I repeat: Demographics are against the GOP as the country gets browner. They have had the baggage of the Southern Strategy, law and order rhetoric, etc., which many people read as anti-minority. And along comes Trump who turns dog whistles on race into loud trumpet calls. The good: the GOP highlights minorities in the party, stresses “family values” which appeal to minorities. The bad: as soon as the Supremes gave permission, they institute voter ID laws and other restrictions in states which had been monitored for years for suppression of minority voting rights. Nothing new. It happened post Reconstruction when the demographics of freed slaves were a problem. It continued for almost 100 years til the Voting Rights Act of 1965. When the the Supreme Court said it was no longer necessary, the states of the old South and AZ covered by the Act unsurprisingly and fairly quickly proved the Justices wrong.
The party had a choice after 2012, when they did their autopsy.
They could continue the strategy of the last forty years, using talk radio and social media to court the angry white vote and ignore everyone else.
Or become more diverse and more moderate. Playing to latent racism and telling white people that they are the “silent majority” may have worked in the last century, but it only elected one President in this one. And that was by statistical fluke, and was not repeated.
Unfortuanately, when confronted with those choices, the GOP chose to be the angry old white people’s party, with all the diversity of the dittoheads that listen to right wing talk radio.
They put a man who made bigottry a watchword, and he proceeded to pander to that crowd in a way that the GOP leaders never did.
Four years on, they were resoundingly defeated.
And the “silent majority” which is actually neither, reacted by trying to occupy the Capitol.
The images of Jan 6th are the epitath of the world of Gingrich, Limbaugh and Trump.
We let the worst elements in American politics get their hands on the levers of power.
The result was disgrace and failure on truly epic proportions.