Barbara Ehrenreich’s “What Happened to the White Working Class? Downward mobility plus racial resentment is a potent combination with disastrous consequences.” at The Nation provides one of the more instructive subtitles in recent literature about the political psychology of this huge demographic group.
Ehrenreich delves into the reasons for the downtick in white working class longevity. But her insights into the political attitudes of white workers ought to be of particular interest to Democrats who want to build an enduring progressive majority. Addressing this concern, Ehrenreich notes:

But something more profound is going on here, too. As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman puts it, the “diseases” leading to excess white working-class deaths are those of “despair,” and some of the obvious causes are economic. In the last few decades, things have not been going well for working-class people of any color.
I grew up in an America where a man with a strong back–and better yet, a strong union–could reasonably expect to support a family on his own without a college degree. In 2015, those jobs are long gone, leaving only the kind of work once relegated to women and people of color available in areas like retail, landscaping, and delivery-truck driving. This means that those in the bottom 20% of white income distribution face material circumstances like those long familiar to poor blacks, including erratic employment and crowded, hazardous living spaces.

Ehrenreich adds that “the public and psychological wage” benefit white workers enjoyed under segregation, which W.E.B. Dubois cited 80 years ago, has shrunk considerably as a result of African American advancement. As she explains,

Today, there are few public spaces that are not open, at least legally speaking, to blacks, while the “best” schools are reserved for the affluent–mostly white and Asian American along with a sprinkling of other people of color to provide the fairy dust of “diversity.” While whites have lost ground economically, blacks have made gains, at least in the de jure sense. As a result, the “psychological wage” awarded to white people has been shrinking.
…The culture, too, has been inching bit by bit toward racial equality, if not, in some limited areas, black ascendency. If the stock image of the early twentieth century “Negro” was the minstrel, the role of rural simpleton in popular culture has been taken over in this century by the characters in Duck Dynasty and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. At least in the entertainment world, working-class whites are now regularly portrayed as moronic, while blacks are often hyper-articulate, street-smart, and sometimes as wealthy as Kanye West. It’s not easy to maintain the usual sense of white superiority when parts of the media are squeezing laughs from the contrast between savvy blacks and rural white bumpkins, as in the Tina Fey comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. White, presumably upper-middle class people generally conceive of these characters and plot lines, which, to a child of white working-class parents like myself, sting with condescension.

Ehrenreich continues, “Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.”
If ‘comfort’ is too strong a word for the way most white workers feel about racial advantage, the belief that your social group, once proudly middle class, is becoming an economically-depressed demographic can move political attitudes rightward. And when media stereotypes and political propaganda feed memes that people of color are benefitting disproportionately from the taxes of white workers, it feeds the resentment. Certainly the GOP has made President Obama the lightning rod for crystallizing this meme.
It’s a message built on endlessly repeated lies, and one which Democrats have thus far failed to adequately challenge and correct. While some white workers undoubtedly crave the sense of superiority their parents experienced during the segregation era, most white workers today are likely more focused on preventing their families from sinking into economic hardship. For Republicans, the task is to convert this fear into racial resentment, and they have done so on a grand scale.
Democrats are going to have to do a better job of demythologizing the GOP memes and stereotypes. It will also require a more energetic “branding” of the Republican party as the party of the wealthy, which squanders trillions of taxpayer dollars on war and corporate privileges. But there is also the even more formidable challenge of branding the Democratic party as the party of working people and their unions, the party of making the minimum wage a living wage, of full employment, comprehensive health care for all citizens and affordable higher education. That’s a political brand that could win enough white workers to insure a stable majority for many years to come.

