Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 109

Life of the Party
The GOP's inevitable demographic
demise may not be so inevitable.
By Stephanie Mencimer

or two decades, elected Republicans have all but refused to govern. They've rebuffed any and all efforts by Democrats to try to solve the country's most pressing
problems-often refusing to even acknowledge that those problems, like climate change,
exist at all. And yet, Republicans still hold a death grip on the country's political institutions, leaving those institutions unable to respond to a changing world.
But, according to the legendary liberal pollster Stanley Greenberg, the end is near. In
his new book, R.I.P G.O.P., Greenberg insists that the ugliness of today's politics, particularly the seemingly hopeless obstructionism of the Mitch McConnell-led Republican Party, is hastening a revolution. Beneath the stagnant waters of Trump's America is
a rapidly moving "blue wave" of progressive politics. Greenberg predicts a "happy ending," with "a country united and finally liberated from gridlock to address the nation's
most serious problems. It ends with the death of the Republican Party as we've known it."
Where have we heard that before? People have been predicting a Democratic revolution for decades now, and yet the country seems light years farther from a progressive
nirvana than it did in 2002, when John Judis and Ruy Teixeira made a similar argument in their book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Nonetheless, Greenberg is optimistic that this time is for real, and his book may be a welcome tonic for Democratic despair, even if you still suspect it's just a liberal fantasy at heart. Consider it a beach read
for the resistance.
Greenberg sees change driven by demographics, as the country becomes more secular, more multicultural, more unmarried, and more urban. He sees Millennials overtaking Baby Boomers as the country's largest voting bloc and women in particular moving
the country forward on issues like climate change and immigration. To make his case,
he naturally draws on extensive polling data. While anti-immigrant sentiment helped
propel Trump into the White House by energizing his base of white working-class voters,
Greenberg reports that the president's agenda has helped boost the percentage of Americans who believe immigrants "strengthen the country" from 53 percent to 65 percent.
Even as the Trump administration has erased any mention of climate change from government agency websites, Americans have become ever more convinced that the planet
is warming. Just since the beginning of the 2016 presidential election, Greenberg writes,
the percentage of Americans who believe that there's "solid evidence" that the climate is
warming reached 92 percent, a jump of thirteen points.
In Greenberg's read of the data, a decade of Republican-induced gridlock has left
Americans longing for the government to do more, not less, to solve the nation's problems. But he doesn't hold Democrats blameless for the current state of affairs. A whole
chapter in the book is called "How Did Democrats Let Donald Trump Win?" In it, Greenberg criticizes the Democrats' incrementalism and their failure to seize on some of the
things that animated Trump voters, such as trade policy and the evils of consolidated corporate power. Greenberg is especially critical of Hillary Clinton's campaign "malpractice," though he mostly seems miffed that she didn't take more of his messaging advice during her 2016 presidential campaign.

R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the
New America Is
Dooming the Republicans
by Stanley B. Greenberg
Thomas Dunne Books, 336 pp.

n something of a tangent, Greenberg also tackles the subject of the white working class,
those potential swing voters whom Democrats seem to despair of reaching in 2020.
Washington Monthly

109

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2019