In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Prof. Zoltan Hajnal outlined the demographic challenge facing the Republican Party. Hajnal wrote:
Lost in the GOP’s euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters. The 60% of the white vote that Republicans garnered last Tuesday is, by most estimates, the highest proportion of the white vote that the GOP has won in any national election since World War II.
Hajnal continued:
The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.
African Americans also face a demographic imperative.
Consider: Six of the top ten states of the New Great Migration of African Americans are in the South -- Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Tennessee and South Carolina. Republicans dominate the congressional delegations, and control the statehouses and state legislatures.
The states with the highest concentrations of African Americans are also in the South. The percentage of the black population ranges from 36.3 percent in Mississippi to 21.6 percent in North Carolina.
While two black Republicans were elected from the South, they represent majority-white districts. BTW, former congressmen J.C. Watts and Gary Franks also represented majority-white districts. The real breakthrough will come when a black Republican is elected from a majority-black district.
In the absence of a Great Migration 2.0, black folks will have to rethink their politics or resign themselves to political marginalization.
For more info, check out “The New Great Migration: Black Americans’ Return to the South, 1965–2000.”
