Remember the old Clinton campaign song? “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”
Actually, it should have been: Don’t Stop Thinking About the Reagan Democrats. It was forgetting about them that was the undoing of the New Deal coalition. And it is forgetting about them that is returning the Democrats to power today, according to James Pinkerton.
Reagan Democrats are the key swing voting bloc... Democrats by ancestry, but have voted Republican more recently.
That’s because they are social conservatives and economic liberals, meaning that they don’t like abortion and gay marriage and they do like Social Security and Medicare.
The Reagan Democrats are looking for a party that takes seriously their concerns about immigration, homeland security, multiculturalism, immorality and de-industrialization, combined with a prudently hawkish foreign policy. Whichever party gets there first in addressing those problems, and then stays there to solve them - that party will be in the majority for a long time.
Wait a minute! What’s the problem? If you look at most of the issues above, you can say that the parties are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to water down the agenda of their base in order to make it acceptable to the Reagan Democrats. At the very least they are kicking up dust to try and seem closer to the Reagan Democrat position than they really are.
So why would the Reagan Democrats need a party to belong to?
Oh sure, they don’t get everything they want, but they get a lot. In fact, maybe the worst thing that could happen to them is to become the base of one of the parties, for then both parties could ignore them.
The Reagan Democrats are doing just fine right where they are.
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