While in attendance at the 2012 Republican convention, Sen. Lindsey Graham said the quiet parts out loud:
“The demographics race we’re losing badly … [Republicans are] not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”
Notice that he wasn’t referencing the present, but was talking about the long term. That is what drove Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census and their voter suppression drives for the last several years. As Zachary Roth wrote, they decided that “being outnumbered doesn’t have to mean losing.”
As we’ve seen since the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans have upped their game in states like Wisconsin and Michigan to peremptorily limit the power of Democrats elected to state-wide offices as well as pass further voter suppression efforts. This is basically the party telling us that they can’t generate enough angry white guys, and so they’re content to spit in the face of democracy to maintain their power.
Leonard Pitts recently zeroed in on the fact that Republicans, who have lied about rampant voter fraud as an excuse to suppress votes, are actually the ones that engaged in vote tampering in North Carolina.
As Republicans go about claiming victimhood in a “conspiracy” that is a figment of their collective imagination, this is what actual election tampering looks like. Not millions of people voting who shouldn’t, but rather, votes stolen, by chicanery, mendacity and intimidation, from people who have every right to participate in the electoral process.
As has been the case for years now, this all comes down to the fact that they can’t generate enough angry white guys.
So one gets sick and tired of watching Republicans hyperventilate about a problem that does not exist while ignoring one that does. If they are really serious about confronting threats to the integrity of American elections, the first step is to get a mirror.
The second is to come to terms with reality. America is changing, rapidly, dramatically and irrevocably. And the GOP needs to figure out how to compete in this new nation, how to make itself a party whose appeal extends beyond angry, older white male voters. That’s a reckoning the right has avoided for years, but it becomes less avoidable every day.
Looking into a mirror would mean taking stock of what happened to the Republican Party in California. The state of the GOP there has been described with words like “wipeout,” “irrelevance,” “dead,” “toxic,” “debacle,” “annihilation,” and “devastation.” As this chart from Daniel Donner demonstrates, it all started back in 1994 with the approval of Proposition 187. Demonstrating that there really is nothing new under the sun, that was dubbed the year of the Angry White Male.
It took over 20 years, but the alignment of the Republican Party in California with angry white guys eventually led to its demise.
If Republicans thought that they could generate enough angry white guys to stay in power nationally, they wouldn’t be trying to suppress votes, steal votes and peremptorily limit the power of newly elected Democrats. At some level, they know their gig of relying on angry white guys is up. As Pitt’s wrote, “the future is coming, fast. And they can’t cheat their way around it.”
