Democratic Party Mulls Forced Population Transfers As 2020 Strategy

The Democratic Party’s planning for the 2020 elections, as expected, began on November 10th, and have only picked up pace since then–even as party officials and campaign strategists engage in the proverbial struggle to drink from the fire-hose of hot takes seeking to assign blame for the 2016 electoral fiasco. But consensus is emerging, driven largely by the two issues that have most preoccupied party thought-leaders and influencers ever since Hillary Clinton’s concession speech: the banal evil of the Electoral College and the staggering margin of victory that Clinton enjoyed in the popular vote (three million and counting.) That consensus seeks to minimize the demographic dynamite that torpedoed the Clinton Campaign–by way of forced population transfers of minorities, arguably the most reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, to those underpopulated regions of the United States that currently enjoy disproportionate representations in the Congress and Senate. As one party leader put it, “We need to take some of those three million votes and put them where they count, where we know they can make a real difference; we need more brown and black folks out in the countryside, up in the mountains. They can’t keep clinging to the coasts. This damn electoral system isn’t changing any time soon; we need to change the country instead.” (There is ample precedent, of course, in American history for such population transfers. Native Americans can relate chapter and verse about the Trail of Tears for instance; and one might plausibly view the KKK-prompted post-Reconstruction migration of African-Americans to regions distant from the Deep South in a similar light.)

The sheer audacity of this plan has injected new life into a party thought to be moribund in its political theory and praxis alike. In one fell swoop it will accomplish the following: place reliable Democratic voting blocs as fifth columns in Republican strongholds; beat the founding fathers at their own game; use the unwashed to triumph over the unwashed; and, of course, introduce multiculturalism to formerly monochromatic regions of the US. (San Antonio, San Diego, and many other Sans have too many taco trucks as it is; some of them could be profitably deployed in, for instance, the Florida Panhandle, the Mississippi Delta, and the prairies. Similar considerations apply to soul food–though not to hiphop.)

Objections to this plan have been restrained, an unsurprising turn of events for a nation preparing for an administration that is equal parts Barnum and Goebbels. Little cover will be needed to accomplish this, and indeed, little force will be too. The Democratic Party is counting on being able to sell this electoral strategy in much the same way it has sold its goods to its members for ever so long: if you do not comply, do not pack up bag and baggage and move to regions picked out by our data management consultants on the basis of calculations that have revealed where your presence will have the most electoral impact, you will be stuck with the Republican Party again.

Who could resist such an enticement?