For a sharply observed analysis of GOP candidate Donald Trump’s failed effort to secure endorsements from African American pastors, read Goldie Taylor’s Daily Beast post, “Black Pastors Confront Trump Over ‘Slurs.'” As Taylor observes,

As The Daily Beast reported over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the GOP frontrunner was set to meet Monday with dozens of high profile black pastors and hold a subsequent press conference to tout an unprecedented group endorsement. As the sun set Sunday night–and several prominent preachers backed out–many questioned whether the event would even happen.
Pressed by their congregations and by a not-so-holy war that broke out on social media, some of the invited ministers issued flat denials, saying they agreed only to discuss key issues with the candidate and that endorsements were never a part of the bargain. Two of the biggest names on the nightclub-esque promotional flier, Los Angeles-based Bishop Clarence McClendon and Brooklyn-based Bishop Hezekiah Walker, announced Sunday they would not attend. Both issued statements on social media.
…Early Monday, Trump blamed the controversy on young black activists, saying in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “Probably some of the Black Lives Matter folks called them up and said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t be meeting with Trump because he believes all lives matter.'”
With expectations dampened, a small but resilient group of mostly black pastors stepped into a media scrum Monday afternoon to talk about the much publicized, now private meeting with Trump. There was no promised live-stream and no radio broadcast.

In other words, it was a messy little circus. Worse for Trump, it provided Taylor with an opportunity to review Trump’s record on issues of concern to African Americans:

The Republican brand is toxic in most quarters of the black community. That said, the media avail felt more like a gambit to change the optics rather than an earnest effort to bring new hope to distressed communities. Trump, who has been busy alienating black voters with his nationalistic, almost barbaric approach to the campaign trail, is clearly in need of a healing…The numbers, however, are clear. Since the late 1960s, after the passage of the civil rights acts, Republican support from black voters has wallowed in the single digits.
…Responding to an open letter from 150 faith and academic leaders published Friday by Ebony challenging the group to rethink endorsing Trump, Bishop Scott directly questioned the ethics of the magazine’s management…”By siding with a presidential candidate whose rhetoric pathologizes Black people, what message are you sending to the world about the Black lives in and outside of your congregations?” the letter read. “Which Black lives do you claim to be liberating?”
Embracing a roomful of black pastors and persuading a few to endorse him certainly aren’t enough to erase what has been–arguably–Trump’s history of racial animus and outright bigotry…Despite his claims, one could argue that Trump has been in a position to create jobs in predominantly African American communities and simply has not done so in any meaningful way. His office towers, residential units, and golf resorts are built almost exclusively in wealthy white enclaves.

“As I sat cross-legged holding a recorder in front of the bank of microphones Monday,” Taylor continues, “I wondered why Trump’s decades-long career as a real estate developer has yielded almost no investments in the black community. A review of financial records revealed that few, if any, charitable contributions have been given to programs that directly benefit African American children. Then, too, according to the company website, there is not a single black executive or key senior leader at The Trump Organization.”
As you might expect, there are accounts of Trump unleashing torrents of bigotry toward African Americans. Taylor cites one example: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” he famously told a colleague. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.”
“Long before he recklessly retweeted false statistics that painted black people as criminally pathological,” Taylor adds. “Trump was sued for housing discrimination. And there are reports that black employees at an Atlantic City property were kept out of view whenever Trump visited.”
Not a record that is likely to inspire significant numbers of America’s most reliably progressive constituency to suddenly embrace a Republican candidate for president. Thing is, Trump may not be the worst of his GOP colleagues, when it comes to racial injustice, just the loudest. Every other GOP candidate has provided tacit, if not aggressively overt support for suppression of African American votes, and Trump has said or done nothing to stand up against it.

