Sen. Olympia Snowe ends run for re-election

[Chan790]

82. Normally, I'd agree with you.

Currently, my thinking is in line with 2012 or Never by Jonathan Chait in the current issue of NY Magazine. The demographics are skewing towards an end of the current flavor of conservatism; by the next time the GOP has an opportunity at retaking the Senate or winning the Presidency, they may be so far behind the 8-ball and the makeup of the nation may have changed so much that Reagan Conservatism may not be viable.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats.

The Republican Party had increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites who, as Obama awkwardly put it in 2008, tend to “cling to guns or religion.” Meanwhile, the Democrats had ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. As a whole, Judis and Teixeira noted, the electorate was growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, making every successive election less favorable for the GOP. And the trends were even more striking in some key swing states. Judis and Teixeira highlighted Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona, with skyrocketing Latino populations, and Virginia and North Carolina, with their influx of college-educated whites, as the most fertile grounds for the expanding Democratic base.

-Jonathan Chait. 2012 or Never http://nymag.com/news/features/gop-primary-chait-2012-3/

While it'd be nice to have a supermajority, I don't think we need it. I think we can get by with the reasonable change to actually requiring filibusters to happen.