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this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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Okay yeah I misremembered my terms - whiteness is on its way out, and in fact the under-18 crowd has white as a minority already, though I forgot for a moment that the rest of the age groups won't catch up until the next decade or two as the Boomers and such die off. White people tend to have fewer children than non-white people, so that's just how that works.
More important is the fact that conservative voters are in the minority, and have been for a long time. While not precisely the same thing, it is somewhat related.
even with white people's population plateauing, white people will be the largest single group for a good while. Also, while we are seeing the largest total growth from the latino population, and the largest growth per capita being asian, all demographic's fertility rates drop after their family has been here for ~3 generations as they adjust to the cost of living. So we have white people as the most influential group for quite some time to come.
But, yes, people who identify as conservative republicans make up about 30% of the population. However, due to awful voter turn out, they represent much closer to 50% of the population that actively votes, because they are far more likely to do so per capita. So it will also be a while before their level of influence declines. That is, unless, we suddenly convince 60% of the population to take voting seriously.
I realize you may not want to hear this from me after my mistake earlier, but I believe that is not true. The "popular vote" is also counted in each Presidential election, even though it does not determine anything, and the last time a Republican won that was 2004. For the last 20 years, people's votes simply aren't being counted, bc they tend to aggregate together in cities and university towns, rather than spread far out across hundreds of miles of farmland, as e.g. people in Idaho do.
If you live in an area that leans >80% one way or another, then I don't blame people for not voting, bc their votes won't affect anything whatsoever. Especially young people, who have a disproportionate hardship to "just get out and vote" - having to take time off from work (retired people don't), college students may need to drive hundreds of miles to get "home" (which even if they do "often", still has to coincide with voting time, and comes at cost of sleep, studying, homework, etc.), people with kids have to struggle with daycare, and so on.
If we truly wanted more people to vote, then as a nation we would encourage that - e.g. give everyone a break from work, have appropriately equipped (e.g. staffed) recipient stations, and/or better yet allow mail-in voting. Making votes from some particular areas "count" while those from other areas not count, is very much a feature that was designed - as the very people that did it freely admit, and continue to push forward all the time.
Put another way, voting turnouts heavily correlate with age, aka the ability to vote with greater ease.
I guarantee you - bc it's simply math - that if every single liberal Democrat were to get out and vote in the next election, thus representing the popular vote by 100% of the eligible people on that one side, it still would have extremely low impact on the actual end result. What would instead have a MASSIVE impact would be a bunch of liberals moving to a state like Texas, and rather than continue to vote from San Francisco or NYC, to influence the Electoral College system from that new location where it has a chance to actually flip it from red to blue, rather than reinforce the already blue still further.
Which has been happening lately - e.g. Austin - but also, I can't blame people especially women who due to the overall lack of healthcare and toxicity of surrounding neighbors may not wish to do that.
All that said, yes overall engagement will be necessary to combat the issues facing us all - e.g. people need to step up and run for office, or else we end up getting the jokers that we currently have. But it's nowhere near as simplistic as you make it sound, like all that would be needed would be to "vote". imho at least!:-)