Voter ID: The GOP's Last Gasp
From Mother Jones
By Kevin Drum| Fri Jul. 13, 2012 3:00 AM PD
Voter ID Laws Are the Last Gasp of a Fading GOP Strategy
I wrote about the long-standing hope of Democrats that demographic changes are working in their favor and will soon create a durable national Dem majority. There are several moving parts to this theory, but the two big ones are (a) young people are trending Democratic, and (b) the Dem-leaning nonwhite population is getting bigger and bigger. As far as I know, Republicans don't really deny that these things are happening. After all, the trend in the youth vote jumps out in every poll, and the growing nonwhite share of the population is regularly front-page news. George Bush and Karl Rove, who desperately wanted to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2006 in order to stanch the flow of Hispanic votes into the Democratic column, knew perfectly well how important this was.
So what's the Republican response to all this? They have two options:
Start to move leftward on social issues, especially gay marriage, in order to win back their share of the youth vote; tone down the anti-immigration rhetoric from the tea partiers; and stop tolerating casual racism among their core supporters.
or
Double down on the demographic groups who already support them. This is basically the South, angry white men, the rich, and the elderly.
Eventually, they might be forced to adopt Option 1, but for now they seem to have abandoned the idea of pushing back against their base (as Democrats eventually did in the late '80s), and instead have gone all in on Option 2. There are two elements to this. The first is to push ever harder for higher turnout among the Fox News set. That was pretty successful in 2010,when the "enthusiasm gap" powered a Republican landslide that year. But there's only so far that can go"
For All of It Go To Source:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/voter-id-laws-are-last-gasp-fading-gop-strategy
