Here’s Samuel Goldman writing in The Week:
Especially to populists and immigration hawks, the very word “California” evokes political, cultural, and demographic doom. But there’s another prospect across the continent. For Republicans, California represents the past. The future is Florida.
It’s worth reading Goldman’s analysis, but I want to emphasize something rather narrow. Goldman hits on it here:
At minimum, though, Republicans’ prospects in Florida should relieve the pessimism that characterizes some conservatives’ attitudes toward immigration and cultural pluralism. Florida not only shows that Republicans can win non-white voters, but that they can do so without merely echoing Democrats’ positions.
As a Democrat, I am concerned about the political drift in Florida. The Sunshine State has a lot of Electoral College votes and a lot of congressional seats, and I don’t want to see the Republicans turn it into an unbreachable redoubt. But then there is human nature to consider. About half of us are wired to be conservative in outlook and temperament, and that’s not going to change. We’re stuck with a right wing to our politics, and the main question is whether that right wing is going to be relatively healthy or not.
Translated to our current environment, we want to see a conservatism that embraces diversity, that takes America as it is and competes for its votes without resorting to anti-Democratic means. That’s not what we’re witnessing right now.
It can seem absurd to argue, as Goldman does, that there are conservatives who would drop their pessimism about immigration and cultural pluralism if only they thought they could win some minority votes. The problem for them is that the minorities exist, not that they vote the wrong way.
But if we can some evolution away from the white nationalist version of the Republican Party that currently prevails toward a new conservatism that has real appeal to many Latinos, that would be a really welcome and healthy development for our country.
It might make Florida as reliably red as California is reliably blue. It might make California a lot more competitive. It might cause some real headaches for the Democrats. But I think it would be worth it because anything is better than Nazis.
A healthy conservative party, one that respected voting rights and tried to appeal to minorities, would be a very positive development. Sure, my progressive agenda might not gain ascendancy. But I don’t think we’d be ignoring issues like global warming or even access to healthcare. The world you describe would be one in which conservative politicians would advocate for solutions like carbon tax credits and the ACA. From where we stand now, that sounds like nirvana.
Does this person know that some surveys and analysis finds that some of (perhaps a lot of) the non-white drift that we’ve seen could actually be an approval of Trump’s views on immigration? In my limited opinion on this and having argued about it endlessly on the internet, the results on that question are mixed. A lot of this drift could just as well be explained as such:
1. Non-white voters in Florida saw in Trump in 2016 as a potential existential threat. A complete unknown and a racist asshole who could potentially bring a lot of harm. He said a lot of weird shit about dictators. Seemed to compare US to bad actors abroad, and he might even have a “dovish” policy with Cuba or with the Palestinian cause.
2. In addition to his loud noises about immigration, in reality he wasn’t actually able to send away people in significant fashion. And it was a drop off compared to Obama. ICE and Border Patrol were demoralized, Democratic activists in cities worked to cancel their contracts, and as a result the menacing threat of his border policy was no longer as acute.
3. Low wage and middle class workers for the first time in a long time experienced significant wage growth that outpaced the upper middle class. And it was Hispanic workers who received the most significant boost, relatively speaking.
4. Seeing this wage growth happen in coincidence with Trump’s loud rhetoric has persuaded some that he’s not actually a threat to them, and they just built a good amount of income to boot. Maybe he was right?
5. He gave the neocons everything they could have dreamed on foreign policy, including moving the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, assassinated Solomeini, assisting an attempt at ousting Maduro, and tearing up the Iran Nuclear Deal and Paris Accords. “He’s not crazy, he’s just like us!”
All of those reassurances, with an increased salience of anti-Black racism as opposed to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and you have a toxic stew. The polling data is perfectly explained with this framework. But I don’t see an actual distinction from the fascism, which is the actual problem. It’s a problem of leaders not able to stand up to their self-perpetuating cult.
The obvious answer to me is a need for more democracy. This two party shit isn’t working out and doesn’t really give everyone enough options to make choices which are more in line with their beliefs. I’ve been a reliably Democratic voter for my entire voting life (just missed the 1996 presidential). It’s felt like the country has been becoming less democratic as long as I’ve been paying attention. We’ve had multiple elections where the winner of the popular vote lost. We had an election decided by the Supreme Court, and despite their protestations that this was a one time thing I’m extremely skeptical about things since that point (and other points in the past where we’ve had things that I consider to be shenanigans, but this is the one I was alive for/paying attention to).
To get away from this two party shit is a hard problem. Maine and Alaska seem to be leading the way here with the introduction of IRV/RCV which is probably the way out of this mess eventually, or at least is a necessary precondition (along with some serious reform to how we draw our various boundaries for elections). But I fear this is coming way too late to matter now that one of our parties is obviously anti-democracy and came within a hair’s breadth of completely disrupting the “peaceful transition of power” (not sure we can actually claim that anymore… the transition of power still happened, but it damn well wasn’t peaceful this time around). I think we just got lucky in the moment. And it doesn’t feel good to leave this up to luck next time.
I don”t think the Republican party can be fixed. Each election, the competency bar for Republican politicians is lower. A third party that breaks away from Trumpism, in combination with some Republican-leaning independents, would help. Republicans have been awful since Reconstruction ended and the party drifted toward Taft. Joe McCarthy was a Trumpster, before D. Trump was pulling his sister’s pigtails. Nixon courting Southern Democrats into the Republican party resulted in a point of no return. President Eisenhower was an exception because he was not a Republican politician when elected.
As a Floridian, I am always bemused by discussions of Florida politics that fail to take into account the two most important factors standing in the way of Democratic success:
1) The abysmal condition of the Florida Democratic Party. They are just a f***ing joke. And corrupt. Alcee Hastings. Debby Wasserman-Shultz. Alan Grayson. ‘Nuff said.
2) The intractable racism and social caste history of non-mexican latin-americans. I grew up in the South, and the blatant racism of latin-americans (and most especially Cubans and Venezuelans) was shocking even to me. (This is inextricably bound up with the anti-socialist attitudes Booman identifies in the post). Think of South Florida as the white-flight suburb of latin-america, and you start to understand the dynamic.
#2 is particularly problematic when combined with the white racist blocs in northern and west-coast Florida. So, when the Florida Dems run black candidates for state-wide office, the endeavor is doomed from the start. Val Demings? Enormous talent. Brains & integrity & charisma for miles. But a black woman running for state-wide office in Florida? Forget it. Wish it were different. But because the two points above will never be dealt with honestly, Val Demings will be our gubernatorial candidate. And we’ll have one less great rep. in Congress.
So you think that Latinos can’t be fascists. Interesting.