I disagree. This is the future of the GOP for decades to come
Say more about this word -- what particular characteristics?
I think Trump himself will be remembered less than people think unless he gets a second term, just because one-term Presidents almost never get the 'very important' treatment (with Lincoln and JFK as obvious-reasons exceptions), and a large amount of remembering is done by intellectuals. (For 'adoration of Trump' to still be a thing 20-30 years from now, I think he needs to get a second term
and that second term needs to be seen as a success, which is a pretty high bar to clear).
Fair enough for the rest of this stuff. I've long predicted that, as the party of 'the government doing stuff' in a low-trust anti-government society, the Democratic party will get pulled towards militarism, and a lot of your stuff would then be reinforced by negative polarization.
I agree that trying to maintain an average of a 4-5 point D victory across 3 cycles is tricky, but given the NPV tends to lean D overall at this point, I don't think it's completely impossible. Remember, individually, it's ok if one cycle is only D + 2 or smtg, but there sort of has to be a D + 8 cycle to cancel it out. Ig this is sort of what happened where 2016 and 2018 cancelled out, and then 2020 was just what Dems needed to win the Senate. Even though Dems gained a Senate seat in 2022, I'd argue they underran what they needed to in the long term because they lost WI-Sen which pushes the median Senate seat rightwards for 2024 and 2026.
They also lost ME-Sen in 2020, and 2020 was sort of preposterously lucky in the sense of having
two special elections in D-trending states. In the long run this requires 2 of the 3 cycles to be true Democratic landslides, which we've had three of in the 21st century (2006, 2008, 2018); I don't think 2020 really counts. Here are (using the congressional numbers) the three-election averages:
2022: D+3.0
2020: D+3.5
2018: D+0.6
2016: R+1.9
2014: R+3.8
2012: D+1.6
2010: D+3.9
2008: D+5.3
2006: D+0.2
2004: R+2.6
2002: R+2.1
2000: R+0.5
…
Only 2008 actually even broke a D+4 average.
For Senate I'd say I see the biggest liability long-term is Nevada which is full of Demographics that have been shifting away from Ds the past few cycles. Nevada becoming an R-leaning state would further strengthen the GOP's small state Senate advantage, even though it's such a relatively urban state.
I think it's just legacy Democrats in blue states going away, and more generally the existence of more obvious Republican than Democratic targets. I don't think any state except GA is really on the cusp of transitioning from usually-Republican to usually-Democratic; I'm sort of skeptical of the AZ trend because I think AZ has many of the same patterns as FL. Over the slightly longer run if educational polarization continues to be a thing then TX
will flip, but this would be accompanied by much better Republican performances in the Midwest. But I'm not really confident about either half of that because I don't necessarily think educational polarization is very sustainable.
This decade seems a lot more favorable to Dems in the House for a variety of reasons - many VRA and other lawsuits against R maps being successful or seem likely to be successful. Also Ds might have a chance to redraw NY. And as you state, it seems the 2020 census overestimated liberal northern states likely throwing a few House seats Dems way. I'd also argue at the House level, political geography is generally improving for Democrats since a disproportionate amount of recent D gains have been in swingy areas of the Country, whereas R gains have been more concentrated to deep red and blue communities.
The chart below is 2020 Pres margin vs 2016-2020 swing. You can see how you have an arc where super D and R communities are more likely to have swung R and communities closer to 50-50 were more likely to have swung D.
I agree the college education thing could be problematic for Dems given they tend to be moving to a relatively small concentration of states with specific cities. Even within somewhat competitive like MN, WI or TX, places like MSP, Madison and Austin become huge Democratic vote sinks which can create unfavorable political geography at the state legislative level. I think the best thing Dems can hope for is for various tech and economic industries to become less concentrated in a relatively small handful of cities; this is a trend that has seemed to start the past decade or so but who knows if it'll continue. Also for college educated voters to not self-sort into these pockets of high turnout D+80 precincts.
Sure, all of this I basically agree with. Note that, at the state level, college graduates are often moving to states which are outright losing population, like CA/IL/NY -- movement of college graduates and movement of people seems barely even correlated.
