http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080901/bowersShould Barack Obama win in November, as he appears poised to do, his victory will be viewed by future generations of political scientists as a fulcrum when the balance of power in American coalition politics shifted. The election of the first African-American President in the history of the United States would finally put an end to conservative-dominated "backlash" identity politics, replacing it with a new, pluralistic mainstream. Even if John McCain somehow does snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the underlying structural dynamics of the electorate all point toward the same conclusion: the end of Bubba dominance is at hand, and a new era is imminent.
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Since 1968 American presidential elections have been defined as a competition over fundamentally conservative identity groups. Even though they are not precisely congruous, a direct lineage exists from the Nixon-forged Southern Strategy of the 1960s and '70s, to the Reagan Democrats of the '80s, to Mark Penn's Bubbas of the '90s and on to the Values Voters of this decade. These swing voting groups are overwhelmingly white, not very urban, heavily blue-collar, generally Southern and always socially conservative.
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In order to solidify their support among the white, blue-collar, nonliberal, nonurban swing voters described above, conservative Republicans from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush employed a series of identity-based "backlash" narratives against a diverse array of minority demographic groups who were scapegoated for the problems the swing voters faced: liberals destroyed traditional culture and humbled America before its enemies. African-Americans used affirmative action to take jobs they didn't deserve and created a national plague of crime. Immigrants illegally took American jobs and public services without even bothering to learn our language. Homosexuals destroyed families and threatened to convert your children to their lifestyle. Non-Christians forced Jesus out of public places and declared war on Christmas. All of these rhetorical strategies pitted a majority of voters (the religious, the white, the middle class, the straight) against some minority. Given the math, it's perhaps not surprising that the strategy worked: Democrats have failed to receive more than 50.1 percent of the national vote in all of the past ten presidential elections.
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Given that Republicans consolidated a shrinking majority against a series of rising minorities, unless the scapegoating stops, their electoral future appears bleak. In 1992 Latinos and Asians made up only 3 percent of the electorate, but in 2006 they accounted for 10 percent. In 1990, according to the National Survey of Religious Identification conducted by the City University of New York, only 10 percent of the country self-identified as non-Christian. According to a 2001 follow-up from CUNY as well as a 2008 study conducted by the Pew Forum on religion and American life, that number had increased to 22-23 percent of the national population. Although it receives somewhat less fanfare, the national drift away from Christian self-identification is changing the cultural face of America even more rapidly than the large influx of Latino and Asian immigrants. Combined, these two trends are changing the cultural and political structure of America with such alacrity that, according to a 2005 study by Greenberg Quinlin Rosner, "OMG! How Generation Y Is Redefining Faith in the iPod Era," only 39 percent of Americans born between 1965 and 1994 (inclusive) self-identify as both white and Christian, compared with 66 percent of Americans born in 1964 or earlier. Given the partisan voting habits of nonwhites and non-Christians discussed in the previous paragraph, it isn't hard to see that Republicans are facing a slow-motion electoral tidal wave that is turning the country nearly 1 percent more Democratic every year, regardless of specific political conditions.
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Worth reading the whole article IMO. Provides a little hope for the future, assuming McCain (or some other Repub) doesn't blow up the world first. :P
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