At the end of the day, before we can really assign much weight to these demographic arguments, we have to start seeing elections that turn out other than we’d expect given “structural” considerations. In other words, Democrats have to start winning in years that they’re not supposed to win. Look at it this way: While it’s true that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, we should also be able to agree that, given the state of the economy and difficulty in winning three consecutive terms (much less four), that Republicans really shouldn’t have won in 1992, 1996, and 2008. Truth be told, they had no business making 2000 as close as they did. Structural factors favored the Democrats in 2012 as well.
Though we can try to explain this in terms of demographics, the simpler explanation is that these elections pretty much turned out how we’d expect without any reference to demographics; Republicans have simply ended up on the wrong side of the coin toss (much as Democrats often did from 1952 to 1988, which are also largely explained by wars and the economy). In terms of the House, Republicans overperformed on the fundamentals in 1994, 2002, and 2010, while underperforming slightly in 1998 and substantially in 2006. We simply aren’t seeing the types of surprising Democratic wins we’d expect from a massive demographic shift.
Instead, we’re seeing is what we’ve seen over the past 80 years: Short-term contingencies occasionally give one party or the other the edge, but a clear tendency exists to revert back to the mean of a 50/50 nation. This tendency has continued irrespective of party self-identification. Maybe it will change in the future, but we haven’t seen much evidence of it yet.
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