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Remember when the Dems were going to own the world forever. Michael Barone says the man who wrote the book on the Dem majority is having second thoughts.
John Judis, co-author of the book The Emerging Democratic Majority, now says in an article in National Journal that the majority has disappeared. His title: “The Emerging Republican Advantage.”
The original book, published in the Republican year of 2002, forecast accurately the groups that would make up the Democratic majority coalition that emerged in the 2006 and 2008 elections: blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals, single women, young voters.
But as Judis writes now, that coalition has come apart. That’s partly because of diminished support from Millennials and Hispanics, but mostly because of additional white working-class defections and erosion among suburbanites unhappy with higher government spending and taxes.
In fact, he now says that the majority he predicted endured for only two elections. President Obama was re-elected with a reduced 51 percent of the vote, but Republicans won the House in 2010, 2012 and 2014, and the Senate in 2014. Democratic strength in governors’ mansions and state legislatures is at its lowest level since the 1920s. …
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics has more.
… Judis’ lengthy essay is a big deal, and well worth reading. He argues that Republicans have managed to bring together middle- and working-class whites, as well as middle-class Hispanics, who don’t see the obvious advantages to the Democratic platform that poor and upper-class voters do. This has allowed Republicans to win expanded majorities in the House and Senate and to compete effectively for the presidency. In short, Judis now sees an emerging Republican advantage.
This is a debate I’ve been involved in since my earliest days at RealClearPolitics. My own book, “The Lost Majority,” started as a rebuttal to Judis and Teixeira’s book, but became more of a companion to it (more on this later). While I don’t see a meaningful Republican advantage emerging long-term, Judis’ views and mine seem to be otherwise more or less in accord. In the end, political coalitions in a large, diverse republic such as our own are, and always have been, inherently unstable. Issues that bind groups together in one election disappear, while new issue cleavages threaten to break groups off. Coalitions are ultimately like water balloons: When you press down on one side, another side pops up. The Democratic coalition of the late aughts proves to be no exception. …
More on the strength of the parties comes from Jay Cost at the Weekly Standard.
… Another interesting observation from Trende and Byler’s data is that, contrary to proponents of the “Emerging Democratic Majority” thesis, which holds that a coalition of the “ascendant” will drive ever-larger Democratic margins, there has been a trend toward the GOP over the last 30 years. Beyond the ebbs and flows of the cycles, the GOP has been steadily improving its national standing. Its low points in each political cycle are not as low as they used to be, and its high points are higher.
Consider the most recent low, in 2008. Per Trende and Byler, the GOP was still in a slightly stronger position in 2008 than it was after its 1992 rout. And it was substantially improved relative to 1978, 1976, 1964, 1962, and 1960. In fact, the GOP’s net standing in 2008 was similar to 1966, which is remembered as a comeback year for the Republican party.
Meanwhile, the party’s highs are getting higher. Across all subpresidential offices, the GOP today holds a greater share of power than at any time since 1928. And no other cycle in the postwar era comes close to 2014 in terms of Republican subpresidential strength—not in Congress and certainly not in the state capitals. Below the White House, the GOP’s current standing rivals historical blowouts like 1928, 1894, and 1860.
Remember all this next time you read an article about how the Democrats are on the rise. The reality is that the transfer of power in 2008 was entirely predictable, given the economic downturn and the fact that the GOP had already controlled the White House for eight years. Meanwhile, Barack Obama’s high-water mark—a seven-point victory over John McCain—was less than the high points for Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Reagan, and Clinton. Moreover, Obama’s presidential victory has led to a GOP resurgence in lower offices on a scale that only octogenarians have ever seen before. …
Christopher Booker of the Telegraph, UK writes on the global warming fraud.
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.
Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.
Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world’s scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming. …
Chris Booker has more.
… Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.
Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.
Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. …