I'm trying to help Greg out a bit today while he's off handling personal matters, so that's why the pace of the blog is a bit slow today. Here's my first post from this morning building off of Ron Brownstein's look at the census numbers:
The Republican Party had a choice after 2008. They could continue to rely on a dwindling but still decisive share of the white vote to prevail, or they could try to bring more minorities into the party. While I'm not entirely sure how much of the decision was made by party leaders and how much is merely the unprecedented influence of Fox News, but whether it's pseudo scandals of the past two years, from birtherism to the NBPP case, the GOP's nationwide rush to ban sharia and institute draconian immigration laws, or characterizing nearly every administration policy as reparations, the conservative fixations of Obama's first term indicate that the GOP will end up relying at least in part on inflaming white racial resentment to close the gap. If Obama can't mobilize as many minority voters as last time, he'll have to make up the difference by picking up more white votes in those Rust-Belt swing states — giving the GOP even more reason to make Obama unpalatable to them. What that means though, is that Obama can hardly afford to adopt the kind of hardball identity politics available to his opponents.
Depending on the state of the economy, the GOP is going to have a hard time winning in 2012 without scaring the crap out of white people. Fortunately, they've spent the past two years practicing.
