Adam Serwer says that with their failure to enact immigration reform, Democrats risk turning their “emerging majority” into a permanent swing vote.
With the Hispanic-friendly conservatism of the Bush family no longer dominating the Republican Party, Democrats felt more confident than ever in counting Hispanic voters as a permanent part of their base. The 2008 election looked to Democrats like the fulfillment of John Judis and Ruy Teixeira‘s demographic prophecy: A younger, more diverse electorate would become increasingly alienated by the pale, aging, and nativist-dominated Republican Party. “A new progressive America is on the rise,” Teixeira wrote in 2009. Nonwhites made up 48 percent of newborns in 2008, and this past March, The New York Times predicted that the number of nonwhite children being born could surpass white births as soon as this year. As a Nixon official, Pat Buchanan once calculated that by playing the white working class against minorities, the Republican Party would end up with the “larger half” of the country. In a 21st-century majority-minority America, Democrats anticipated having the larger half.
