Romney 2012?

Skimming through the demographics it looks as if the influence of whites is on the decline. So also the influence of men. As is the case with earners above $50,000. City dwellers are on the up. So are the young.

And marijuana legalisation got its foot in the door.

The Republicans can either tack left or sit tight and wait for the liberal consensus to implode.

The backlash has already started.

["High risk, high reward."] That is the approach the entire Republican Party has taken in almost every situation it has found itself since 2008. Republicans greeted Barack Obama’s presidency with a calculated wave of total opposition. They would not cut a deal on health care or on the federal budget, each time accepting the risk of total defeat rather than settling for half-measures, like giving Democrats some kind of token health care reform or small tax increase.

The gamble was that by denying Obama any support, they would render his presidency wholly partisan at best, and a dysfunctional failure at worst. They would increase their own chances of denying him a second term, and that their return to power would allow them to claim a full and absolute break with the past. They shoved all their chips onto tonight’s election. When the networks called it at 11:15 p.m., the totality of the right’s failure was clear. And because they bid up the stakes as high as they could, their loss was unusually devastating.

The gamble was not totally crazy, I have argued, because 2012 may have been the last chance to enact an undiluted conservative agenda. The electorate is driving steadily leftward, with the oldest voters representing the GOP’s strongest constituency, and the youngest voters its weakest. Every four years, a new 18–22-year-old cohort arrives that is more liberal than the one that has died off in the interim. The Republicans face a double peril with the youth vote. A far lower proportion of young voters are white, and those who are white are far less likely than their parents or grandparents to vote Republican. White voters over the age of 65 selected Romney by a twenty-point margin. White voters under 30 split evenly.

...

The great gamble failed. It failed for many reasons: The economy recovered just enough in 2012, Mitt Romney ran a mediocre campaign, Obama ran a strong one. Among the most important is a factor conservatives seem to have never reckoned with — their party has never recovered the public’s trust.

...

Democrats will not keep winning forever. (In particular, their heavy reliance on young and non-white voters, who vote more sporadically, will subject the party to regular drubbings in midterm elections, when only the hardiest voters turn out.) Eventually, the Republican Party will recast and reform itself, and the Democratic Party’s disparate constituencies will eat each other alive, as they tend to do when they lack the binding force of imminent peril. But conservatives have lost their best chance to strike down the Obama legacy and mold the government in the Paul Ryan image. “There is nothing more exhilarating,” Churchill once said, “than to be shot at without result.”