At Washington Monthly Political Animal, Martin Longman’s The Media Treatment of the Clintons Never Improves comments on an Associated Press article which has been put up on the Fox News website with a headline that appears designed to disparage Hillary Clinton. As Longman writes,

Let’s take a look at this Associated Press piece that is being prominently featured at the Fox News website. The headline writers certainly tried to make it appealing to those who are opposed to another Clinton presidency: Clinton opened State Department office to dozens of corporate donors, Dem fundraisers.
But, once you open the article and start reading, you encounter the following disclaimer (emphasis mine):
it’s basically a smear to publish a piece like this one from the Associated Press, especially when you are unwilling to spell out your double standard and really justify the rationale behind it. And the headline writers take advantage, too, to get the clicks they’re after.
This story says that Hillary Clinton did nothing unusual, illegal, or even unethical, but that’s not the impression the story and the headline leaves, is it?
Haven’t we seen enough of this kind of media treatment of the Clintons over the years?

A Fox News headline distortion is no surprise. But somehow, we still expect better from AP. The nation’s most widely-read news agency has nurtured and featured many fine writers over the years, and lowering its standards to allow poorly-sourced Hillary-bashing is a disappointment.

Washington Post chief correspondent Dan Balz addresses the formidable challenges facing Democrats, not only in winning the 2016 presidential election, but also in reducing the GOP’s edge down-ballot\.

…The realities and the contradictions of the politics of this divided era…have left Democrats in control of the White House and big cities and Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and a majority of state governments. These contradictions and the challenges for both parties are well explored in the new book, “America Ascendant,” by Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.
Not surprisingly, given his partisan leanings, Greenberg is and long has been bearish about a Republican Party that he sees as fighting against irreversible trends in the makeup and attitudes of the future America. But those conclusions do not lead him to offer unabashed enthusiasm for the future of the Democrats at a time of wrenching economic and cultural changes.
Greenberg sees his own party as having fallen short in addressing many of the economic and other conditions that have soured so many people on a political system that they feel has ignored their interests in favor of the privileged or the elites.
He argues that, unless Democrats find a way to break through the disaffection and indifference and deal with the structural economic issues, their ability to energize enough support to command a true governing majority will continue to escape them. As he writes, “The rising American electorate could be the Democrats’ salvation — but that electorate first has to be engaged and motivated to vote.”

As Bill Clinton’s pollster in the 1992 presidential campaign, which Balz notes “restored the Democrats to power in the White House, after Republicans had held it for 20 of the previous 24 years,” Greenberg provided a unique perspective on Clinton’s political skills as “a new Democrat” in a telephone interview with Balz.

…He was best known for his advocacy of welfare and education reform…But Greenberg noted that Clinton also has had a strong streak of populism, advocating higher taxes on the rich, decrying the salaries of chief executives and declaring his roots in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Clinton was both left and right at the same time, and in doing so he managed to expand the appeal of his party.
“Clinton had a formula for making the Democratic Party electable nationally,” Greenberg said. The formula included taking advantage of some of the demographic and voting trends of the time — greater support for Democrats among college-educated women and suburban voters — while bringing back some of the white industrial-class workers who had defected to Reagan and the Republicans.

Balz adds that Clinton was instrumental in converting states in “the industrial heartland and elsewhere,” including Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California and New Jersey, “from general election battlegrounds into Democratic strongholds. He also helped Democrats find ways to carry Ohio in four of the past six presidential elections.”
President Obama inherited a much more difficult set of economic challenges, explains Greenbers, including widening economic inequality, as well as the Bush meltdown. “His economic project was the recovery,” Greenberg said of Obama. “But that only takes you back to where we were. What I argue is that there are big structural economic and social problems, and the reason why this new majority is disengaged is because Democratic leaders have not addressed these problems.”
“The huge losses suffered by Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections,” explains Balz, “have put Republicans in control of the House and the Senate and expanded their hold on a majority of the governorships…” However, says Balz, “Greenberg still sees a much brighter future for the Democrats than for the Republicans. But he acknowledged that he turned out to have been overly bullish about his party’s prospects in 2014. “We made assumptions that 2010 was atypical,” he said. “I didn’t think ’14 would be as bad as ’10. I didn’t think this new majority would be as disengaged as it was in ’14.”
Balls call it “a lesson worth remembering for Democrats as they watch the Republicans struggle among themselves. But the stakes couldn’t be higher for Democrats, and for the nation, as Balz explains:

If Republicans win the presidency in 2016, they would then control nearly everything — the White House, the House, probably the Senate and certainly a majority of governorships. If Democrats hold the White House, they might win the Senate but probably would not have the House and would be in a distinct minority in the states. If they lose the White House, they would be virtually wiped out of power.
For Democrats, that means a victory in the general election still would represent only a down payment on the future and a continuing struggle to implement the kind of progressive economic agenda that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have begun to talk about in their campaigns.

