you win some elections, you lose some elections. Just because one side loses an election doesn't mean a paradigm shift is underway.
Now, obviously, self identification isn't everything. I am sure there are some liberal dumbasses out there that consider themselves conservative. But overall, people recognize what "economically conservative" means and know what "socially conservative" means. Both have been on the rise for quite some time. Unions got crushed in wisconsin.
Obama may win the election, but it wont be because of a paradigm shift.
Conservative / liberal both can mean anything one wants it to mean.
African-Americans consider themselves conservative. How many do you think are going to vote for republicans?
The difference here and the shift comes from changing population demographics.
The U.S., soon to be majority-minority
Non-Hispanic whites still make up the majority in America but they won't much longer. Census figures show the two largest states, California and Texas, already are majority-minority; so are 22 of the 100 largest metro areas. Writer J.W. Anderson asks: Are citizens prepared for such a major change? Are politicians? Is the press?
Try this thought experiment: Imagine a community in which most of the taxpayers are white and in upper middle age, while most of the small children are Hispanic, Asian or black. And in this community, the issue is the budget for early childhood education. Is the school tax more likely to go up, or down?
Imagine, further, that the white taxpayers understand that, as those kids grow up and reach voting age, the political power in the community is going to shift sharply to them. Does that make the decision easier, or more difficult?
There you have a miniature model, simplified but accurate, of the United States as it is reflected in the 2010 Census. It helps explain the behavior of the political system as it struggles with the tensions being generated by rapid change in the American population. Wide areas of this country, including both of the two most populous states, are now what the statisticians call minority-majority – meaning that the accustomed majority group, non- Hispanic whites, are fewer than half of their people.
The most important political documents of the year are, arguably, the reports on the 2010 Census. The national figures came out last winter, and the Census Bureau is now publishing data at the level of counties and congressional districts. (For an introduction, see this interactive map.)
Nationwide, non-Hispanic whites are still a large majority – but not so large as they used to be. They were 69.1 per cent of the population in the 2000 Census, but 63.7 per cent 10 years later. In California, the state with the most people and often a leader in social trends, non-Hispanic whites are 40.1 per cent. In Texas, second-largest, they are 45.3 per cent.
The major reason for this massive change is birth rates. Among non-Hispanic whites, birth rates have dropped to a point barely above the replacement level – similar to the spectacular drops, incidentally, in the European countries from which most of this population originally came. Birth rates are much higher among the minorities, especially among Hispanics.
Analyzing the Census numbers, the Pew Hispanic Center recently reported that while the increase of the Hispanic population in this country was mainly fed by immigration as recently as the 1990s, the pattern shifted in the past decade when the growth was, by a wide margin, due to children born here.
In the decade from 2000 to 2010, the country’s total population grew 9.7 per cent. But the non-Hispanic white population grew only 1.2 per cent. In the same 10 years, the Hispanic population grew 43.0 per cent. The Asian population grew 43.3 per cent. The African American population grew at a rate closer to the national average, 12.3 per cent.
To get a sense of the future trend, look at the age profile. Americans over the age of 55 are now about 77 per cent non-Hispanic white. But, as William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution pointed out earlier this year, the 2010 Census shows that more than half of American three-year-olds are now minority. It means that if immigration went to zero tomorrow, and the birth rates of the respective ethnic and racial groups continued unchanged, the non-Hispanic white majority would disappear within several decades.
more at link
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=535
If you think republicans aren't pondering this same question, you would be wrong.
