Ryan Streeter
It almost seems sacrilegious to write about anything other than the coming government shutdown right now, but American life continues on nonetheless. And it continues to change. As the political class tries to make decisions in ways that affect their core constituencies, it's always interesting to look how constituencies in general are changing.
Three interesting demographic pieces have come out in the past day or so that help us understand America’s changing political landscape.
Today’s Gallup poll, this piece yesterday at CNN on 8 takeaways from the new Census data, and a new City Journal essay by Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox raise these important points:
Republicans have a health care problem. As if we didn’t know ObamaCare repeal and entitlement reform would be hard, the latest data show that 1 in 4 adults have government-provided health coverage. The average is boosted, of course, by the large percentage of seniors on Medicare, but nonetheless the overall percentage has risen in the past couple of years. Since the chief Republican reform efforts center on entitlement reform and ObamaCare repeal, the political challenges are only intensifying. People in the 25-45 range are least likely to have government health care, which means conversely that they are likely to be the most supportive of Republican reform efforts.
The center of gravity in American politics is moving south and west, and is becoming more Hispanic and less white. The south and west factor is good for Republicans, the Hispanic/white factor is not – yet, anyway. Republicans have known they have been behind the curve on this latter issue for awhile and are effectively out of excuses. The most promising thing the GOP has going for it are the Marco Rubios and Susana Martinez’s in the party. “Outreach” has otherwise failed, doomed by a lack of imagination, on the one hand, and overkill on immigration on the other.
The center of American life, despite the best efforts of elites and urban boosters, has continued to concentrate in the suburbs. We are the suburban nation. Hardly anyone lives in rural areas anymore, and core cities have grown super-slowly or negatively. Meanwhile, Americans are piling into the rings outside core cities, filling up roadways, cul-de-sacs and parking lots like never before. We are both dispersing and concentrating at the same time: always moving out into new terrain, but doing so in and around metro zones. This means that the issues of school quality, congestion, commuting, and fuel prices will be politically important. Forget high-speed rail, as much as some of us enjoy trains. America will need more lanes, more telecommuting, and more pressure on urban schools to improve if the neighborhoods around them ever want to bounce back again.
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