Donkey Rising

[kpete]

The Rising
With demography on its side, the emerging Democratic majority is about to arrive.

By MATTHEW YGLESIAS



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But the good news for Democrats is that their swatches of the American patchwork, though they fit together less well than do the GOP’s, are mostly the swatches that are growing. Every year, the proportion of seculars in the population expands, while the proportion of non-Hispanic whites shrinks, as does that of the party’s most problematic demographic—whites with no college degrees. These trends prompted John Judis and Ruy Teixeira to posit an “emerging Democratic majority.” Although their book was published soon after the country’s post-9/11 swing to the right made their thesis seem foolish, today the underlying pro-Democratic trends seem real enough. The growth of favorable demographic groups, combined with new ways of using the Internet to mobilize educated liberal professionals, has helped drive Obama’s primary victory and a new sense of progressive self-confidence. Demo­crats from Obama down are calculating that the failures of the Bush years make it possible to sell the country on an agenda that revives the big liberal ambitions of decades past, albeit with substantial specific changes...
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the rest:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/the-rising/6984/