Here is a potential strategy for the GOP proposed by Steve Sailer of
www.vdare.com! Comment if you'd like!!
Even If Immigration Continues, The Sailer Strategy Could Still Win It For The GOP In 2050By
Steve SailerThe central question about the long-term future of the Republican Party is—does the
Republican Party have a future?The demographic changes unleashed by
post-1965 immigration policies inexorably work to
benefit Democrats, as
Peter Brimelow and
Ed Rubenstein pointed out in their National Review cover story
Electing a New People back in1997. (Those were the days! After
William F. Buckley purged the magazine of
patriotic immigration reformers, Brimelow and Rubenstein updated their analysis in the Hudson Institute’s magazine American Outlook in
2000.)
Brimelow and Rubenstein made
three points:a static point: in American politics,
race is destiny—the races vote systematically differently and these differences are very slow to change;
a dynamic point: the major parties’ share of the overall vote sways back and forth according to political conditions, and the proportion they get of each race’s vote sways back and forth in parallel (but the differences between the races remain roughly the same);
an immigration point: immigration policy is shifting America’s racial balance toward minorities, and therefore the ability of the Republican Party to win national elections is being steadily reduced.
Brimelow and Rubenstein’s conclusion in 1997: the GOP should move to cut off immigration.
Instead, under
George W. Bush, the GOP did exactly the opposite, although Bush’s
amnesty efforts ultimately
failed.
Nevertheless, the trend that Brimelow and Rubenstein identified was undeniable. Thus, according to the gold standard Census Bureau survey of more than 50,000 households immediately after each election, the non-Hispanic white share of the vote declined slowly from 84.9 percent in 1988 to 79.2 percent in 2004.
Then the white share fell off a cliff, down to 76.3 percent in 2008.
The reason for this sudden slump: turnout. In 2008, minorities surged to the polls to vote for Obama. Simultaneously, white turnout as a share of white adult citizens was down from the level of 2004.
Not surprisingly, the black turnout rate as a share of eligible black voters was up from 60 to 65 percent. But even more interestingly, other minorities, who are
less politicized than blacks, were excited by Obama’s candidacy too. Among citizens, Asian turnout was up from 45 to 47 percent of eligible
Asian voters, and Hispanic turnout increased from 47 to 50 percent of eligible Hispanic voters.
The more marginal white voters tend to
vote Republican if they get motivated enough to show up at the polls. The opposite is true for the more marginal minority voters—they tend to vote Democratic.
At a conceptual level, there are two ways the GOP can stay alive:
The
conventional wisdom says that the GOP must start converting a fast-growing immigrant group, such as
Hispanics—by, say, promoting
amnesty for illegal immigrants and
zero down payment mortgages to boost
minority homeownership.
Oh, wait, that has been the strategy of
George W. Bush,
Karl Rove and
John McCain. How’s that working out, by the way?
But there is an alternative, more obvious strategy that hasn’t been widely discussed:
The GOP could raise
white turnout and win a larger share of the white vote.
Of course this means the GOP would have to advocate (and then perhaps actually implement) policies that, you know, do something for its
natural (white) base.
The obvious example: cutting immigration. This would not merely benefit whites by, for example, reducing workplace competition, but it would also (whaddya know) halt the
immigration-driven demographic deterioration in the GOP’s electoral position.
It’s so rational that it apparently
can’t be discussed in
respectable Beltway circles.
VDARE.COM calls strategy #2 the
“Sailer Strategy”. How The Sailer Strategy Could Win CaliforniaGOP Wins With Sailer Strategy!GOP’s Southern (=Sailer) Strategy Rises Again. Actually, It’s Never Been Down.Sailer 1, Stupid Party Strategists 0Jesse Helms: The Sailer Strategy VictoriousEven before the
Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the
2000 election, I pointed out in VDARE.com:
GOP Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote.
“If Dubya had garnered 57% instead of just 54% of whites, he would have cruised to an Electoral College landslide of 367 to 171.”
