How to Beat Republicans

The Republican core assembles three groups: small business anti-regulators who tend to be libertarian, country-based social conservatives, and religious people who seek government intervention on their behalf. The contradictions present in this coalition are obvious. Yet even if it were fully united, the core itself still isn’t large enough to win. Republicans benefit from the oddity that independent, upscale upbeats and downscale disaffected voters cynical about politics both lean the GOP’s way. (See the Pew Research Center’s findings here.)

It helps that all the above groups are overwhelmingly white. And that Christianity, the religion of the white tribe, is the Republican religion.

The decline in Republican power is most evident in the West, and relates directly to that region's growing Hispanic population. As a Republican state with Republican governors from 1966 to 1998 (except Jerry Brown, 1974-82), California helped elect Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, while nearly saving Ford in 1976. Not since. Not since California Governor Pete Wilson went anti-immigrant in his 1994 campaign for re-election.

And the rest of the West was solidly Republican—until 2004 anyway. The switch of 70,000 votes in New Mexico, Nevada, and Colorado would have given those three states’ 19 electoral votes to Kerry, and with them, the 2004 election. Florida is another state where rising Hispanic numbers have turned a Republican state toward Democrats.

It’s a fight though. Hispanics are Catholic, and Bush 43 and his Texas-reared brain trust know how to use religion to go after Hispanic votes. Obviously, the ugly debate about illegal immigration is hurting Bush’s Hispanic strategy, and could cost the Republicans dearly in upcoming elections.