According to NBC News, 12,000 Pennsylvanians dropped their Republican registration in January, a trend seen in many other states in reaction to the insurrection at the Capitol. The longer term trends though are probably more worrisome for the GOP.
First, consider gender:
Democrats have long been a party where women outnumber men, but the difference has grown. In the last decade, self-identified Democrats have gone from 42 percent male and 58 percent female in 2010 to 39 percent male and 61 percent female in 2020. And self-identified Republicans, who were once evenly split between genders in 2010, have become more male. In 2020, the self-identified Republicans were 54 percent male and 46 percent female.
Since there are more voting age women than men, the Republicans are on the wrong end of this swap. The same is true of the change in educational attainment.
In the last 10 years, blue-collar voters have become a bigger part of self-identified Republicans (growing by 7 points), while the blue-collar numbers have shrunk among Democrats (declining by 2). At the same time, white-collar voters have become a much bigger part of the Democratic Party and are up by 6 points. Even as Republicans have seen a gain with white-collar voters, by 4 points, the gains haven’t kept up with their blue-collar boom.
The overall share of people without a college degree is shrinking. So, the Republicans are again on the wrong side of this equation.
The NBC News article doesn’t discuss race, but the GOP is probably not picking up enough blue color voters of color to offset the demographic growth of minority populations that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats.
The two major parties don’t have total control over these developments. While parties certainly have ideological strategies for winning a majority of votes that involve targeting specific populations, they are also influenced by the people who support them. This is why the GOP can drift away from free trade toward protectionism even though no prominent Republican prior to Trump made that transition.
The Democrats, now more dependent on suburban professionals than coal and steel workers, may become more sensitive to raising progressive income taxes. Will they soon watch in horror as some firebrand wins their presidential nomination on an anti-tax pledge?
Eventually, the Republicans should become more diverse almost against their will, and the Democrats will be less economically progressive despite themselves. There were some some small signs of this in the 2020 election, but it would have been a much bigger shift if Trump and the GOP hadn’t embraced white nationalism as an organizing principle. That obviously acted an enormous drag on the party’s blue collar gains with people of color.
I’ve argued that the Democrats shouldn’t accelerate these changes. They should remain the party of the little guy. But the party strategists aren’t going to pass up easy-to-get suburban votes for difficult to get rural white votes. They ride the tide much more than they create it. It’s the same reason Republican officeholders aren’t willing to buck their base to hold Trump accountable for his crimes.
It’s rare to see a political leader who can actually create a new coalition on their own rather than finding one that was ready-made for them. Rarer still is the political leader who can do this by appealing to people’s better angels. In the absence of these kinds of leaders, the two parties will continue their current drifts. For the Republicans, this means more defections of reality-based voters, which will make them increasingly beholden to racists and kooks.
