We have now entered the week after President Barack Obama’s reelection — after a whirlwind, $2 billion election cycle characterized by its partisan fervor and political polarization, it feels like the quiet that follows a storm. In fact, the night of the election was a bit of an anticlimax after the political rollercoaster of the campaign season:
President Obama not only won reelection, he won solidly, winning the popular vote by 50.5 percent to 47.9 percent, and the Electoral College by 332 votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. He also won all of the so-called “battleground states” such as Ohio and Florida (with the exception of North Carolina). In the end, he only lost two states that he’d previously won in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina.
And not only did the president win strong, he won early: By around 9 p.m. PST, Ohio had been called for the president, and with it, the race.
What was surprising — even more so than the fact that it all ended so quickly — was how surprised the political right was when it happened: Even though polling data from across the nation (and particularly from the states of Ohio and Florida) revealed a positive trend for the president in the days leading up to the election, conservative commentators and surrogates for the Romney campaign were adamant that their candidate would win.
But victory is impossible when you run a campaign based on an alternate reality version of America where Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and other minorities, LGBT citizens, single women and young voters either don’t exist or don’t vote.
On election night, pundits for Fox News mulled over the closeness of the race (a race that, they said, had surely been moving in Mitt Romney’s favor). Megyn Kelly turned to Bill O’Reilly and asked him why the race was so close, to which O’Reilly replied:
“The white establishment is now the minority.”
Considering that whites made up 72 percent of the electorate this year, one cannot help but doubt this claim.
The “traditional” America O’Reilly was referring to hasn’t existed since minorities and women won the right to vote. All of the demographics listed above came out strong this year for Obama, as they had in 2008, because in the intervening years the Republican Party has seemingly done everything that it could to distance themselves from these groups.
Harsh immigration policies such as Arizona’s “show me your papers” law won’t be popular with Latinos. Republican Senate candidates who philosophize on rape will not get women’s votes. (Republican candidates Todd “legitimate rape” Akin, Roger “some girls rape easy” Rivard and Richard “pregnancy from rape is God’s intention” Mourdock all lost their races). Misogyny in general does little to ingratiate a party with its female constituents. Dismissing or outright vilifying LGBT citizens isn’t helpful either.
The significance of this election isn’t simply that Obama was reelected: it was a referendum on the idea of “traditional” America and its hold over America’s future: Tammy Baldwin is our first openly gay Senator; the state of New Hampshire elected all-female representation; two states legalized recreational marijuana and for the first time, gay marriage became a winning issue at the ballot box — Maine, Maryland and Washington all affirmed gay marriage, and Minnesota rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned it.
Obama only received 39 percent of the white vote, but he won with Latinos 71 to 27 percent. He won 67 to 31 among unmarried women, and 55 to 44 of the women vote overall. His share of the young vote was 60 to 37 percentage points. And all of these voting blocs take up a larger share of the electorate than they did four years ago.
Progressivism not only won in the present, it is also winning the future.
Mr. O’Reilly said these groups want things. This is true: They want things like comprehensive and compassionate immigration reform; they want their bodies to be respected; they want to be treated as equal citizens; they want access to healthcare and education. They feel entitled to voting rights and opportunity.
They want progressive governance as Ruy Teixeira and John Judis described it in their 2004 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority:
“Today’s Americans…want government to play an active and responsible role in American life, guaranteeing a reasonable level of economic security to Americans rather than leaving them at the mercy of the market and the business cycle. They want to preserve and strengthen Social Security and Medicare, rather than privatize them. They want to modernize and upgrade public education, not abandon it. They want to exploit new bio-technologies and computer technologies in order to improve the quality of life. They do not want science held hostage to a religious or ideological agenda. And they want the social gains of the sixties consolidated, not rolled back; the wounds of race healed, not inflamed.”
That Democratic majority is now maturing, and the Republican Party must moderate itself if it wishes to remain a competitive political party in this new America.
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Apolitical is a blog that covers current events, politics and culture from a progressive perspective — bringing the world at large to the Malibubble, one post at a time.
