Do you think there will be a time where there hasn't been a Republican President for a long time, several diverse red states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas all go into the competitive territory, and when several older white voters are beginning to die off, and that economic gaps like wages, employment, and education between whites and minorities get closer, that the Republican Party decides to say "enough is enough, let's try hard to target minorities aggressively as much as possible!"? For some reason I can see this happening, and could lead to a slight realignment. Do you think?
Too early to ask. Eight years, which is all that anyone dares predict now, isn't that long. Twelve? Clinton won decisively in 1992 after 8 years of Reagan and 4 of the honorable George Bush -- but won with an electoral map far different from that of Carter in 1976. North Carolina was competitive in both 2008 and 2012 and had been drifting D since 1988. Could you be thinking of Indiana? Arizona? Georgia was competitive in 2008 and on the fringe of competitiveness in 2012.
The narrowing gap between whites and minorities in income is more likely to intensify the enmity of poor whites toward anyone liberal -- unless there is a major shift in attitudes on economics. The South has alternated between populism and reaction since the Civil War, and a conservative trend that began in the 1980s may be close to playing itself out. Remember -- Jimmy Carter won every former-Confederate state except Virginia in 1976. If poor whites turn against economic elites that have treated them badly economically while pandering to 'culture', then the GOP is going to face a landslide about as nasty as the one that Ronald Reagan had in 1980.
The last big realignment was in 1992, when Bill Clinton won a raft of states that Carter lost in 1976 -- California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine -- states that all Democratic Presidential winners have won in any election beginning in 1992. The two Democrats who lost their Presidential campaigns both lost Nevada and lost either New Hampshire (Gore) or the pair of Iowa and New Mexico (Kerry).
2008? Obama winning Colorado and Virginia twice is not on the same magnitude should those two states be drifting D.
Most realignments happen under the cover of a series of losses for the Presidency, typically with diminishing margins for the winner in successive elections. Roosevelt won an epic blowout in 1936, a more ordinary landslide in 1940, a margin more like Clinton in the 1990s or Obama in 2008 in 1944; Truman won a close election in 1948. Eisenhower won a landslide, winning states that almost never go Republican (Massachusetts, Minnesota, Rhode Island). Significantly Eisenhower turned Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, and Oklahoma from states that usually voted for Democratic in most elections to states that have voted for a Democratic nominee only once (1964).
2016 is much too early for a realignment. The Republicans must abandon the delusion that with a few tweaks, a failed nominee of the other Party or some other luck they can win again. The coalition with which they won in 2000 and 2004 is shrinking. They lost twice to a Democratic nominee that many people reject for ethnicity alone. In 2016, when the Democratic nominee is a white person who is unambiguously Christian, the Republicans are going to need an unusually-strong candidate. If a white male had achieved what Barack Obama had achieved between 2009 and 2012 he would have probably have won with a landslide characteristic of Eisenhower in 1956, if not Reagan in 1984. Add five to seven percent of the vote total to President while concentrating most of the gain in the South, and President Obama picks up Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and West Virginia... and wins North Carolina and perhaps Indiana a second time. Arizona?
Establishing a new coalition capable of winning is the first step for the GOP. If the Democratic nominee of 2016 can poach some of the poor-white vote, then 2016 will make two terms of Barack Obama look like a a stubbed toe in contrast to a compound fracture.
