Republicans Are In A Race Against Time And They Are Already Losing
Nothing's changed about how much trouble the Republican Party is in. If anything, the end is going to be even quicker and more brutal.
JUSTIN ROSARIO 20 HOURS AGO
Even as Republicans revel in their new power, the clock is already ticking down until their inevitable collapse. Trump may not be aware of this, but the Republican Party certainly is. They had a few decades left but like the timer in a cheesy action flick, the countdown just sped up. A lot.
There a few factors involved with this ticking time bomb:
1. Republicans are reaching the limits of their voter suppression efforts. There's still some progress to be made in stealing the vote of minorities, the young and the poor but even with a soon-to-be-friendly Supreme Court, there's only so much Republicans can do.
There's a reason that Hillary, a deeply unpopular candidate, won the popular vote anyway. Despite many white Obama voters rushing into the arms of an unrepentant racist in the 21st Century version of White Flight, there were still more voters on the other side. And that imbalance is only going to grow. That means tampering with the Electoral College is a dangerous proposition. Republicans haven't won the popular vote in almost a quarter of a century.
2. The nation's demographics are still shifting away from white hegemony and it's not just immigration that's driving it. In 2015, 50.2% of all babies born were not white and this year, Millennials surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest generation.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly white Boomers die from natural causes and even more of the diverse Millennials reach an age where they start voting more regularly. It's a brutal one-two punch that can't be legislated away by power-hungry Republicans.
3. Trump is not going to tone down his racist rhetoric. Even if he tries, his white supremacist followers will continually remind the entire country that they took over the Republican Party and that America is for "whites only". This will have the same exact effect on Latinos and Asians that the Southern Strategy had on the black community in the 1960's and 70's: They will overwhelmingly become lifelong Democratic voters.
Oh, and Latinos and Asians are the two fast growing segments of the population.
4. A lot of those angry white voters are going to get even angrier when Trump doesn't deliver on his promises to destroy Washington and make America white again. The economy is already recovered and most of what Trump and the Republicans want to do will weaken it rather than strengthen it.
And as much as he bragged about his big, beautiful wall and deporting millions of immigrants in record time, there's no way for Trump to actually pay for it without raising taxes, especially when Republicans push through the tax cuts for the rich they're going to want.
Trump's baskets of deplorables will turn on him and all the Obama-turned-Trump voters will experience buyer's remorse on an unprecedented scale.
Put all of this together and that bright future the GOP is looking at today is just the headlights of an oncoming train with Trump in the engineer's seat. The challenge will be to keep Republicans from dragging the entire country on the tracks with them.