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For years I've been seeing conservatives arguing that that Democrat line about "demographics is destiny" was more the product of wishful thinking than facts on the ground. I'm starting to feel that way myself. After every Presidential election cycle, centrist Democrats redouble their efforts in encouraging the DNC to do some earnest soul-searching and recognise the fact that non-white voters are a demographic (or rather, collection of extremely loosely affiliated demographics, each of which has its own interests, many of which are zero-sum) that must be actively appealed to just like any other demographic, and cannot be simply taken for granted under the increasingly tenuous assumption that "Republicans are racist so people of colour won't vote for them". Then the next Presidential election cycle starts and the DNC immediately resumes taking non-white voters for granted, then react with shock and horror when they lose even more of them than in the last election.
Trump making historic inroads among Latino and black voters in 2016 may have come as a legitimate surprise to the DNC in 2016. No one should have been surprised by it last month. In November 2024, any white Democrat rending their hair and asking "how could a Latinx person vote for Trump??? Don't they know how racist he is???" just comes off as pathetic, like an ostrich. How many times does Lucy have to pull the football away from Charlie Brown before he learns pattern recognition?
I'm honestly wondering if, within the next ten years, we'll see Democrats claiming that they never claimed anything as racially essentialist as "demographics is destiny" and the whole thing was just invented by conservatives as an antisemetic dog whistle.
I think Hanania had an article along these lines a few weeks ago: for a long time "demographics is destiny" was the consensus among Democrats and Republicans. This served as a convenient fig leaf for Republicans who want to appeal to anti-immigration voters without being accused of racism: "we don't hate non-white people, we just want to win elections, which is impossible if non-white voters can be assumed to vote Democrat" (as Democrats themselves openly believe, to the point of it being a major component of their electoral strategy). So the increasing recognition that non-white voters are up for grabs by either party is a bit of a double-edged sword for the Republicans. On the one hand, a new demographic is voting for them, yay! On the other hand, if they want to keep appealing to their white nationalist faction while still appearing respectable, they're going to have to come up with some new justification for being opposed to immigration other than racial animus or the still-unacceptable euphemism of "cultural homogeneity", and so far the replacement fig leaf of "immigrants commit more crimes" doesn't appear to be playing ball. I don't think there's any conflict between being a social and economic conservative while also believing that Diversity is our Strength™ (i.e. we will welcome people of any colour or creed to America, provided you share our values and are willing to work hard), but the impression I get is that is that there is a very large Republican faction who will accuse any Republican politician who isn't aggressively opposed to immigration of being a RINO regardless of their stances on other policy questions - a faction that no serious Republican politician yet feels comfortable marginalising or alienating.
This is exactly the opposite of my experience of how the phrase is used. Consider the opening paragraph of this Time article:
To your next point:
Then how come a Democrat won the presidency in 1960?
Not OP but I imagine his argument would be that the policies of 1960's Democrats would have more in common with today's Republicans than today's Democrats.
Of course, but even in the sixties the Democrats were radically more economically and socially progressive than the Republicans. During the campaign, Republicans accused JFK of being a closeted socialist on the back of his healthcare policy proposals, and JFK appealed to black voters by publicly showing his support for Martin Luther King. If the argument is that "white Americans as a group can always be presumed to vote for the more socially and/or economically conservative of the two candidates", that invites the question of how JFK was elected in the first place, given the demographics of the 1960s.
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