Over the last few years I’ve been observing various friends who have gone the mediation, yoga, the all is one, health food… yada, yada, yada route. I thought at first it might balance out the hard right except it isn’t because many of them don’t vote. I wonder if perhaps standing up for anything upsets their balance. And then there are the millennial's, who (as a generalization) talk about concern for liberal ideals but are not on the whole voting that way.
Just an observation, however I don’t see the swing reversing anytime soon especially as the left continues to underestimate the right while over estimate their own intelligence and superiority.
The biggest difference is that Rural America still trends towards larger families, and as Rural America trends strongly towards conservative outlooks, as such the "Conservative" side of the political spectrum tends to keep the population growing.
The Urban(Liberal) side of things tends to favor small or non-existent families, so their numbers don't "self-replenish" as easily. The advantage the "liberal" side is they DO have a pretty solid lock on most of the educational institutions the children of those Conservatives pass through, as well as popular culture. Which gives them a significant amount of time and opportunity to try to convert them away from their more conservative upbringing. Many such conversions stick, while others wane over time(often after they either start having families of their own, or return to more conservative areas).
The biggest thing that helps offset it for the liberals is their ability to keep "Racial issues" out there and the constant large inflows of racial minority immigrants in particular, and they know it. If the GOP found a way to reliably attain votes from minority groups(to the tune of 50% or more), much of the DNC would suddenly be changing its tune regarding immigration in all forms. But there are a multitude of issues present which obviously are preventing the Republicans from achieving that kind of outcome. Up to and including openly racist persons or groups supporting many of their objectives and the optics that presents.
Of course, we also have the more "recent" phenomena of Liberals in particular seeking the company of each other, IE "the liberal withdrawal" from Rural America. Which is both helping exacerbate the partisan politics as everybody's physical "bubble" gets MUCH larger because of that. But also in the form of that meaning that more conservative teachers teach in rural areas, and more liberal teachers teach in urban(liberal) areas, which further amplifies both the partisan disparities, and also serves to shrink "the window of opportunity" for conversion to other ways of thinking that challenge the bubble they grow up in.
Of course, this thread itself demonstrates that some posters in this very thread "don't get conservatives" in general, as their doom and gloom prognostications are DNC political fodder, rather than grist for any meaningful Republican Campaign.
Conservatives are by their nature, conservative--in that they're cautious about changes.
Yes, there are more extreme elements that get lumped in with Conservatives, who want to "roll back the clock" on a long laundry list of things. However, there isn't really a common word to use to meaningfully describe them, the closest I can come up with is "Revaunchism" but that historically covered territory more than anything else.
Many/most Conservatives are largely happy with the status quo, there are things they'd like tweaked or otherwise diminished(particularly in regards to Bureaucracy), but their ideal end state is not to find themselves back in the society of the 1950's, 1990's, or any other era of the past. They might prefer
elements of those eras, but they don't want to go back to it wholesale, as I'm sure they could, if given time(or often, almost immediately), things from that social era they're just fine doing without. Don't confuse people waxing nostalgic with people who genuinely wish things were
exactly as they were.
The NYT article a partially quoted in another thread regarding non-Trump-fan Republicans who are supporting many of his activities also demonstrates this to some degree. As this cycles to comments from others about "the pundits"
on both sides failing to understand what is going on. Party self-identification with the Republican Party has been on a long-term decline since Bush(43)
at the least. It might have spiked for short periods of time, but it's been slowly declining all the same(Even during Obama, IIRC). Yet at the same time, the behavior of self-identified "Independent" voters in the interim has also changed considerably as well. They used to be just about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans up through Bush 43's term of office. Since then, the Independent voter has started to skew
very heavily in favor of Republican/Conservative candidates. The NYT Article for example, only reported on the matter that people who identify as
Republican continues to decline while Democrat self-identification remains steady or seems to be growing slightly.
Which is something the MSM isn't "getting" in regards to
conservative voters. Many of them aren't "Republicans" first, they're conservatives first. The problem the Democrats have is what they often espouse is such anathema to Conservatives that they turn up and vote Republican to stop the Democrat from winning. It wasn't so much that they were pro-Republican, as it was that they were anti-Democrat.
In some respects, the DNC sometimes gets that, which is why some of their smear campaigns, when run, are targeted as they are. Because those same
conservatives find certain items that identify well with "Christian Fundamentalist Values" in particular to also be objectionable. And because they're not overtly pro-Republican, going negative with the right things can result in their not showing up to vote. Which brings us back to Hillary having been an absolutely terrible candidate to bring forward, as it encouraged Conservatives to show up to vote
against her while not doing a particularly effective job of motivating people to vote
for her.
And 2020 is still likely, in my view, to be so clouded with anti-Trump mania that the Dems are at a very high risk of fielding a candidate that is going to Alienate a number of "Reliable (historical) Democratic voters" and likewise motivate those Conservatives to turn up to vote
against the Democrat because they view that candidate as a bigger threat than Trump. The "real fun" in all of this in the interim is in a generic ballot poll, the Democrat
should win in a 2020 scenario at present,
because even the conservatives don't like Trump.
It wouldn't be until
the specifics of the Democratic candidate in question come to light that things will fall apart, and the likely forms that an Anti-Trump campaign will take isn't good in that respect.
