Interactive: Predicting GOP's demographic problem

By Chris Wilson

Just to get out ahead of the pack a little, I?m go ahead and call 2020 election for the Democrats.

I'm less sure about 2016, though at the present this next election is not looking good for the GOP either. This forecast is based on extremely simple math: Take the current rates of turnout and party preference for the four major racial and ethnic groups and plug them in to the Census Bureau?s population projections for the 18-and-over population in the next half-century.

If you simply project the present into the future, then it?s pretty clear that Democrats have this thing in the bag--"thing" referring to the future of democracy. We can assume that the future will not look exactly like the present, which is why this widget allows you to manipulate the percentages of each group that turn out to vote and who they vote for. It?s when you start messing with the dials in this interactive that you realize the massive amount of trouble the GOP faces if it does not change its image with minority voters.?or, as well soon be calling them, ?plurality voters.? Here, you can try it yourself:

You will notice that turnout is very low for Hispanic and Asian Americans. This is because we?re measuring voter turnout for the entire voting age population, including those who are not citizens or are otherwise ineligible to vote. Going forward, a significantly larger proportion of both demographics will have been born in the United States. As the Pew Hispanic Center wrote in a study of the Hispanic electorate published shortly after the 2012 election, ?That vast majority (93%) of Latino youths are U.S-born citizens and thus will automatically become eligible to vote once they turn 18.? The report was titled ?An Awakened Giant.?

Even a few ticks upward in Hispanic turnout have major benefits for the Democratic Party, which stands to draw less than half its support from non-Hispanic white voters by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, the Republicans don?t have a tremendous amount of ground left to gain among white voters, who will shrink both in total numbers and as a share of the electorate in the coming elections.

Predictions fail on account of a failure of imagination on the part of those making them. In recent elections, however, partisanship by racial and ethnic background has remained highly predictable in the face of countless calamities. The demographics of the electorate are going to change so rapidly in the next eight years that politics will seem unrecognizable, but these party loyalties may very well be intact. This is a fact that itself is not difficult to recognize whatsoever.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/predict-presidential-elections-by-demographic-interactive-widget-225441066.html

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