 Democrats and just 4 Republicans?

Nationally, because of a toxic mix of far right ideology and inevitable demographic changes, the Republicans are headed in the exact same direction. Neither Georgia, Arizona nor Texas will be reliable red states in the future and will probably all three will be battleground states in the 2016 presidential cycle!