How the Minority Wins

There’s no greater evidence of the passage of time than the Republican Party’s autopsy report on its failed 2012 election cycle. “By the year 2050 we’ll be a majority-minority country and in both 2008 and 2012 President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority groups,” former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said at a 2013 press conference announcing the report.

The document itself essentially admits both to the fact that the Republican Party was a party of white men, and that the only way to compete would be to neutralize the “demographic destiny” of Democrats, embracing immigration reform and becoming a true multiracial and multiethnic “big tent.” It’s a strikingly candid report. It reads like speculative fiction today.

But around the same time, darker clouds appeared on the horizon. The RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote an influential series on “missing white voters” rebutting the demographic arguments of the GOP report, saying that Republicans could still build a reliable coalition solely by picking up more “downscale white voters,” and reversing .