I think a big question for me is what happens to TX. It's a state that is seeing net-college ed migration (and has favorable growth patterns to Dems on a ton of other metrics). If and big *IF*, Texas goes the way of Georgia and has a rapid transformation from Lean R --> Lean D, it makes Rs electoral prospects for President much trickier. It's really hard to see what R's EC path would be without Texas, and so if they start being unable to win it, I wonder what strategy the GOP would take. Honestly best case for GOP, I see Texas sort of shifting into a true swing state and stalling slightly to the right of the NPV, but it'd still mean this one large state could singlehandedly shut down any GOP path to Pres in a given election.
I think TX is pretty far from being Safe D; hell, GA is still pretty far from being Safe D. Even a pretty strong Midwestern improvement wouldn't really cancel that out; at that point Republicans either really would just be relegated to congressional control, unless EC shifts have
really helped later-life destinations like FL/TN/the Carolinas. (I've characterized Leon Sit's projections for the 2030 Census as being "like adding another Tennessee", but of course a big part of those projections being good for Republicans at all is predicated on them continuing to win TX.)
Kansas having such a big education exodus is somewhat surprising to me because according to the 2020 census, the fastest growing parts of the state were also the highest education/well-to-do. I do agree Johnson County probably has one of the highest concentrations of true R-->D vote flips in the past decade or so; it's one of the few suburbs where honestly not that much of D gains can be attributed to Demographic change (unless generational turnover plays a big role). In a place like Henry County GA, it's clear most of the leftwards shift can be attributed to the increasing black population. And then you have a ton of suburbs in between. I think the reason why a state like KS looks favorable long term to Ds imo is because the state's population mostly lives in urban/suburban communities, and growth patterns tend to favor these urban/suburban communities becoming a larger and larger share of the population.
Yeah, my argument against KS as an outright future Democratic-leaning state is that at a certain point they'll run out of persuadable ancestrally-Republican college-educated voters. Among small states, I think AK is the best chance for a flip, and that there might be some unexpected Democratic stability in ME, which also receives lots of "crunchy" in-migration. (Whereas VT has become really expensive and is probably overdo for a correction, though of course it has
far to go before it's winnable for the GOP.)
On the opposite side, Delaware has seen lots of later-life in-migration (the fastest-growing county is Sussex!) and is probably underrated as a 15-years-from-now Republican flip. It's also a place where even pretty small Republican improvement in deep-blue city areas might be of unusual consequence.
As someone from the northeast who has at least spent time in the northern MA/NH area, the sense I get is that NH's migration is only relatively conservative by New England standards, but still liberal by national standards, especially along the MA-NH border.
I think lots of internal NH politics seems to beg to differ here; the state government is really and actually quite conservative and there lots of anti-Massachusetts rhetoric and such.
I def agree with your point there tends to be more D-->R persuasion, and it's what's keeping Rs viable is def true. Imagine for instance if Biden was getting Obama numbers in the rural Midwest but with the demographics of 2020; Democrats would truly have a dominant national coalition. As the Country slowly becomes more diverse, the benchmarks Dems need to hit with certain racial groups to win elections becomes lower, and Rs will likely peel off more voters. I mean think about it; it really wasn't that long ago you had to be nationally competitive with the white vote to win an election; it's only really been in the past 20 years Dems could get away with consistently losing the white vote while remaining electorally viable.
Democrats have been able to lose the white vote and be viable for a while (the last presidential election at which they
won it was 1964). That said, yes, Democratic victories while losing the white vote by double-digits are a 2008-and-later phenomenon; if I remember correctly Bill Clinton came within a point twice.
(One of my favorite weird turnout statistics is that the 2004-to-2008 turnout surge was entirely fueled by non-white voters; white turnout actually very slightly
fell. In general -- starting in 1976, by which point the civil-rights-era and post-civil-rights-era registration drives had mostly ended -- the three really distinct peaks in white turnout are 1992, 2004, and 2020. For black voters obviously 2008/2012 swamps everything else.)