The challenge for Democrats is clear, says Balz: “…Even if Democrats win the White House next year, they must still build down from there, and from their urban base build outward. Unless they do that, neither Democrats nor Republicans will be able to claim the kind of majority support that they desire — and the country will remain divided, at odds, and not easily governed.”
Also in the Washington Post, E. J. Dionne, Jr. observes in his latest column,

One of the tasks of political analysis is to make sense of conflicting information, and a new book by Stanley Greenberg, who was a political scientist before he became a Democratic pollster, does not shy away from the messiness of our social and electoral landscape. My Dickensian “best of times, worst of times” analysis is drawn partly from Greenberg’s new book, “America Ascendant.” In it Greenberg sees Republicans in a long-term demographic “death spiral.” But the book is also unsparing in acknowledging that Democratic weaknesses among older white and rural voters leave the GOP “almost unopposed in nearly half of the states.”

Dionne applauds Greenberg’s “resistance to gloom about America’s future,” and continues, “only the dysfunction of our politics will keep our country from having another good century. Yes, we face real threats, including terrorism. But we are not paying enough attention to our strengths, including the advantages of a social diversity that is causing such unease among many of our fellow citizens.” Further, says Dionne,

The power of Greenberg’s analysis is that he doesn’t dismiss the anger of these Americans, so many of whom are rallying to Donald Trump. Written before Trump’s rise, the book doesn’t mention him, but Greenberg treats what has become the Trump constituency with a heartfelt empathy.
The sorts of voters who rally to Trump have reason to be upset, he says, because the very economic and social changes that contribute to growth also create “stark problems for people and the country that leave the public seething, frustrated, and pessimistic about the future . . . .” There are no wage gains for most, “working-class men have been left marginalized,” and the proportion of children being born to single parents has soared.
Greenberg is open to changes in our mores and insists that progressive policies on family leave, pay, taxes and prekindergarten programs are more plausible responses to these problems than sermonizing. But if his book provides Democrats with good news about their national political advantages, it pointedly challenges them to address rather than ignore or dismiss the reasons for the thunder on the right.

Dionne concludes on a note of optimism and challenge: “‘The citizenry is ready for a cleansing era of reform that allows America to realize its promise,'” Greenberg writes. It would be helpful if the campaign gave us more reason to think he’s right.” A worthy challenge, and one which cries out for bold Democratic leadership.

In his National Journal article, “Forget the 2016 Polls: Nobody Knows Anything Yet,” S.V. Dáte writes, “At the same point in the 2012 race, just over two months be­fore the Iowa caucuses, pizza-chain ex­ec­ut­ive Her­man Cain had a clear lead in Iowa, while even­tu­al winner Rick San­tor­um was at 4 per­cent.”
Citing “large per­cent­ages of re­spond­ents who say they still have not settled on a can­did­ate,” Dáte notes some interesting technical reasons why early polling is less influential:

