For the past several years, political pundits on both sides of the aisle have been predicting a future with a permanent Democratic majority in the United States.  As evidence, they point to increasing immigration of races that consistently vote over two to one for Democrats, and to the fact that young people overwhelmingly lean left.  Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the past seven presidential elections, and Texas, the jewel in the Republican crown, is forecast to go blue in a decade or two because of its growing Hispanic population.  These predictions have led to jubilation among Democrats and foreboding among Republicans.

So is the Republican party doomed?  Not necessarily.  A permanent Democratic future is preconditioned on all demographic groups continuing to vote for the two main parties at the same rates they do currently.  I don't think this will be the case.  Specifically, I believe that white voters will begin voting for Republicans in larger numbers than they do now.  The reason why is simple: identity politics.

Since the 1960s, the white share of the Democratic vote has steadily been decreasing.  Just over half of Hillary Clinton's votes in 2016 came from whites.  The Democratic vote will probably be majority-nonwhite in the 2020 election and onward.

In the past, Democrats couldn't afford to alienate whites, because they couldn't win elections without either a majority or near majority of the white vote.  Times have changed, and now they can.  Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton lost the white vote, but by small margins.  Barack Obama lost the white vote by much larger margins – first by 12 points, then by 20.  This shows that Democrats can now win elections without the white vote.

As the Democratic Party becomes more and more nonwhite, it will essentially become a nonwhite racial advocacy party that is strongly anti-white.  In the future, black Democrats will demand reparations for slavery, and Hispanic Democrats will demand increased immigration, among other things.  The Democratic Party will have no choice but to support these measures, as the party is dependent on nonwhite votes.  Nonwhites will want to flex their political muscles.  They already have determined the past two Democratic nominees.  In the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama won the nonwhite vote in 2008, and Hillary Clinton did in 2016.  If only white Democrats had voted in the primaries, Hillary Clinton would have been the party's nominee in 2008 and Bernie Sanders in 2016.  Nonwhites will want leaders who look like them.  Bill Clinton will almost certainly be the last white male Democratic president.

The Democratic support of nonwhite identity politics is a double-edged sword.  It may rile up nonwhites to vote for Democrats, but it will also alienate whites, the largest voting bloc in the country.  Many centrist and center-left white Democrats will turn to the Republicans because they will feel unwelcome in their old party.  In time, only the most radical leftist whites will remain Democrats.

Many middle-of-the-road Americans dislike Donald Trump, and this has led political analysts to assume this will translate into them never voting Republican, but I disagree.  Centrists and moderates may dislike Trump's personality, but not necessarily his political views.  If someone with right-wing populist views and a less outlandish personality were nominated by the Republicans, he could easily win support of moderates and centrists.

Van Jones wasn't entirely wrong when he said Trump's election was a "whitelash."  As anti-white hatred increases, so will the white backlash against it and the Republican share of the white vote.  With the rise of identity politics, whites may begin voting as a tribe, just as other races do.

The Democratic Party is highly fragile – much more so than the Republican party.  The Democrats' coalition is made up of many different groups of people united in their hatred of traditional America.  As of right now, their differences have been put aside to fight a common enemy.  Hatred of Trump is the glue keeping the Democrats together.  When his presidency ends, they'll lose their great unifier, and the Democratic Party will likely split.

The two largest factions in the Democratic party are Hillary Clinton-supporters and Bernie Sanders-supporters.  It is highly unlikely that the Sanders faction will be able to take control of the party from the Clinton faction, so the latter group may create a third party.  This has historical precedent.  In the 1912 election, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft split the Republican vote, allowing Woodrow Wilson to be elected president.  Something similar could happen in the future with the Democratic Party.  Sanders candidates will do well in the Pacific Northwest and New England, and Clinton candidates will do well in California and the Acela corridor.  If Sanders had run as an independent in the 2016 election instead of endorsing Clinton, he almost certainly would have taken a big chunk of Democratic voters with him.  Another possibility is that a black or Hispanic leftist will feel that the Democratic Party isn't doing enough to support his race and will run as an independent candidate and take a big chunk of the black or Hispanic vote.  If this happens, it will not only ensure a Republican victory, but alslo force Democrats to become even more invested in identity politics to keep their base.  This will in turn drive even more whites from the Democratic Party.

A future with a permanent Democratic majority is not inevitable.  Leftists have low birth rates, so they need to keep their numbers artificially high by bringing in immigrants who will almost all vote for them and influencing public opinion through their near total control of the institutions of power.  Instead of writing off young people, Republicans should make sure they have jobs, have no student debt, and can raise families – or else they will turn to the Democrats and socialism to address their problems.  Married people are more likely to vote for the Republicans than single people, so it would be in the interest of Republicans to make sure young people can get married and have children.

Most importantly, Republicans in Congress should vote to severely reduce immigration.  Immigration to the United States has been happening at far too high a rate for far too long, and our country must be able to assimilate the immigrants it has already taken in before taking in any more.  With the supply of Hispanic and Asian immigrants cut off, the Hispanics and Asians already here may begin to identify less with their race and more with the country as a whole, which is mostly white.

Some may scoff at the idea that Hispanics and Asians could shift to the Republicans, but ethnic and racial shifts in voting patterns have happened before.  The Democrats thought they had the Irish, Italians, Poles and other white ethnics forever, then lost them as the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion."

If Republicans can seriously reduce immigration and encourage population growth within the country, they will have a much easier time winning elections.

Image: Stephen Craven via geograph.