Despite all the
subsequent hogwash from Karl Rove about his minority outreach strategy, the plain albeit unreported fact was that the GOP triumphs in
2002 and 2004 followed this game plan. GOP House candidates won 59 percent of the white vote in the
2002 off year election and Bush took 58 percent in the Presidential election of 2004.
However, the Republicans' relatively strong showings among whites in those two elections were driven much less by any coherent platform intended to benefit the base than by post-9/11 appeals to their
patriotism. My analysis of the
lost 2002 exit poll results showed that:
“Whites were more interested in foreign-affairs issues than blacks or Hispanics. One out of five whites said the issue that mattered most in determining their votes was either terrorism or Iraq, compared to one out of ten Hispanics, and one out of 25 blacks.”
By 2006, though, the Bush-Rove-McCain
Grand Strategy of
Invite the World
Invade the World
In Hock to the World
was running out of gas. And, in 2008, the Housing Bubble inflated by
Bush’s 2002 plan to win over Hispanic voters by creating 5.5 million more minority homeowners via debauching traditional credit standards backfired catastrophically.
In 2006 in California,
56 percent of all home purchase mortgage dollars had gone to minorities. And in the subsequent mortgage meltdown, minorities accounted for the great bulk of defaulted dollars in California. A
study by economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve of 239,101 mortgages issued in California during the
Housing Bubble reported:
“We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.”[
Lending in Low- and Moderate-Income Neighborhoods in California:The Performance of CRA Lending During the Subprime Meltdown,by Elizabeth Laderman and Carolina Reid, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, November 26, 2008]
In other words, the Republican Establishment wasted eight years, while the party’s position was deteriorating demographically because of mass immigration, on minority outreach programs like tacitly encouraging illegal immigration and bad borrowing.
The result of all this cleverness was that the GOP was in even worse shape going into the 2008 election. Add in
well-deserved blame for economic collapse and McCain’s
themeless and politically correct campaigning, and Obama unsurprisingly won 365-173 in the
Electoral College.
As I’ve shown above, McCain’s share of the
white vote, 55 percent, was relatively weak, and white turnout was down.
Worse, in terms of the Electoral College, white Republican voters were over-concentrated in Great Plains, Great Basin, and Southern states.
But I’ve built the same kind of Electoral College model as I did in 2000. This time, it shows McCain could have eked out a 271-267 victory if he had gotten just five more percentage points of the white vote in each state—and if whites had showed up at the polls at the same rate as in 2004.
With just those two changes, McCain would have picked up
Florida, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.It’s striking that one can even dream up a path to victory for a candidate as feckless as John McCain was in 2008!
Recently, the bloggers
Cold Equations and
One STDV looked at the Census Bureau’s
2050 population projections, and in effect tried to update the 1997 Brimelow-Rubenstein
forecast of the partisan tilt of the playing field in the 2048 and 2052 Presidential elections, assuming the GOP garners the same share of the vote within each race as in this decade. Upon that base, I built a model with a few more factors, such as age and citizenship differences.
The result: If—as in some time-loop nightmare—we just refought the 2008 election over and over, mere demographic change alone would propel the Democrats from 53 percent last year to 59 percent by mid-century.
That is, if the GOP keeps doing what it did in 2008, the country will become a more or less one-party regime—just like the President’s chosen hometown of Chicago. And that might be the best case scenario. Think
Detroit. Or New Orleans.
And yet the GOP’s plight is not hopeless. Looking at my statistical model of the 2048-2052 elections: if
the GOP’s share of the white vote grows from 55 percent to 70 percent; and
white turnout returns to the level seen in 1992 (during Ross Perot’s insurgent run),
then, all else being equal, GOP candidates would still win in the middle of the 21st century. The party would get a 50.5 percent to 49.5 percent majority in the popular vote in 2052.
To put that in current perspective, about one third of
Obama’s white voters would have had to switch to Republican by 2052.
That certainly wouldn’t be easy.
But does anybody have a better plan? (Other than an
immigration moratorium NOW?)
In future columns, I will examine how it can be done.
[Steve Sailer (
email him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative. His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog. His new book, AMERICA’S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA’S "STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is available
here.]
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