Do the United States’ “enormous demographic shifts” predetermine election results in coming decades? They definitely appear to be changing the playing field to the advantage of Democrats over Republicans, Richard Baehr, co-founder of the American Thinker and the website’s chief political correspondent told a Jewish Policy Center conference call on September 24.

But there is “not any straight line” from election to election, Baehr said. So “candidates and messages matter,” meaning savvy Republican candidates still can win.

“In 1988, 85 percent of all voters were whites,” Baehr noted. The Republican presidential candidate, Vice President George H. W. Bush, won the white vote by a 20 percent margin. The Democratic presidential hopeful, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, took 80 percent of ballots cast by minority voters. The result? Bush won the presidency by eight percent of the popular vote over Dukakis.

In the 2004 presidential election, Republican President George W. Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), 50.7 percent of the popular vote (62 million) to 48.3 percent (59 million). But “there was a 12.5 million vote shift between 2004 and 2008,” Baehr said. “Half of that was due to a shift of black voters, from 10 percent to 13 percent of the electorate, and from 88 percent Democratic [in 2004] to 96 percent” for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the first major party black presidential nominee. Obama defeated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) with 53 percent of the popular vote (69.5 million) to McCain’s 46 percent (60 million).

By election night of the 2016 presidential contest, between the Democratic nominee, former secretary of state and former Sen. Hillary Clinton, and Republican real estate developer and former reality television star Donald Trump, “everyone in television news expected Clinton to win.” That was because “newscasters were privy to exit polls, showing her winning the popular vote by four percent,” Baehr said.

In fact, the Democrat won the popular vote by only two percent, 48 to 46 (65.9 million to 63 million total votes). Losing by small margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Clinton saw Trump triumph in the Electoral College 304 to 227 and thereby gain the White House.

Underneath such results, Baehr stressed, the composition of the electorate continues to change. The white voter majority Republicans have relied on decreases approximately 0.5 percent annually. Within that group, those without college degrees, who tended to back Trump disproportionately, declines as well.

Today the U.S. population is roughly 330 million, Baehr noted. Its ethnic/racial breakdown is approximately 62 percent white, 18 percent Hispanic, 12.5 percent black, six percent Asians and one percent native American Indians.

“By 2050, the population is expected to stabilize at 440 million, with the white share at 47 percent, Hispanics at 29, blacks still 12.5, and Asians 10 percent.”

However, contrary to identity politics, racial-ethnic identifications are in part “social constructs.” Between 1870 and 1910, approximately 25 million Greeks, other peoples from the Balkans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians and Jews immigrated to the United States. On arrival, they often were considered of low intelligence, criminally disposed and definitely not “white.” Today they are, as are Asians—for purposes of affirmative action—applying to elite universities.

Baehr told JPC staff that more than half of Hispanic Americans identify as white on census forms.

So, the size and composition of tomorrow’s ethnic communities may diverge from today’s extrapolations.

Meanwhile, driving current shifts are declining fertility rates for every group—all have lower than the 2.1 births for each woman between 15 and 44 necessary for replacement—plus high levels of immigration, legal and illegal. “There are 43 million foreign-born residents living legally in the United States now,”

On August 8 two explosions rocked a Russian weapons testing site on the White Sea near the Arctic Circle and authorities quickly pulled offline four nuclear fallout monitoring stations connected to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. News sources, however, reported radiation leakage and seven dead. These included five from Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear agency, a senior official among them.

Why the mystery?

“Most experts think it was a test of a nuclear-propelled hypersonic vehicle,” said Dr. Stephen Bryen, a former deputy undersecretary of defense and an authority on nuclear arms, missile defense and cyberwarfare. Hypersonic weapons, if developed successfully could overcome all existing anti-missile defenses, Bryen told participants in an August 28 Jewish Policy Center conference call.

“That’s why it’s a game changer.”

The Russians are not alone. China apparently is also working on hypersonic weapons development, and Bryen said that just last week the United States cancelled work to upgrade an existing ground-based missile interceptor to come up with “something better” for the dawning hypersonic era.

Hypersonic missiles would travel at five to 20 times the speed of sound (767 miles per hour). Supersonic missiles exist now; the BrahMos supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, jointly developed by Russia and India, reportedly can fly at up to three times the speed of sound, with upgrades to five times in development.

