USA Democrats are becoming a minority ,us Democrats are becoming a minority

Battered by defeats and bled by defections, Georgia Democrats are becoming a minority party.
In more ways than one.
That was how I began a story the Morning News carried on Dec. 4, 2004.
Polls showed most of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry's Georgia votes were from blacks and less than one white person in four voted for him.
Fast forward six years.
On Nov. 2, polls suggest, Georgia Democrats may have drawn an even smaller share of white voters.
African-Americans now dominate the party's caucuses in the state House and Senate. Four of the five Georgia Democratic congressmen are black.
It all began with a 1970s Republican effort to exploit angst about civil rights among Southern whites and dissolve their long-standing ties to the Democrats.
More recent white flight also has a racial dimension. But, despite a flap over a Confederacy-flaunting state flag a few years back, the exodus is about much more than race.
At issue is how blacks and whites tend to view government.
For decades, Democrats have been increasingly consistent advocates of the sort of expansion now personified by President Barack Obama.
Meanwhile, African-Americans mostly have seen government - especially at the federal level - as a positive force.
It protected their rights to vote, attend integrated schools and compete for jobs. Moreover, it was a major source of jobs for blacks and often helped level a playing field that long had been tilted against them.
White Southerners are more apt to view government - especially the one in Washington, D.C. - as an obstacle.
One that made it harder for them to run their businesses, use their land and deal with their crooks the way they wanted to. And to keep what they earned.
That made the GOP increasingly attractive as Democrats drifted toward greater reliance on government. And all the more so as they began to use it to enforce their views on abortion, gay rights and other social issues.
Such contrasting perceptions - even though they can be wrong - have consequences because white Georgia voters outnumber black ones almost 3 to 1.
Stripped of most of its whites, the Democratic Party's support base is not only smaller, it's more pro-government.
So you win Democratic primaries by running as pro-government. But - as Nov. 2 showed - that's not how you win general elections in most of Georgia.
Some Democrats - such as gubernatorial candidate Roy Barnes - more or less hid their party label during the general election campaign.
It seldom worked. Polls indicate that voters let their mostly bleak views of Obama shape their votes in state elections.
Georgia Democrats now note hopefully that white women are at least relatively more sympathetic to them than white men.
But like an accordion, that gender gap plays two ways:Republicans have a problem with white women, but Democrats have a much bigger one with white males.
The drubbing Democrats suffered on Nov. 2 took another toll. It excluded them from the once-a-decade process by which elected state officials redraw political boundaries to reflect population shifts.
Race is part of that process, too - and comes into play in a way that hurts Democrats.
Courts have ruled the U.S. Voting Rights Act requires the state to pack black - that is usually reliably Democratic - voters into some districts.
That helps blacks win, but often in districts that Democrats would carry anyway. And white - that is mostly Republican-leaning - voters end up in competitive adjacent districts, tilting them toward the GOP.
Bottom line: Republicans will dominate Georgia politics for the foreseeable future.
That is, unless whites fall in love with the feds or the GOP botches things much more than its critics say it already has.