During some of the darkest days of the George W. Bush era, liberals contented themselves with one particular certainty: It was just a matter of time. Thanks to demographics, the GOP’s stranglehold on the presidency, the Senate, and the House would all eventually be broken. The country was getting younger and browner, and the Republican coalition of old white conservatives, increasingly cohered by racist messaging, could not hold. The GOP was on the edge of collapse, its support aging out and dying off. If the Democratic Party could get those young people and people of color to vote, they could win.
That, in broad strokes, was the optimistic argument put forth in 2002 by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority (excerpts of that book were published in this magazine). In it, Judis and Teixeira forwarded the thesis that the electoral map, in concert with a handful of outside factors, would inevitably come to the aid of Democrats, and push them permanently into a majoritarian position. It was a hopeful forecast in a grim political period.
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