Slate’s Jordan Weissmann reflects on the census data released last week:
Donald Trump and the Republican Party he shaped represent the fading face of the United States, winning over an older, more rural, and overwhelmingly caucasian bloc of voters that reflected the country’s past more than its more urban and diverse future.
The latest data from the 2020 Census, which the government released on Thursday to kick off the congressional redistricting process, illustrate that fact in incredibly stark terms. It shows that the white population fell for the first time in history during the last decade, and that Americans continued to cluster in growing cities and suburbs, whether in Texas, Georgia, Virginia, or New York.
Perhaps most strikingly, while metro areas grew, vast stretches of the country continued to bleed population. About 53 percent of all U.S. counties shrank between 2010 and 2020. You can see them in the sea of burnt orange on the graph below, rural regions and small towns that often have few residents to begin with. In total, they were home to about 50.5 million people in a nation of more than 331 million.
In addition to the Republican, unprincipled, white-knuckled war on democracy, the problem for Democrats remains that the structure of the Constitution gives those rural states in the middle of the country two senators each, while no matter how populous coastal states become, they get only two. Thus also, presidencies won without winning the popular vote. And popular-vote presidencies like Joe Biden’s hamstrung by a Senate over-representing Republican-controlled states and under-representing the rest.
I may have more to say on this later, but like it or not Democrats have to do better at winning elections out where they do not now.
“We’re going to be in places where the Democratic Party hasn’t been in 25 years,” then-DNC chair Gov. Howard Dean said in 2006. “If you don’t show up in 60 percent of the country, you don’t win, and that’s not going to happen anymore.” What Dean said 15 years ago is true today: You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.
And if you do show up to play and expect to compete, you’d better have game.
Somewhere in the last week, I saw a commentary on how right-wing money men are willing to compete everywhere, year after year to advance their ideology. They don’t spend, they invest. Not only in right-wing talk radio, but in Spanish-language right-wing talk. And even in markets with an significant Asian demographic. They’re playing the long game. So did the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the left flounders. The left-wing talk model does not work as well, this comment went, because it does not stimulate the lizard brain the same way. So what are Democrats doing that does work or might work at counter-programming out where Democrats give conservatives a too-easy pass at winning both U.S. Senate seats and state legislatures?
Somebody like Dean has to take a long-term (not election-cycle) view of advancing progressive ideas out where the buffalo roam.