On election night, November 6, before the results came down, Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly told his fellow pundits that “20 years ago, President Obama would’ve been roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney.” What’s changed, O’Reilly explained, is that “the white establishment is now the minority.”
White Americans may not be the minority quite yet, but the demographics are shifting in that direction, and those shifts will certainly affect the electorate. As demographer William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes: “Minorities accounted for a historic high (28 percent) of voters in Tuesday’s elections.” President Obama won 80 percent of the minority vote, and 39 percent of the white vote.
The growing Latino population may transform once-Republican bastions into swing states, Dr. Frey explains. “More fast-growing states in the South and Mountain West still lie in the province of Republicans (think Texas, Georgia, and Arizona), but their changing demography, coupled with greater Democratic appeal to whites, will gradually change this.”
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