Will Hillary be our third black president?

But here’s the question. Are the Obama-era numbers an aberration, or are they more like a new normal? The near-universal assumption among journalists is aberration. But here’s the case for why they might be something closer to the new normal, which rests on two points.

The first is the much-discussed demographic change. The white vote over the last three presidential elections has gone from 77 percent (2004) to 74 percent (2008) to 72 percent (2012). If the Obama era was an aberration, you’d expect that figure to bounce back up. But electoral demographers say quite the opposite. One comprehensive statistical model predicts that the white vote will just keep dropping, down maybe to 70 percent in 2016. The African American vote is expected to at least hold steady at 13.

But second and more important, it’s about the Republican Party of then versus now. When Gerald Ford was getting 15 percent of the black vote in 1976, his party wasn’t carrying out a jihad to make sure as few black people could vote as possible or uncorking champagne when the Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act. Or, for that matter, trying to make sure as few working poor people as possible could have access to health insurance.