Wait, Not THAT Emerging Democratic Majority! [View all]

[JudyM]

During some of the darkest days of the George W. Bush era, liberals contented themselves with one particular certainty: It was just a matter of time. Thanks to demographics, the GOP’s stranglehold on the presidency, the Senate, and the House would all eventually be broken. The country was getting younger and browner, and the Republican coalition of old white conservatives, increasingly cohered by racist messaging, could not hold. The GOP was on the edge of collapse, its support aging out and dying off. If the Democratic Party could get those young people and people of color to vote, they could win.
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Still, for roughly two decades, some Democrats have held fast to this understanding. Invariably, the electoral cavalry would come. For decades, they’ve been disappointed, as that swell of support has been stuck just beyond the horizon. But three contests in, that long prophesied Democratic majority, in some form, seems to have arrived.
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Of course, for all the criticism from the establishment of Sanders’s candidacy, his success has been largely to actualize the wishful thinking that mainstream Democrats have been banking on for the bulk of the 21st century. He’s drawn up new plays, but he’s running an offense that the party ... has also embraced... these same Democrats have been quick to dismiss the viability of the approach. Even if Sanders is able to ride the emerging Democratic majority to primary victories in Texas, California, and elsewhere, it could never work in the general, various ex-Obama and -Clinton staffers have insisted to MSNBC, amid bouts of apoplexy from the network’s anchors. ...

However, if they just relented and let the process play out—allowing Sanders’s campaign to activate young voters, Gen Z college students and workforce millennials, the oldest of whom are now nearing 40, and voters of color, particularly Latinos—the party might finally have the loyal, activated base that it’s so long pined for. That loyalty could well prove lifelong, and produce the sustained victories that have eluded the party since the collapse of the New Deal order.

https://prospect.org/politics/wait-not-that-emerging-democratic-majority/