Toward a Demotic Republican Party

He notes two trends that have changed since Judis and Teixeira's 2002 book. College enrollments are going down rather than up, thanks to administrative bloat, racial discrimination and tolerance of violent antisemitism. College grads were a growing part of the electorate from the 1940s to the 1990s. They aren't anymore.

The second thing is that America just isn't as racist as gentry liberals and self-appointed Black Lives Matter apparatchiks claim. Ruffini travels to middle-class black subdivisions in suburban Atlanta to Asian communities in Orange County to Puerto Ricans moving into Disney World's backyard and sees people working hard, moving upward, raising families, becoming not alienated rebels but self-identified Americans as the children and grandchildren of Ellis Island immigrants did several generations ago.

In the process, there's lots more intermarriage than gentry liberals imagine. That's erasing the sharp divisions in racial categories fostered by universities with their segregated dormitories and by big corporations with their human relations departments and their "diversity training" sessions.

What are some of the consequences of the emerging demotic Republican Party? One is that high turnout now probably helps Republicans and hurts Democrats, whose gentry liberals vote no matter what. Another is that Democratic campaigns have a big financial edge now, something forecast when the 2004 Democratic campaign slightly outspent even a Republican incumbent president.

The Electoral College tilt, which worked for Trump in 2016 and 2020, may vanish as he piles up votes in states he's already carrying and as Democratic margins from nonwhites recede. The Electoral College may favor Democrats again, as it did in 2004 through 2012.

Meanwhile, today's Republican congressional party is even more fissiparous and disorganized than the demotic Democratic congressional majorities were in the post-World War II years. Dissenting Democrats then just denied House speakers their votes; Republicans are throwing their speakers out.

The corporate establishment and heads of mainline Protestant churches, though their constituencies may be declining, are now and probably will be inclined to look askance at leaders of a demotic Republican Party, and not just Donald Trump, as their counterparts did 75 years ago at Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats. Meanwhile, pro-Republican intellectuals are sounding as beleaguered and defensive as liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sounded when most Ivy Leaguers voted Republican.

Which side owns the future? Neither one, Ruffini says. The "dueling realignments" of recent decades, amplified during the Trump years, "suggest a kind of self-regulating equilibrium where new divisions result in roughly the same competitive politics." This is true even or especially when, as in this year, both parties seem bent on nominating candidates with glaring and arguably disqualifying defects.

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Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.