Election Wrap up Part Trois

Oh for Christ sake.

We've seen various iterations of this argument floating around, 'All the demographic trends favor the Dems.'

This idea first popped up in 2002 with the book, The Emerging Democratic Majority.

Sixteen years they've been peddling this.

We recall Sally Kohn making this argument in 2014 after the GOP annihilated the Dems all over the map. They made this argument after W won in 2004. Without looking we are sure someone, somewhere wrote, 'Reagan may have won in a landslide, but his voters were old and they will eventually be replaced by young Democrats.' Or, 'Enjoy it now GOP, because all those kids who didn't vote for McGovern this time around will be giving the Dems a lock on the White House in the decades to come.'

Actually, the young Hippie kids of  '72 voted for Reagan after they become responsible adults. Just ask PJ O'Rourke, who once edited an underground newspaper in Baltimore that had a run in with something called 'The Balto-Cong', later edited Mad Magazine, and then voted for Reagan.

We suppose that on the surface it must have looked like the Emerging Democratic Majority was emerging in 2008, what with the GOP wipeout in 2006 and Barry's victory in 2008.

Must we once more go through the historical context of the 2006 and 2008 victories?

In 2009, whilst sitting in the smoldering ruins of the GOP, we looked at the margin of Barry's victory, which was really no greater than George Bush's in 1988. Solid, outstanding actually, but not electorate re-ordering.

The Dems thought the Emerging Democratic Majority had emerged in 2008, but got wiped out in 2010. Electorates tend to snap back to the mean. It was, we believe, Sean Trende who once pointed out that Harry Truman's electoral map in 1948 looked a lot like Woodrow Wilson's in 1916. Ben Shapiro has been making the exact same argument vis a vis Trump and Obama.

We agree. There was, is and never will be an Emerging Democratic Majority.

And by the way, the Trump Coalition dies with Trump.