5 Long-Term Trends Working Against The Democratic Party

5 Long-Term Trends Working Against The Democratic Party
By John Hawkins
10/4/2011

There tends to be a rough parity between parties in the American political system. That's because both parties shift in response to changing conditions. They go after new groups of constituents, positions on the issues change, and the only rule at the end of the day tends to be that he who can deliver the votes, makes the rules. For example, black Republicans used to vote heavily for the Republican Party and it was the Democrats, not the Republicans, who used to be the biggest advocates of tax cuts.

The biggest change in the political landscape over the next few decades is likely to be America's shift to a majority minority population by 2050. This is a change that appears to benefit the Democratic Party since black Americans currently vote for them by a 9-to-1 clip and Hispanic Americans vote for them 2-to-1. The Republican Party will, of course, adjust to the situation and find ways to bring in more minority voters because it will have no other choice. However, there are other coming trends that don't bode as well for the Democratic Party.

1) The fragmentation of the national media: At one point, the Left had an almost total lock on the media. People watched one of the big 3 liberal networks, they read a liberal newspaper, and they had few other options to find out what was going on in the world. That has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The big three networks? They've lost 55.5% of their audience since 1980. Liberal newspapers? They're dinosaurs that are slowly but surely sliding towards extinction in their current form. Staffs are being laid off across the country and The New York Times, which is the most prestigious paper in America, is 1.1 billion dollars in debt and fading. The further the liberal press falls, the more room there is for the web and talk radio to move into the gap and provide Americans with an alternate viewpoint that's friendlier to conservatism, capitalism, and Christianity.

2) They're aborting themselves into oblivion: Controversially, the book Freakonomics tied abortion to the reduced crime rate we've seen over the last few decades. James Taranto has also pointed out that abortion may be playing a bigger role in politics than we realize.

"It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have."

This shouldn't change anyone's mind about being pro-life. After all, right is right and wrong is wrong. But, is there some validity to this theory? It sure seems like it.

3) America goes broke: The Democratic Party's core message is, "Vote for us and we'll give you somebody else's money." That's how they weld together all the disparate pieces of their base. But as Margaret Thatcher once famously said, "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Unfortunately for the Democrats, we're at that point. America has lost its AAA credit rating. We have a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit, a 14 trillion dollar debt, and 100 trillion dollars in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities. Even Barack Obama, who's the most wasteful spender in human history, admits that this level of spending is "unsustainable." What this means is that there is going to be much less taxpayer money for the Democrats to dole out to their constituencies in the coming years. If the Democrats can't continue to buy those votes with your money, their base will start to splinter.

4) Population shifts caused by liberal policies: The more liberal an area gets, the more non-functional it becomes, and the more people and businesses eventually flee. It's a long, slow process, but it's very real. You can see it in cities like Detroit, which lost 25% of its population in the last decade. You can also see it state-wide in the electoral college where states carried by Obama will lose 6 electoral votes because of the latest census numbers.

5) The fall of unions: Unions are in deep decline. In 1981, 25 percent of all workers belonged to a union. That's down to 12.4% today. Those numbers are likely to continue to decrease because unions make businesses that use them much less competitive in the global market place. Because of America's debt at all levels of government, there will also be tremendous downward pressure on public sector unions, which drive up the cost of government. This is a problem for Democrats because unions are their most important backers. They supply them with tremendous amounts of manpower and almost unbelievable amounts of money. In 2010, for example, unions poured 170 million dollars into Democratic re-election efforts. It's almost inevitable that unions will continue to decline and when the unions get sick, it's the Democratic Party that sneezes.
__________________________________________

To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.