Ryan Struck of CCN tweeted a quoted from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

“After they change the filibuster, they’re going to admit the District as a state. They’re going to admit Puerto Rico as a state. That’s four new Democratic senators in perpetuity. Once they get a hammerlock on the Senate, they’re going to then pack the Supreme Court.”

There is an interesting and unstated foundational premise in McConnell’s argument about the number of senators, that the Republican Party is incapable of persuasion. The voters it has now, its primarily white Christian voting base, is the only one it is capable of attracting.

This is a truth that is universally known but rarely acknowledged. It is the truth the motivates the voter suppression efforts of the party because this is party incapable of attracting new voters to this side. In 2012 the GOPs presidential candidate lost the electoral college with a popular vote share of 47.2 percent while in 2016 it won with a lower share of the vote a mere 46.1 percept of the popular total.

The foundational idea of democracy, direct or representational, is that it is a marketplace of ideas where political actor present and argue for various causes, policies, and ideals and the voters determine those that are place into office or enacted. In theory a part that loses voters adjusts their policies and positions to attract new voter for victory in future cycles and the only way the new states would be Democratic in perpetuity is if the GOP is incapable of adjusting itself to attract new voters in those new states.

There was a time in presidential contests when California was a solidly Republican state it is no more. Things do change and the idea of the any state belong to one party in perpetuity is false but McConnell is telling a truth.

The Republican Party as is it now standing solidly against democratic ideal and processes and confronted in a contest of ideas will lose for the foreseeable future.