Few seem to have noticed, but for the second straight election, there will be no Republican candidate on the ballot for the highest office available in California – the U.S. Senate.
In 2016, the available candidates were Democrats Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez. This November, the candidates are Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Kevin de Leon. The reason for this is Proposition 14, a state constitutional amendment passed with about 54 percent of the vote in 2010. It mandates a “top two” primary, in which party primaries are replaced by a “blanket primary,” with the top two going on to the final November ballot.
As a constitutional amendment, it may stand forever, given growing minority immigration to that state. The new method also applies to Congressional seats, as well as to all statewide offices. Goodbye, two-party democracy in California.
Immigration was the most important issue in the 2016 presidential election. It is an even bigger issue now, with many Democrats calling for open borders and an end to ICE enforcement. That mass immigration is killing the two-party system in the United States doesn’t seem to register.
Demography is political destiny, but moderate Republicans still can’t grasp this. Sharing their view are the Cato Institute, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Federalist Society, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Koch brothers and many more who should know better.
Mass immigration has been popular with the establishment in both parties and with the dominant media for decades. Donald Trump and many populist Republicans openly differ with this point of view and are excoriated for it, but the proof is in the results. Yearly legal immigration to the United States has been at record levels for decades, and 80 percent of it is from Mexico, Central America and Asia — the unanticipated result of family chain migration.
Non-Hispanic white voters, though they haven’t favored a Democrat for president since 1992, form the only ethnic/racial group that votes anything like a two-party system (under 60 percent for the winner; over 40 percent for the loser). Ronald Reagan won less of the white vote in 1984 than Mitt Romney did in 2012, yet Reagan won a landslide and Romney lost by millions. The difference was immigration.
Donald Trump won 49 states by an aggregate plurality of a million votes but lost California by 4 million. The 2008 Hispanic presidential vote nationally went 67–31 for Barack Obama. In 2016 it went 66–28 for Secretary Clinton, according to the Pew Research Center, which also forecasts a drop in the white population to 20 percent in this century, after being in the 85-percent range for over 300 years.
Asian voter trends are just as dismal in terms of a healthy two-party system. Asian-American voters gave Obama 77 percent of their votes in 2012 and they preferred Mrs. Clinton to Trump 79–17 percent in 2016. The black vote was even more extreme — over 90 percent Democrat in 2008, 2012, and 2016.
The kicker, as no one seems willing to acknowledge, is that our all-time record-breaking legal immigration includes almost no Europeans, despite that the Kennedy immigration reform bill of 1965 meant to re-open the door to East Europeans. It didn’t because they were trapped in communist regimes, which means almost no people are coming who might vote Republican (or whose children might).
The children of Asian immigrants, born here, voted 82 percent for Obama in 2008. All 42 Europeans nations contribute only about 180,000 legal immigrants a year — many fewer than the “anchor babies” who regularly number, yearly, over 250,000 — most of them Mexican.
On top of that, there is a Democrat voter reservoir of at least 11 million illegal aliens, which Hillary Clinton hoped to amnesty via executive order. She lost, but federal judges are now so independent of the Constitution, that they may order an amnesty of their own.
James Delmont is the author of forthcoming “The Great Liberal Death Wish.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.