The demographic timebomb continues to tick for the Republican Party, and if you believe Democratic analysts at the national level, the ticking is loudest right here in Georgia, which they’re eying as the next state to follow Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico in the transition from red to blue.
Ruy Teixeira, a well-known liberal political analyst and author who has focused on the electoral impact of demography, puts the tipping point for Georgia around the 2020 election cycle.
“The geographical locus of that change will likely be in the burgeoning Atlanta metropolitan area, whose share of the statewide vote continues to grow (up to 54 percent in the 2012 election),” Teixeira wrote this week. “It is here that the new Georgia is taking shape most clearly.”
“Reflecting these changes, Obama carried the Atlanta metro in both 2008 and 2012, by 4 points and 1 point, respectively,” he wrote. “That’s a 21-point Democratic swing from the 1988 presidential election. The changes — and the improvements for Democrats — are generally even gaudier in the metro area’s (and the state’s) most populous counties: Cobb (138 percent of growth from minorities, 34-point margin shift toward Democrats since 1988); DeKalb (143 percent of growth from minorities, 55-point shift toward Democrats); Fulton (94 percent of growth from minorities, 16-point shift toward Democrats) and Gwinnett (118 percent of growth from minorities, 42-point shift toward Democrats).”
Those are striking numbers, particularly in Cobb and Gwinnett counties, both of which have been longtime Republican strongholds. But personally, I think Teixeira’s projection of 2020 may turn out to be both overly optimistic and less revolutionary than it might seem at first.
As Teixeira himself notes, a lot of the minority growth in Georgia comes from a Hispanic population that is considerably less likely to register and vote than black and Asian minority voters, which should make the demographic trend less threatening to the GOP than it might appear. That can be overcome with concerted campaigns to register and turn out the Hispanic vote, but that brings us to a second problem:
At a similar point in the Republican Party’s surge toward majority status in Georgia, the GOP had built a well-funded, disciplined statewide party organization under the leadership of men such as Paul Coverdell. When the larger political trends finally did swing their way, the Republicans were prepared to seize the opportunity.
In contrast, the Georgia Democratic Party is in shambles. It has no leadership, no money, no organization and seemingly no vision other than to sit back and let demographics run their course. It has the beginnings of a promising next generation of political candidates, but little in the form of structure to nurture and support them.
Finally, it’s important to note that Teixeira and other analysts predicting Georgia’s transition from red state to blue are thinking almost exclusively in terms of the state’s 16 presidential electoral votes, not its internal power structure. Those are two different transitions, and they often occur on very different timetables.
For example, Georgia began voting consistently Republican in presidential elections way back in 1984, when Ronald Reagan whipped Walter Mondale by a 20-point margin. But thanks to Democratic gerrymandering, patronage and political inertia, it would be another 18 years before the state’s inclination at the national level translated into a Republican governor and Legislature.
You see the same phenomenon in Virginia, often cited as a model for Georgia Democrats. Demographic and cultural factors did indeed change turned the state from red to blue in both the 2012 and 2008 presidential elections, and today, both of its U.S. Senate seats are held by Democrats. Yet all three state constitutional offices remain Republican, eight of its 11 U.S. House members are Republican and the state House is two-thirds Republican.
In other words, Democrats looking to demographic change as a magic button that will alter the power structure at the Gold Dome anytime soon are setting themselves up for major disappointment. They not only overestimate the power of demographics, they underestimate the tenacity of their opponents and the difficulty of the change they seek.
