"The United States is undergoing a profound demographic transformation. Non-Hispanic whites are likely to become a minority by the year 2042."¹

Many think that this trend favors the Democrats overall, and conventional wisdom seems to be that this would always be the case. But, in my travels I've come to understand that people is people. They have the same basic wants and fears. As other ethnic groups supplant whites as majority population groups within the US, I see no reason to expect that they will not also supplant them as a majority in middle class representation as well.

If this were the 1930's we might expect something akin to apartheid to develop, preserving the, now minority, white population's position as the representative middle class. We are not in the first half of the 20th century any longer, though, and class structures are not hereditary prisons in our political and economic model. Indeed, despite increasingly strident language of class warfare rhetoric, mobility both up and down the social and economic ladders within the US is more fluid and more common than ever before. The rich don't always get richer, and the poor enjoy a standard of living that other countries' middle classes envy.

As current minority groups increase in population and increase in middle class representation, I expect to see them adopt many of the same positions and concerns of the current middle class. People is people.

As families move through economic "classes" their political favor and their votes will undergo a shift to reflect their changing status. Over time, as the middle class becomes increasingly composed of groups who are now counted in the minorities, the simple fact of being a member of one of these groups will no longer be an invitation for the democrats to count their votes.

President Clinton and President Reagan were both able to speak to the current, largely white majority, middle class, and also speak to minority groups with great success. Future presidential hopefuls will find themselves in the new position of having to address those groups together, because they will be the same group to an ever increasing extent.

The Democrats may very well find that the lines of the old landscape are eroding beneath their feet, and if they don't address themselves to these shifts may find themselves without an audience. The Republicans may not fare any better. They seem entrenched in a position that depends on a white middle class, and while they address themselves, generally well, to middle class concerns, they are largely inept at doing so in a way that embraces encroachment on that class by non traditional members.

1. Ghost Story: Realignment was just an illusion.
2. Senator Brown does not yet have a US Senate page to link to