Layered onto this fun­da­ment­al lack of deep voter in­terest are the lo­gist­ic­al dif­fi­culties in mod­ern polit­ic­al polling. More and more Amer­ic­ans do not have home land­lines any­more, only cell phones. And those num­bers, by law, must be manu­ally dialed, driv­ing up costs. The ma­jor­ity of Amer­ic­ans, re­gard­less of what type of phone they have, do not an­swer in­com­ing num­bers they don’t re­cog­nize. These factors pro­duce a re­sponse rate in sur­veys of 8 per­cent, com­pared to 80 per­cent or so a few dec­ades ago.
And then there are the sample sizes, of­ten so small that the mar­gins of er­ror are lar­ger than the spreads among a host of can­did­ates. An ABC News/Wash­ing­ton Post poll re­leased this week­end had Trump lead­ing na­tion­ally with 32 per­cent, Car­son in second at 22 per­cent, and then 10 can­did­ates ran­ging from Sen. Marco Ru­bio at 11 per­cent down to Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham and former Sen. Rick San­tor­um at 1 per­cent.
But be­cause the sample size of 423 Re­pub­lic­an re­spond­ents pro­duces a 5.5-point mar­gin of er­ror, those 10 can­did­ates from Ru­bio to San­tor­um were stat­ist­ic­ally tied.
John Dick, founder of the polling and re­search firm Civic Sci­ence, said such de­pend­ence on ob­vi­ously im­pre­cise sur­veys is ac­tu­ally do­ing voters a dis­ser­vice. “It is cat­egor­ic­ally ir­re­spons­ible, in my opin­ion,” Dick said.

As with church attendance and charitable contributions, notes Dáte, there is also the tendency of too many poll respondents to say they will vote, but don’t show up at the polls on election day. “A Fox News poll re­leased on Sunday sim­il­arly had 79 per­cent of re­spond­ents say­ing they are likely to vote…If 77 or 79 per­cent of re­gistered voters truly wind up vot­ing in their primar­ies, it would shat­ter turnout re­cords across the coun­try.”
The early polls are consequential in other ways. Dáte acknowledges the power of early polls in attracting contributions and in selecting those who get to participate in televised debates, which has played a significant role in the subsequent allocation of media attention.
The polls are of interest to the candidates themselves as a way to pinpoint weaknesses with different demographic groups, define the popularity of policy positions and geographic vulnerabilities. But for those following political campaigns, using the polls to determine who is actually leading the horserace is pretty much a waste of time.

Hip hop artist and social activist Killer Mike has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for President. Here is his introduction of Sanders at an Atlanta rally, at which he also called for free education, universal health care and restoration of the Voting Rights Act.

At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky posts what may be the best article written anywhere about Donald Trump’s campaign, “Who in GOP Will Finally Stop Trump?: Party leaders could summon the courage of their predecessor Margaret Chase Smith, who stood up to Joseph McCarthy when it mattered. That is, if any of them have the stones to do it.”

I’m still not sure it’s 100 percent clear that Donald Trump really understands that he’s a neo-fascist. He may not know enough history to be fully aware of the now-undeniable odor of his rhetoric and campaign. He may think a member of a racial minority being beat up and called a “n***r” by his racial-majority supporters at a rally, and his own joking about it, is just a little incident; something for which there’s no larger historical context. I know he allegedly had the book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed, but I still think he’s doing most of this on instinct rather than with intellectual intention because I doubt he knows enough about fascism for it to be the latter.
But stop and think about this: I just wrote a paragraph musing on whether the leading candidate for president of the United States from one of our two major parties is knowingly fascist. We’re at the point where we’re debating whether the Republican Party frontrunner is or is not objectively a fascist.

Trump’s GOP opponents are either too intimidated or incapable of calling him out. Of the Republican candidates, notes Tomasky, only former Gov. Jim Gilmore has spoken out against Trump’s “fascist talk.” Where are the others, asks Tomasky? Do any of them have the mettle that it took to speak out against McCarthyism?

