America’s two political parties have consistently maintained the same ideologies or “meta-platforms” over the past 50 years, to large degree over the past century. The Democrats are socially “progressive” and support government welfare and intervention; the Republicans are proudly Christian and conservative and support free markets. Republicans are “hawks” on foreign-policy, while Democrats are “doves.” And so on.

But ultimately, political parties are vehicles for demographic, economic, and geographic groups to hold power. Over the last half-century, actual government policies have changed at a glacial pace, if at all, and can be properly understood as window dressing. White people might resonate with the idea of self-reliance and free enterprise, but there is no evidence that government actually shrinks under GOP leadership (in fact, the opposite seems to be the case). There is also no indication that White Republican actually want liberal entitlements to be reformed.

The Republican party is the de facto White party; the Democratic party is the de facto party of non-Whites, immigrants, and their urban White “allies.” An America in which Whites no longer comprise a majority is an America where a Republican majority is simply untenable at the national level.

Texas is a symbol—and potential lynchpin—of this “conservative” coalition.

Just over 40 percent of Texans are non-Hispanic Whites. Only one-in-three babies born in the state are. The Lone Star State has many large metropolises (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, etc.) with large populations of Hispanics, immigrants, African-Americans, and White liberals. Notably, the last two mayors of Houston have been a White lesbian and African-American.

On paper, Texas should be California. But it stubbornly remains a Republican bastion. The reason for this is block voting by Whites that approaches the solidarity in the Deep South states. In 2016, Texas was the only state in the country where Whites voted more heavily Republican than non-Whites voted Democratic. It’s telling that the Senate battle in 2018 is between a Hispanic Republican, Rafael Cruz, who has adopted the friendly Anglo name “Ted,” and an Irish Democratic who goes by his childhood nickname, “Beto.” Mitt Romney won Texas with 57 percent; Trump, with only 52.

That said, the writing is on the wall. The question of Texas turning blue is one of when, not if.

The conventional assumption is that this will doom the GOP’s chances at nationwide electoral viability. Had Trump lost Texas, however, he still would have narrowly beaten Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. The Republican party can trade Texas for the upper Midwest—and on the current trajectory, the it will likely have to. It must then retain Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and pick up Minnesota—a state Trump lost to Clinton by a margin narrower than the number of votes Republican spoiler candidate Evan McMullin received there—or cede that nationwide electoral viability.

2016 electoral college results had Clinton swept Texas and all other votes remained unchanged

 

What the GOP cannot survive is the “Californication” of the entire country. In 1940, California’s population was 89.5 percent White. Today it is 37.2 percent, and only 27.1 percent of births in the state are to White babies. The last time the state gave its electoral votes to a Republican was 1988.

Since 1940, the White share of the population has decreased in 47 states. It has increased in just two states, Mississippi and South Carolina, and remained virtually unchanged in another, West Virginia. All three went decidedly for both Donald Trump in 2016 and Mitt Romney in 2012. The electoral consequences of the ongoing demographic transformation of the United States are obvious.

Nevertheless, if Republicans retain their Congressional dominance in 2018 (and prove our projections wrong!), it will be accomplished by impassioned racial block voting, which is currently not being perceived in the polls. There is precedent for this in recent memory.

The 2010 Midterms marked a culmination of the conservative coalition, even more so than 1994. Writing in The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein recognized the dynamic at play:

Fully 60 percent of whites nationwide backed Republican candidates for the House of Representatives; only 37 percent supported Democrats, according to the National Election Poll exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Not even in Republicans’ 1994 congressional landslide did they win that high a percentage of the white vote.

Moving forward, Brownstein argued that Republican electoral hopes rested, not on “outreach” to minorities, but “in-reach” to Whites.

[T]he key question for 2012 may be whether Republicans can increase their advantage among whites enough to overcome what’s likely to be a growing share of the overall vote cast by minorities, who still break preponderantly for Democrats.

Brownstein’s analysis still holds six years later. He is reiterating—from a liberal perspective—the strategy put forward by Samuel Francis, NPI’s co-founder, in his book Ethno-Politics. The GOP is the White man’s party, whether it likes it or not. It can run from its identity, or embrace it.

The obstacle preventing the GOP from fulfilling its destiny is fundamentally psychological. In multicultural America, Whites remain the decisive voting block for determining electoral outcomes; yet they are the only voting block that is not allowed—and that does not allow itself—to advocate openly for its own existence and political power.

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NPI’s 2018 Outlook

Introduction
The Blue Period
Realignment and The New Majority
The Midterm Flip
The Great Decoupling
The Emerging Democratic Majority
The Unmentionable Majority