Rants & Reasons

It is obvious from the overtly racial subtext in much of right-wing discourse, that Republicans hope to motivate white voters to come to the polls in 2010 in order to regain the majority in Congress. As Joe Biden said recently, that would be a disaster for Obama’s agenda.

Given that minority voters and young people tend not to vote in mid-term elections, and given we are still likely to be enduring a rotten economy next year, many prognosticators have given the Republicans some chance of accomplishing their goal.

So this recent analysis by Political Scientist Alan Abramowitz is good news for Democrats:

Could Democrats be heading toward an electoral disaster comparable to the 1994 midterm election in which they lost 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats, turning control of both chambers over to Republicans for the remainder of Bill Clinton’s presidency? Nobody is predicting such a dramatic turnaround in party fortunes just yet. But while a Senate majority appears to be out of reach, some GOP strategists now see a chance for their party to regain control of the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm election. And they’re not alone.

…There are important differences between the makeup of the American electorate now and the makeup of the American electorate then, differences that make a repeat of the 1994 outcome highly unlikely… The most important difference is that nonwhites make up about twice as large a share of the electorate now…First, whites generally make up a larger share of the electorate in midterm elections than in presidential elections–the presence of a presidential race appears to be a more important motivation for voting among African-Americans, Hispanics, and other nonwhites than among whites. This means that the nonwhite share of the electorate in 2010 is likely to be lower than the all-time record of 26 percent that was set in 2008. Second, however, the data show a clear upward trend in the nonwhite share of the electorate in both types of elections. This means that the nonwhite share of the electorate is almost certain to be higher in 2010 than it was in 2006.

The weakness of the Republican Party among nonwhite voters is a much bigger problem for the GOP today than it was back in 1994. In that year, 86 percent of the voters were white while only 9 percent were African-American and only 5 percent were Hispanic or members of other racial minority groups…Based on the average rate of change in the racial composition of the electorate over the past two decades, by 2010 we can predict that no more than 76 percent of voters will be white while at least 11 percent will be African-American and at least 13 percent will be either Hispanic or members of other racial minority groups.

According to Abramowitz, Democrats are likely to lose some seats in both houses of Congress—that typically happens to the party in power when the economy is bad. But it will not be sufficient to cause Dems to lose their majority.

I hope he is right.