So what would a majority right-of-center coalition look like in the next decade or so? It would have to hold almost all of its Reagan coalition plus gain the support of at least 40 percent of the growing Hispanic vote. As the white percentage of the country moves from 75 percent of the country (in 2000) toward 50 percent by 2050, there won't be enough white people to make the 1980s-era Reagan coalition a majority. Depending on birth, immigration and voting rate changes in the coming decades, the right-of-center coalition would need between 40-45 percent of the emerging Hispanic vote to supplement the shrinking white percentage.
It is pretty obvious that, in a time of prosperity (post-World War II America), the left-of-center economic and populist appeals to Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants were less compelling than the cultural fears being generated by society. But in hard times -- or, equally importantly, if hard economic times are expected and dreaded -- the historic appeal to those voters of populist and left-of-center economic arguments may regain their potency. If those blue-collar, rural, culturally and religiously conservative and (in part) lower-middle-class voters switch their electoral loyalty back to the left-of-center economic-argument-based coalition, that will be the end of a majority right-of-center coalition.
Although the economy remains strong, the public's economic anxiety about the future has been building steadily during the past half-decade. The emergence of China and India is engendering growing anti-free trade feelings (even 59 percent of Republicans now believe free trade hurts America, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll). Ever-rising health care costs and the anticipated burden of taking care of the boomer parents as we mentally and physically start declining add to the economic fears for young and early middle-aged Americans.
It is precisely these kinds of economic fears that Mike Huckabee is talking to (as well as his religious and culture message). Whatever happens to his candidacy in 2008, I think it is highly likely the Republican Party (as the presumed continuing vehicle for a right-of-center coalition) will have to talk persuasively to the growing economic anxiety.
It is possible that the case for confidence in continuing economic prosperity can be made convincingly to the public. In that case, the appeals of populism and big government programs may fail -- at least for a sufficient percentage of the public to maintain a majority free market, low-tax coalition.
But if public economic anxiety persists amongst these key elements of the right-of-center coalition, at some point, the free market advocates will have to consider modifying their policy if the coalition that makes possible any free market policy is to continue to be politically viable.
Tony Blankley
Tony Blankley, a conservative author and commentator who served as press secretary to Newt Gingrich during the 1990s, when Republicans took control of Congress, died Sunday January 8, 2012. He was 63.
Blankley, who had been suffering from stomach cancer, died Saturday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, his wife, Lynda Davis, said Sunday.
In his long career as a political operative and pundit, his most visible role was as a spokesman for and adviser to Gingrich from 1990 to 1997. Gingrich became House Speaker when Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives following the 1994 midterm elections.
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