Given the chaos consuming the Republican Party in the wake of Donald Trump’s nomination this year, I think future historians will write about the 2016 presidential election as the year the Republican Party’s internal contradictions finally came to the surface and consumed the party from the inside, leaving it an all-but-empty shell.
The Republican Party has an extremely difficult task before it, a task which requires it to do two seemingly mutually exclusive thing: It needs to both expand its base beyond white working-class voters, while retaining those same voters during its transition to a more diverse party.
Claire Malone, writing at FiveThirtyEight.com back in July, described the dilemma facing the Republican establishment concisely:
“The results of a FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey poll conducted in June found that one of the most indicative variables in determining Republican identification this year was agreement with the statement that the ‘number of immigrants who come to the United States each year’ should ‘decrease.’ Trump’s campaign kicked off with a speech last June that labeled Mexican immigrants as the dregs of society — ‘They’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,’ he said — and has hammered on the immigration issue since, adding Muslims to the dragnet of groups deemed undesirable in the United States. The election has taken on a distinctly racial tinge, and in doing so, has clarified the motivations of voters somewhat.
“Trump’s strategy, while winning him the GOP nomination in the short term, has likely only served to compound the long-term demographic and ideological problems the Republican Party has long known it faces. Over the past few decades, the GOP has remained largely white, less educated and older while the numbers of minorities in the country soared, college attainment rose and the millennial generation came of age politically. Alienating the country’s growing ranks of minorities is unwise on the sheer face of the numbers, and bad reputations can stick around for years; like sports teams and baldness, our political beliefs are passed down through generations and familial connections.”
According to the Census Bureau, in less than 30 years non-hispanic whites will be a minority in the United States:
“The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority nation for the first time in 2043. While the non-Hispanic white population will remain the largest single group, no group will make up a majority.
“All in all, minorities, now 37 percent of the U.S. population, are projected to comprise 57 percent of the population in 2060. (Minorities consist of all but the single-race, non-Hispanic white population.) The total minority population would more than double, from 116.2 million to 241.3 million over the period.
“Projections show the older population would continue to be predominately non-Hispanic white, while younger ages are increasingly minority. Of those age 65 and older in 2060, 56.0 percent are expected to be non-Hispanic white, 21.2 percent Hispanic and 12.5 percent non-Hispanic black. In contrast, while 52.7 percent of those younger than 18 were non-Hispanic white in 2012, that number would drop to 32.9 percent by 2060. Hispanics are projected to make up 38.0 percent of this group in 2060, up from 23.9 percent in 2012.”
The Republican establishment can read the demographic writing on the wall as well as anyone else, and before Trump ran away with the nomination, that establishment had planned on this year being the beginning of expanding its constituency beyond its traditional coalition.
In the wake of their loss in the 2012 elections, the Republican establishment wrote a post-mortem that contained a startlingly clear-eyed assessment of their weaknesses:
“At our core, Republicans have comfortably remained the Party of Reagan without figuring out what comes next. Ronald Reagan is a Republican hero and role model who was first elected 33 years ago — meaning no one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for President. Our party knows how to appeal to older voters, but we have lost our way with younger ones. We sound increasingly out of touch.
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In the last election, Governor Romney received just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote. Other minority communities, including Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, also view the Party as unwelcoming. President Bush got 44 percent of the Asian vote in 2004; our presidential nominee received only 26 percent in 2012.”
I have said before in this space that the United States needs a vigorous and coherent opposition party for the health of its governance. Here’s hoping that saner and more reasonable heads prevail in the wake of this year’s election.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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