A Daily Kos diarist did a pretty cool demographic analysis of Texas this week and discovered that the Lone Star State is going to be a purple swing state by 2024 and will have a Democratic lean by 2028 at the latest. You can play with the Electoral College calculator to see what this means. But, trust me, is spells certain doom for the current incarnation of the Republican Party. My interpretation of this information is that we can put an expiration date on the current madness we are witnessing. Like milk gone bad, the electorate will no longer consider drinking what the GOP is offering by sometime in the next decade.
I’ve been looking at the current Electoral College map and reading Nate Silver’s analysis, and I see New Mexico and Nevada already moving away from swing-state status, with Colorado nearing that condition. As far as I can tell, Mitt Romney has a chance to outperform John McCain by taking back North Carolina and Indiana, with an outside chance of winning Virginia, Ohio, and Florida, too. That still leaves him 14 electoral votes short of a tie, but it appears to be his upside potential at the moment. Short of an ill-timed catastrophe, it appears that the modern GOP is already incapable of winning a national election. But eight or twelve years from now, they’ll be incapable of making a plausible argument to a potential financial contributor that they have any chance of winning a presidential election.
I don’t think the Republican Party will stay the same. But we shouldn’t forget that the GOP failed to control the House from 1955-1995 and failed to control the Senate from 1955-1981. They are capable of existing in a minority status without adapting for astonishingly long periods of time.
The difference here is that we are not talking about Congress; we are talking about the White House. Once Texas becomes a Dem-leaning state sometime between 2024 and 2028, the current incarnation of the GOP will have no shot at sitting in the Oval Office.