The GOP-leaning white vote has declined from 87 percent to just 65 percent of the vote over the past several decades, threatening the Republican Party, according to a top Pew Research Center analyst.
Carroll Doherty, the director of political research for Pew, said that the “Republican Party faces big challenges going forward. The demographics are not favorable.”
Doherty spelled out the challenges this week at a Capitol Hill meeting of the moderate Republican Ripon Society.
He noted that Mitt Romney lost despite winning the same percentage of whites as former President George H.W. Bush, the result of more minorities going to the polls. “Romney was defeated, in part due to the changing demographic composition of the nation,” said Doherty.
“We’ve gone from a country that’s 87 percent white, non-Hispanic to a country that’s 65 percent white, non-Hispanic,” he said. “By 2060, we could very well be a majority-minority nation. This has had an impact on the electorate,” he said, according to Ripon.
Doherty said the threat is real to the GOP. “At this time of great demographic change, Republicans remain overwhelmingly white, while Democrats are becoming more diverse,” he said.
But he didn’t predict the end of the party, and said that Hispanics especially don’t typically follow past voting patterns and could become Republican.
He was joined by top pollster Ed Goeas, who is associated with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the upcoming presidential race.
Goeas said the GOP, and presumably Walker, will be chasing the minority vote on economic issues. “When we talk about the African-American vote and when we talk about the Hispanic vote, the key to winning these votes is not approaching them as Hispanics or African-Americans, but rather approaching them as middle-class voters — as hardworking taxpayers,” he said.
“The middle class believes that the rich get their benefits and the poor get their programs, and they get stuck with the bill. And they’re tired of it,” he added.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
