Tribal Politics

I have written on several occasions (here, here, here, here) about increasing racial polarization of the parties, as increasing numbers of whites gravitate to the Republican Party. I've called this process a movement toward "tribal parties" and observed that such are a problem where they exist in the Third World.

Coming out of Tuesday's election, the Associated Press reports that the trend continued to gain momentum in the 2014 election.

Exit polling shows racial polarization of the electorate has begun to cross party lines, with whites less likely to back Democratic candidates than they have been in the past.

Democratic Senate candidates lost ground among white voters by an average of 10 points compared with 2008.

The coalition behind Republican Senate candidates was predominantly white, 90 percent across all 21 states with Senate races that were exit polled, ranging from 79 percent white Alaska to 98 percent white in West Virginia.

It wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of white women voters switched allegiance to the GOP in 2014, information on such movement should begin to surface as we continue the election postmortem. The GOP will eventually be able to appeal to Asian voters and many Hispanics, but they aren't there yet in most states.