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7. Judis and Teixeira, Emerging Democratic Majority, 61; Chait, “2012 or Never.”

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11. Judis and Teixeira, Emerging Democratic Majority, 38; Alan Abramowitz, “Déjà vu All Over Again? Why a Repeat of 1994 Is Highly Unlikely,” available at: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/aia2009092402/ (accessed 18 April 2013).

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24. Trende, Lost Majority, 155–59, suggests that the prediction also relies on a fourth assumption: that liberals will be able stably to maintain their increasingly ethnically diverse electorate. He observes that “the history of multi-ethnic coalitions in this country has not been a harmonious one.” He cites examples of the fracturing of local and state “black-brown-white” coalitions in recent years in ways that could foreshadow a much more complex political future than straight-line projections imply for the Democratic coalition.

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53. Arguably the very notion of postmaterialism has an important particularistic foundation. It is predicated on the notion that people who are sufficiently secure materially will basically cease to concern themselves with the conditions, including policy conditions, that might ensure continued prosperity. This now seems like an artifact of an earlier period in which prosperity was considered by some to be a technocratic matter. Once economic growth was solved as a managerial matter, politics would be free to move on to other things. The period since the early 1970s has not treated this assumption kindly. Successive cohorts have been forced by periodic downturns to confront nettlesome questions about what exactly can deliver growth.

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