Michael Barone recently wrote that Republicans should be pursuing “upscale”–affluent and college-educated–voters. In National Review, Reihan Salam and I disagreed with Barone. We argued that Republicans should of course try to appeal to the voters Barone has in mind, but that it was more important to court “downscale” voters.

Barone has now written a thoughtful post responding to our critique. I am a little surprised to find that Barone, of all people, is more pessimistic than us about the possibility that more blacks, Hispanics, and Asians could be brought into the conservative coalition. But I think he is correct to say that we should expect today’s young voters to stay Democratic as they age. We did not mean to deny this point, merely to say that there are reasons to expect the margin by which they vote Democratic to shrink.

Anyway, the whole post is well worth reading, as is most anything that Barone writes.