The Future Under Democrats Looks Miserable

[Geee]

Tablet Magazine

Unchecked illegal border crossings, fading churches, disintegrating families, proliferating diversity deans, and worthless degrees will all help ensure that the American future will be largely miserable—and that the people who will inherit that future will be Democrats

 

In The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), John Judis and Ruy Texeira argued that college-educated professionals and nonwhites, along with a minimum number of working-class whites, could form the basis for Democratic hegemony in national politics. As Judis and Texeira point out in their new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (2023), Democratic strategists and journalists adopted a distorted, dumbed-down version of their thesis in which the Democratic Party could do without working-class non-Hispanic white voters at all. Conversely, the modest decline of Hispanic and Black voter support for the Democrats in the last few elections has led some to suggest that a racial realignment is underway that might enable Republicans to emerge as the party of the “multiracial working class.”

A more plausible explanation, however, is that Joe Biden has always been an unpopular candidate made more unpopular by inflation and botched immigration and foreign policies—and that he is likely to win anyway. Most demographic trends still favor the Democrats and hurt the Republicans. Democratic constituencies continue to grow as shares of the American electorate, while core Republican electoral blocs are steadily declining.

Consider the interaction between voting and religious belief. According to 2024 polling data, Republicans win supermajorities among only two religious groups—white evangelical Protestants (85%) and Mormons (75%)—while eking out bare majorities with white nonevangelical Protestants (58%) and Catholics (52%). All of these Republican-leaning religious communities are dwindling. As a share of the American population, white evangelical Protestants have shrunk by roughly a third from 33% in 1999 to only 21% in 2021. In only 15 years, from 2007 to 2023, Mormons also declined by about a third as a share of the U.S. adult population, collapsing from 1.8% to 1.2%. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are no longer the majority even in Utah. Since 2007, the Republican-leaning white Catholic share has dropped by 8 percentage points.