And that brings us to the question: Who in the Republican Party is going to step up here? Because this is A Moment for the GOP, make no mistake. It’s a historical moment, and when your leading candidate is joking about his supporters beating people up at rallies and musing about religious ID cards for around (ahem) 6 million of your citizens, it’s time to say something.
Reince Priebus, after the last election, called on his party to be more inclusive. Is this what you had in mind, Reince? How about the other leading candidates? Is this where you want your party to be taken? Karl Rove and others in the professional political class–will they say anything, if not out of moral principle then at least to try to protect their party’s candidates from down-ticket disaster?
And most of all, what about the party’s graybeards and elder statesmen? Looking at you, John McCain. How about a little “Straight Talk” now, about a man who proposes to come into your state, where there are an estimated 300,000 or so unauthorized immigrants, and break up families because one of them’s illegal and the other is not?

The GOP has deliberately pandered to and exacerbated the worst prejudices of their voters. As Tomasky notes, “this predicament raises the interesting question of how one-third of their voters came to admire a neo-fascist and open racist in the first place. Gee, it can’t have anything to do with the kind of rhetoric and “harmless jokes” about the current president and about the 47 percent that Republican leaders have winked at for seven years, can it?”
If the Republicans need a role model to end their groveling to bigotry, Tomasky has one:

There’s precedent for the courageous path, should anyone choose to take it. On Feb. 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy gave his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, charging that communists were working in the State Department. The months that followed were very much like these last five months of the Trump ascendancy, as the official party stood mute in the face of the hysteria created by one of its number.
Then in June, one Republican senator said “enough.” Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was a freshman senator, having taken her husband’s seat. She took to the Senate floor and gave a 15-minute speech (PDF), which has gone down in history as her “Declaration of Conscience,” that all of us, starting with leading Republicans, ought to be reading this week. Two choice excerpts:
“As a Republican, I say to my colleagues on this side of the aisle that the Republican Party faces a challenge today that is not unlike the challenge which it faced back in Lincoln’s day. The Republican Party so successfully met that challenge that it emerged from the Civil War as the champion of a united nation–in addition to being a party which unrelentingly fought loose spending and loose programs.”
“The Democratic administration has greatly lost the confidence of the American people… Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

Tomasky notes that six of Sen. Chase’s fellow Republicans “signed with her a statement of principles that began: “We are Republicans. But we are Americans first.” So that’s what people can do in the face of extremism, if they want to.” Those seven Republicans stood up for American values and earned a place of honor in our history as genuine patriots who put their country before politics.
Where, we must ask, are their heirs?

You’ve read all of the good arguments for increasing the minimum wage to a living wage. But to win wider support for this long-overdue reform, we have to make people feel it. Sharing this young man’s testimony widely is a good start:

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Imagine that you and your family have been displaced from your homeland by an oppressive government. Imagine that if you are forced to return to that homeland you will likely be subjected to persecution — and potentially death.
Now imagine that the world’s democracies close their doors and refuse to give you asylum.
That is exactly what happened to thousands of Jews who were targeted for persecution and ultimately extermination by Hitler’s Germany.
In November 1938, the Nazis organized a systematic attack on Jews called Kristallnacht. That event escalated the growing anti-Semitism in Germany to a new level, and many Jews decided they must leave the country.
On May 13, 1939 some 900 Jews fled Germany aboard the cruise liner SS St. Louis. They had hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the United States and safety.
But when they arrived in Cuba they were not allowed to land. Then the captain steered the St. Louis towards the Florida coast, but U.S. authorities refused to allow the ship loaded with desperate refugees to dock.
In the end, the ship was forced to return to Europe — and 250 of those on board were ultimately killed by the Nazis.
Most Americans look back on our refusal to admit the Jewish refugees from Europe as a shameful blot on American history. We must not allow it to happen again.
Today the flow of refugees are Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi. They are fleeing ISIS and the horrific civil war in Syria.
Our most fundamental moral precept is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — the Golden Rule. When fellow human beings are fleeing their homes in fear of their lives, we must do our best to help provide them help and safety or we won’t be able to look at ourselves in the mirror.
What if we found ourselves on the other side of that equation? What if that child’s body on that Greek beach were one of our children? What would we expect and hope for from our fellow human beings?
It certainly is not the unforgivable demagoguery that flooded the airwaves on Monday from 24 GOP governors who issued statements saying they would “not take in” Syrian refugees in their states and would deny any aid to resettle them.
New Jersey Governor and long-shot GOP presidential contender Chris Christie said he wanted to keep out Syrian refugees even if they are children.
Another presidential candidate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said he would use “all lawful means” to block Syrian refugees from coming to Louisiana.
Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan, which has a large Syrian community, said he would do everything he could to keep Syrian refugees out of the state.
Illinois Governor, Bruce Rauner announced he had “suspended” taking refugees in Illinois.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a letter to Obama that begins “As governor of Texas, I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack in Paris.”

