Why the 2016 presidential race will be a historic ideological battle

What’s happening in the Democratic Party is that President Obama’s two election victories have given its voters confidence the demographics of the nation are working in their favor. Mitt Romney won the white vote by 20 points — the same margin as Ronald Reagan did in his landslide victory over Jimmy Carter — and yet this wasn’t enough to overcome Obama’s advantage with non-whites.

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Democrats figure that the coalition of unmarried women, minority groups and young voters aren’t going to back a Republican nominee who wants to defund Planned Parenthood, support voter ID laws, crack down on illegal immigration, oppose efforts to combat climate change, protest gay marriage, and so on. Given their growing confidence that the changing face of America is with them, Democratic voters feel more comfortable letting their liberal flag fly in a way that Bill Clinton would have never dreamed of. His ever-calculating spouse has made the calculation, in the words of the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin, that “there’s no gen[eral] election downside in aligning w[ith] the left.”

Republicans, on the other hand, are making a completely different calculation. Looking ahead to the 2016 campaign, they see Hillary Clinton’s numbers steadily tanking under an ethical cloud, as a growing number of Americans say they don’t trust her. Polls have shown Republicans ahead of Clinton even in Pennsylvania, a blue state that has eluded GOP nominees for decades. They’re confident that her weaknesses as a candidate have made the presidency ripe for the picking. Given this sense of optimism, they see no reason to settle.

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