2012: Last Chance Republicanism?

How large are the stakes in this year’s American presidential election? Pretty huge if you’re a Republican. Jon Chait has an excellent piece in New York magazine explaining how the GOP, in its present form, has mortgaged its future in a bet that Barack Obama will be a one-term President. Defeat, he suggests, will mark the end of the Republican party as we’ve known it since Nixon won. Time and, more importantly, demography is not on its side.

Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country.