Chester Thai ’14: Following President Obama’s re-election, many Republicans have demanded change in the GOP platform in order to appeal to a greater number of minority voters and stay competitive in future elections.
“The central problem for Republicans is that the Democrats’ biggest constituencies are growing,” wrote Michael D. Shear of The New York Times. In the recent presidential election, over 70 percent of African American, Asian, and Latino voters voted for Obama. According to Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog, 45 percent of Obama voters were minorities.
Non-whites now make up twenty-eight percent of the electorate, up from twenty percent in 2008. As Shear noted, “Obama managed to win a second term despite winning only 39 percent of white voters and 44 percent of voters older than 65.”
Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union, emphasized, “Before, we thought it was an important issue, improving demographically. Now, we know it’s an essential issue. You have to ignore reality not to deal with this issue.”
Even though Romney was more successful among whites than Republican Senator John McCain was in 2008, the trending demographic shifts pose a major threat to the party as a whole.
With 88 percent of his vote coming from whites, Romney was only able to win 27 percent of the Hispanic vote, as compared with 31 percent for McCain and 44 percent for George W. Bush. As Howard University sociologist Roderick Harrison, former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau, noted, “[Democrats] have put together a coalition of populations that will eventually become the majority…populations without whom it will be very difficult to win national elections and some statewide elections, particularly in states with large black and Hispanic populations.”
Andrew Janetta ’14, a member of the Young Republicans club, elaborated, “The major urban states (Florida, California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, a combined 153 electoral votes) all fell Democratic in this election and, with the exception of Florida, the others have fallen Democratic in the past three elections. This pattern demonstrates the overwhelming lack of support in major urban areas, often the most common region for minorities, for the GOP. Without the victory of these states, the party has few ways to win in the future.”
Currently, though, Republicans disagree over the extent to which the party must modify its policies. While many argue that the GOP needs to change some of its stances, others believe it is all a matter of how the party presents itself.
Corey Stewart, a Republican who is chairman of the Board of County Supervisors in Prince William, Virginia, declared, “You don’t have to sell out on the issues and suddenly take on the Democratic position on taxes to win the black vote or the Latino vote or the women vote. But you do have to modulate your tone.”
His message came in the wake of Obama’s 15 percent margin win in Prince William County, a previously white-dominated area that became the first county in Virginia to have minorities constitute over half the population.
Mark McKinnon, a former strategist for George W. Bush, agreed with Stewart, explaining that the GOP “needs messages and policies that appeal to a broader audience. Trying to expand a shrinking base ain’t going to cut it.”
“Basically,” Cardenas explained, “our party needs to do a lot of work if we expect to be competitive in the near future. Our party needs to realize that it’s too old and too white and too male and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it’s too late.”