Read more…

In his Washington Post op-ed, “Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans,” Democratic strategist Stan Greenberg predicts that “Election Day 2016 will produce a shattering crash larger than anything the pundits anticipate.” The reason, says Greenberg, is “because the revolutionary economic and social changes occurring in the United States have now pushed both the burgeoning new majority and the conservative Republicans’ counterrevolution beyond their tipping points.”
Greenberg provides a vivid picture of America’s demographic changes:

The United States is being transformed by revolutions remaking the country at an accelerating and surprising pace. Witness the revolutions in technology, the Internet, big data and energy, though just as important are the tremendous changes taking place in immigration, racial and ethnic diversity, the family, religious observance and gender roles. These are reaching their apexes in the booming metropolitan centers and among millennials.
As the revolutions interact, they are accelerating the emergence of a new America. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City’s residents are foreign-born, with Chinese the second-largest group behind Dominicans. The foreign-born make up nearly 40 percent of Los Angeles’s residents and 58 percent of Miami’s. A majority of U.S. households are headed by unmarried people, and, in cities, 40 percent of households include only a single person. Church attendance is in decline, and non-religious seculars now outnumber mainline Protestants. Three-quarters of working-age women are in the labor force, and two-thirds of women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of their households. The proportion of racial minorities is approaching 40 percent, but blowing up all projections are the 15 percent of new marriages that are interracial. People are moving from the suburbs to the cities. And in the past five years, two-thirds of millennial college graduates have settled in the 50 largest cities, transforming them.

Political attitudes dynamics are no less striking. Greenberg explains that “diversity is becoming more central to our multicultural identity” and “Shifting attitudes were underscored in this year’s Gallup Poll when 60 to 70 percent of the country said gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce are all “morally acceptable.”
He cites a “a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars” which comprised 51 percent of voters in 2012, but will account for 63 percent of voters in 2016. he adds that the Republican Party brand “has probably not been as tarnished since the Watergate era.”
Greenberg notes that the GOP downhill slide accelerated in 2004, when Bush strategist Karl Rove decided to prioritize winning evangelical voters, while writing off swing voters. As a result the Republican demographic mix has been distilled down to “mostly married voters, as well as the oldest, most rural and most religiously observant voters in the country.” Greenberg argues that the GOP’s new demographic reality “creates formidable odds against its winning an electoral college majority.”
Further, there is a “shrinking proportion of people who think of themselves as conservative, down to 37 percent from 46 percent during the November elections.”For Republicans,” adds Greenberg 2016 “will confirm that the new America is here and that the counterrevolution has lost. That is why I expect the result to be shattering for the Republican Party as we know it.”
Greenberg believes it is possible that the Republicans can learn from their 2016 defeat and re-emerge with less bashing of immigrants and more tolerance for “the sexual revolution and the new gender roles and work to help the modern working family.” They might even be more open to investing in infrastructure upgrades and education.
Such a transformation, says Greenberg, could set the stage for “a different kind of debate within the Republican Party and, perhaps, a different kind of politics in the country,” just as Dems “modernized” their policies after their 1984 defeat. And that would be a welcome change for those who want to see America moving forward again.