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Republicans Up Against a Demographic Tide
Jonathan Chait points outs that Republicans have "increasingly coalesced around the a defense of public services for its core constituency at the expense of others."

"The glue holding together the contemporary Republican agenda -- the fierce defense of entitlement spending on the elderly, the equally fierce opposition to welfare spending on the young, the backlash against illegal immigration, the nationalist foreign policy, the cultural traditionalism -- is ethnocentrism. Republicans are defending the shared cultural prerogatives of a certain group of people. That is why I am arguing that the shifting demographic tides will require the GOP to undertake a major reorientation in order to maintain its competitiveness. There's simply no way to transpose their sense of what is and what is not a legitimate government function onto a progressively younger, browner electorate. (Latino voters overwhelmingly support Obama's health care reform.) Their conception of us versus them can work for a while -- it worked quite well with the anomalously old, white 2010 off-year electorate -- but the them is rapidly outnumbering the us."


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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