Michael Barone, in “The Enduring Character of Democrats and Republicans,” identifies contested groups—fulcrums, as he calls them—around which U.S. national politics pivoted for decades in the 20th century. Barone observes that we are currently in a fulcrum-free period. Nonetheless, there are candidates for the fulcrum states of coming decades.
Barone’s electoral regularities over the last century were driven by new groups and the response to them:
• Jewish voters, who by 1900, two decades after the start of their wave of immigration, formed a significant proportion of the New York electorate. At their peak, they were 15 percent of voters in that 47-electoral-vote swing state. Through the 1960s, this pushed politicians of both parties left.
• The re-entry of African-American voters as a significant bloc after World War II, first through the Great Migration in the North (starting during World War I), then in the South following the 1965 Voting Rights Act. African-Americans never became a fulcrum group: the New Deal rapidly shifted them from the Republican to the Democratic column. Instead, after the Voting Rights Act (and mirroring pre-Jim Crow political patterns), moderate Southern whites became the fulcrum. They migrated toward Republicans, except when presented with moderate/Blue Dog Democrats. While presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the recent templates, Missourian Harry Truman, whose forebears had fought for the Confederacy, pioneered. In 1948, Truman tacked Left by advocating African-American civil rights, but retained enough border state bona fides to carry the Upper South, losing the Deep South to Strom Thurmond.
Each of these groups lost their fulcrum role after completing their political migration: Jews became solid Democrats, Southern whites became solid Republicans. While Barone suggests that no current group is geographically concentrated enough to be a long-term fulcrum group, the 2009 American Community Survey estimates show a high Latino concentration in four big states:
• Texas (37 percent);
• California (37 percent);
• Florida (22 percent); and
• New York (17 percent).
In the next few decades, Latino immigrants and their children will be eligible to vote in increasingly large numbers. Latinos aren’t monolithic—Florida’s ethnic Cubans are not California’s ethnic Mexicans, demographically or culturally. Despite their diversity, Latinos are disproportionately working-class and socially conservative, with a significant trend towards evangelical Protestantism or Mormonism.
This makes them potentially sympathetic to Republicans, yet many feel threatened by what Barone calls the Republican “in-group” flavor, a fear fed by immigration controversies. Democrats cater to Barone’s out-groups, but by using the Davis-Bacon Act to funnel jobs to segregated white construction unions, they disadvantage Latinos, who have a disproportionate presence in the hard-hit construction industry.
Of the four big Latino states, California and New York look reliably blue; New York Latinos are also too multiethnic to easily form a bloc. Florida is already a swing state, though its middle-class (and, by now, more assimilated) Cuban community will have a core reason for its Republican allegiance to disappear when the Castro regime does.
Texas, which may grow to 37 electoral votes in 2012, could become the fulcrum. Its Latino population is relatively homogeneous—heavily Mexican in ethnic origin. According to the William C. Velásquez Institute, the Latino share of Texas voter turnout rose from 11.62 percent in 1980 to 20.12 percent in 2008. The Texas Latino vote has been predominantly Democratic, but George W. Bush was able to draw as much as 49 percent in his 2004 presidential race. His gubernatorial successor Rick Perry drew about 25 percent in his victorious 2006 race, with this year’s polls giving him between 24 percent and 30 percent.
As the Texas Latino vote rises, Democrats and Republicans might increasingly compete for the swing portion. But there could be a variation on the post-Civil Rights Era scenario. If the Texas Latino share of total turnout grows to 30 percent in coming decades and remains around 30 percent Republican, then, with African-American total turnout share remaining around 12 percent and voting 10 percent Republican, Republicans would need at least 67 percent of the white vote to win statewide.
Republicans and Democrats might then make the fulcrum the Texas white moderate vote, particularly in the growing urban areas. Austin already resembles a Big 10 college city with better music and 1.5 million bats. Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, with their gentrifying center-city neighborhoods and attendant amenities (no art lover should miss Houston’s Menil Collection, Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center, or Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum) are also becoming more like major cities in other regions.
If Texas is the coming fulcrum state, then George W. Bush, running for Texas governor and then president as an education reformer and compassionate conservative, may have created the template for success.
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