Russian efforts to obscure the August 8 explosion apparently stem from the test weapon’s nuclear-propelled engine. Bryen said that, essentially using the atmosphere for fuel, a hypersonic missile with a nuclear reactor could loiter for hours or days before being ordered to attack a target.

He said Russian officials probably “didn’t want the alarm to spread in the country” that radiation had been released and was drifting south and westward. That would be so especially among a population that remembers the deadly nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl in 1986.

Bryen noted that the most recent Russian failure was their third. “Russians have been testing [a hypersonic vehicle], so far not successfully.” Nevertheless, “we are entering an age in which hypersonic weapons will be more and more” common. Not all will be nuclear-powered, but they are “being developed because all air defenses are unable to deal” with their speed.

Using nuclear reactors to power such vehicles is not a new idea, Bryen said. “The United States started as early as 1946” to find power sources for indefinite flight. However, the attempt was abandoned.

From 1961 to 1964, Americans tried again for a supersonic ram-jet engine. (Hypersonic engines are referred to as scram-jets.) “It was tested twice and demonstrated it could work, but it was very risky,” he said. Such engines “spew radioactivity even if used correctly,” and “the test reactor wasn’t shielded.” In operation, it would throw radiation into the atmosphere and along its flight path.

Though current U. S. and even the multi-layered Israeli anti-missile systems could not defeat hypersonic weapons, they would not become obsolete, Bryen pointed out. Threats from conventional short, medium and long-range missiles would remain to be defended against.

But another potential threat to missile defense exists, warheads that can change trajectories. All current anti-missile systems target incoming threats on the basis of constant trajectories. North Korea may be working on weapons that can change their flight paths to circumvent any protective systems the United States and Japan field, he said.

Meanwhile, “the United States has not done well with missile defense,” Bryen noted. “We have none on the East Coast or facing Canada,” over which Russian missiles might fly, a little on the West Coast [basically against North Korea]. There is a missile defense system in Romania, which is only temporary, and we are build

Dr. Aykan Erdemir, Senior Fellow at FDD and former member of the Turkish Parliament, shares his insights into the outcome of April’s Turkish municipal elections. Recorded April 10, 2019.

Simon Henderson is the Baker fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at The Washington Institute, specializing in energy matters and the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf. A former journalist with Financial Times, he started his career with the BBC, and reported from Iran during the 1979 Islamic revolution and seizure of the U.S. embassy. Mr. Henderson writes and appears frequently in the media discussing the internal political dynamics of the House of Saud, energy developments, events in the Gulf, and Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Dr. Michael Ledeen, author of the “Faster, Please” column for PJ Media, will address the internal political situation in Iran including the May 19th elections, Iranian intervention in Syria, and Iran’s ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Dr. Ledeen is Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and is an internationally renowned scholar on Iran, Iraq, terrorism, and international security. He has served as a consultant to the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Defense Department, and as a Special Advisor to the Secretary of State.

Dr. Ledeen holds a Ph.D. in modern European history and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, and has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Rome.

Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council and authority on Russian foreign and security affairs, will address Russia’s aims in Syria and relations with Iran, as well as the Russian response to American policy in the Middle East. Berman is the author of Implosion: The End of Russia and What it Means for America and has been featured in the JPC’s inFOCUS Quarterly.

Gabriel Scheinmann appears on Newstalk KGVO Talk Back to discuss U.S. foreign policy and Iran.

Lisa Benson interviewed Jerry Gordon and JPC Senior Director Shoshana Bryen on the reaction to the Iran deal, the President’s American University Speech and his CNN interview with President Obama by Fareed Zakaria.

JPC Senior Director Shoshana Bryen talks to the Middle East Round Table on Your Turn with host Mike Bates on 1330AM WEBY radio on July 16th, 2015.

On June 4th, during the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Group Lunch on Capitol Hill, Shoshana Bryen who is the Senior Director of the Jewish Policy Center offered practical steps that the U.S. can do to help assist the Kurds and advance U.S. interests in the region. Bryen says that the first step “is for the U.S. to recognize the Kurds politically, as an ally, as a partner in the fight against ISIS.