'Duck Dynasty' story is just another symptom of conservative demographic doom

The common thread among defenses of Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson’s bigotry — beside completely ignoring the racist aspect of it — is that A&E is buckling under pressure for special interests interested in “political correctness.”

This is, of course, wrong. What’s going on can be demonstrated by looking at polling data. In July, Gallup asked voters whether they’d vote for a referendum to legalize same-sex marriage in every state. The result of the study showed that such a referendum would win with 52% of the vote. And when we break it down by demographics, we see that the strongest support came from: #1. liberals; #2. those with no religion; #3. Democrats; and #4. 18-34 year-olds.

And that’s where conservatives misunderstand A&E’s reaction. They think it’s all about demos #1, #2, and #3. The truth is that it’s about #4. The 18-34 demo is the TV goldmine — young adults, mostly without children, who spend money more freely than any other demo. It’s not political pressure that has A&E spooked, it’s the market. Concern for the market — which conservatives claim to love — is at its heart undemocratic (which is why conservatives generally prefer it). 18-34s are a minority of Americans, but their spending habits give them outsized influence.

Firing Robertson has nothing to do with “political correctness” on A&E’s part. It’s about who brings the bread and butter.

Conservatives do not.

A Shock to the Old Demographic

Mike Luckovich.

'What Piñata?'

David Fitzsimmons, Cagle Cartoons, The Arizona Star.

[via Truthdig]

More bad demographic news for the GOP: FL Cuban-Americans slipping away

Miami Herald:

President Obama nearly won the solidly Republican Cuban-American vote in Florida and rolled up huge margins with every other Hispanic group in the state, according to an exit poll performed by a firm that also worked for his campaign.

Obama actually won Cuban-Americans who voted on Election Day itself, taking 53 percent of their vote compared to 47 percent for Republican Mitt Romney, who built up a lead among those who cast absentee and early in-person ballots, according to the survey of 4,866 voters conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International.

Romney narrowly carried Cuban-Americans, 52-48 percent, which is a decrease for Republicans when compared to 2008.

“Obama is picking the Republican lock in Florida,” Fernand Amandi said, noting that Hispanics are Florida’s fastest-growing segment of the electorate.

Of course, the Republican response to this in line with the fourth stage of conservative grief -- i.e., denial. Not very helpful in dealing with their problem. You'd think Tuesday would've taught them a little lesson about poopooing polling. But of course, these are modern conservatives we're talking about here. They don't do learning lessons.

Changing electorate does not favor GOP

Buzzfeed reminds me a lot of Politico, in that it’s usually best when just reporting and worst when doing analysis. This isn’t surprising, since Buzzfeed Politics editor Ben Smith is a Politico alumn. But this piece strikes me as impressively dead on, for the most part. Long story short, the electorate seems more liberal even than the president it reelected. “The Tea Party is a memory, an embarrassment to a party that didn’t even mention it at its national convention in Tampa,” they write. “And the network that led the conservative resurgence, Fox, suffered a sort of televised meltdown as the results came in, with Karl Rove berating host Megyn Kelly for calling the election, he said, prematurely.”

…Republicans have warned of a more liberal Obama over the coming term, an outcome Democrats hope for and consider likely. But the scale of the decisions facing the country will create an intense pressure for compromise, and now on Democratic terms.

But the 2012 election marked a cultural shift as much as a political one. Ballot measures that had failed for years — allowing the marriage of two men or two women in Maine and Maryland; legalizing marijuana in Washington State and Colorado — were voted into law. The nation’s leading champion of bank regulation Elizabeth Warren handily defeated moderate Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and the nation’s first lesbian senator, in Tammy Baldwin, was elected in Wisconsin. Even climate change, which was absent for nearly the entire campaign, came roaring back with Hurricane Sandy, and was the subject of endorsements for Obama and harsh attacks on Romney.

These measures were passed, and Obama re-elected, by an American electorate that Republicans had dismissed as a fluke of African-American pride and youth enthusiasm, and which a generation of pundits — Michael Barone, George Will — wrote off as a fantasy.

They put their finger directly on a change in America they describe as “unmistakable and irreversible”:

The groups on whom Obama depended are the ones that are growing; white men, the core Republican constituency, are a shrinking minority. For the first time In 2011, minority births surpassed white births in the United States, and the longer demographic trend places white Americans in the minority by 2041.

There’s no changing this. Republicans will have to adapt or perish.