If you look at the demographic makeup of Mitt Romney’s inadequate coalition, you’ll notice that it includes the elderly who are on Social Security and use Medicare. You’ll notice that it includes business and finance leaders. These people are not going to like the Republican Party’s coming threat to destroy the stock market if they can’t destroy people’s retirement security. Getting the Republicans to go on that kind of suicide mission should involve a lot of work, but they seem to want to do it for free.
There is an obvious cultural divide in this country that the Republicans use quite effectively. But if they want to truly minimize the effectiveness of that cultural divide, they could hardly do better than to go after white seniors’ earned benefits with a threat to wipe out white businessmen’s profits and white professionals’ 401(k)’s.
It’s easy to imagine an erosion of GOP support among the white working class when the Democrats offer a white presidential candidate in 2016. Whether it’s Biden or Clinton or Cuomo or O’Malley or Warner, or whoever it is, those candidates won’t automatically be losing in Appalachia.
I think the Republicans will have to do substantially better with white voters in 2016 if they want to compete, and I think there is almost no chance that they will. I think Wall Street will be with the Democrats, and I don’t think the GOP will retain their advantage with the elderly.
The GOP is moving to oblivion with breathtaking speed. I can easily see Hillary Clinton winning in 2016 with a very similar electoral map to LBJ’s 1964 landslide.
