…Which is to say: Sean apparently assumed that it was reasonable to expect good-faith disagreement from Democratic demographers.

In my recent four-part series on demographic changes, the 2012 elections and immigration reform, I suggested that census data and exit polls reveal that some 6 million white voters opted to sit out last November’s election. The data show these non-voters were not primarily Southerners or evangelicals, but were located in Northeast, Midwest and Southwest. Mainly, they fit the profile of “Reagan Democrats” or, more recently, a Ross Perot supporter. For these no-shows, Mitt Romney was not a natural fit.

I drew the conclusion that one path forward for the Republican Party could involve, in part, reaching out to these voters by altering the GOP’s economic platform and messaging. There are still valid questions that flow from this: How much do Republicans have to change to win these voters? Do they pay a price with upper-income whites for such a shift? Can they make these changes and still be Republicans? What is the best path forward? These are great questions for further debate, but my point in the series was simply that there really are multiple ways to skin the electoral cat, and that the much-uttered meme “Republicans must pass the Gang of Eight bill if they ever hope to win another national election” is sorely lacking, at best.

Some critics have not been content to argue these points. They have mischaracterized them as urging Republicans to ignore non-white voters. They then “double down,” if you will, by attacking their own mischaracterization.

Of course they will. The ultimate goal for Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz (the two people that we’re specifically talking about, here) is not to accurately analyze the 2012 electorate. It’s to maximize the Democratic party’s share of the 2014 and 2016 electorate. The last thing that those two want to have happen is to see the GOP learning from our past mistakes.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Yes, I am openly insulting Teixeira and Abramowitz. Speaking as a partisan Republican hack, they offend me on a professional level: they’re not only Democratic hacks, they’re inept ones. Deliberately ignoring what Sean actually explicitly wrote is sloppy work.