Source: Washington Post
by Megan McArdle
“For most of my working life, the Democratic Party has counted heavily on demographics. Its theory of politics had different names — the ‘Emerging Democratic Majority’ that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote about in 2002, or Barack Obama’s ‘coalition of the ascendant’ — but the idea was the same: Demographic shifts meant Republicans would be stuck with a rump of aging White voters while Democrats built a dominant coalition from all the groups that were growing: the young, the college educated, the LGBTQ+ community, and the non-White working class, particularly Hispanics. … The coalition of the ascendant assumed that voting bloc would reliably deliver fat margins for Democrats; if they don’t, there is no durable, dominant majority. If you want to understand why Democrats became so invested in this theory, and why it failed, I recommend Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, ‘We Have Never Been Woke.'” (11/21/24)