The GOP’s Demographic Crisis

For far too long, the entire party building agenda of the Republican Party has been based on the politics of exclusion and fanning the hate and paranoia of white conservatives.  Along the way, the Party leadership sold the soul of the Party to right wing conservative Christians who only intensified the process by infusing religious extremism into civil law issues and making anyone who wasn't white and conservative Christian unwelcome in the Party.  I myself exited the Virginia Beach City Committee (where I had been precinct captain for the Alanton Precinct for 8 years) because the concept of separation of church and state seemed to simply no longer matter.   Now, the GOP may be beginning to reap the whirlwind that it deliberately sowed.  A piece at NBC News looks at the demographic time bomb that may have begun to go off yesterday:

What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces. As the Obama campaign had assumed more than a year ago, the white portion of the electorate dropped to 72%, and the president won just 39% of that vote. But he carried a whopping 93% of black voters (representing 13% of the electorate), 71% of Latinos (representing 10%), and also 73% of Asians (3%). What’s more, despite all the predictions that youth turnout would be down, voters 18-29 made up 19% of last night’s voting population -- up from 18% four years ago -- and President Obama took 60% from that group. The trend also played out in the key battleground states: The president won about 70% of the Latino vote in Colorado and Nevada, and he won 60% of it in Florida (a high number given the state’s large GOP-leaning Cuban-American population). On Monday, we wrote that demography could determine destiny. And that’s exactly what happened.

Obama’s demographic edge creates this dilemma for the Republican Party: It can no longer rely on white voters to win national elections anymore, especially in presidential cycles. Indeed, according to the exit poll, 89% of all votes Mitt Romney won last night came from whites (compared with 56% for Obama). So the Republicans are maximizing their share with white voters; they just aren’t getting the rest. And come 2016, the white portion of the electorate will probably drop another couple of points to 70%.

Republicans face a crisis: the country is growing less white and their coalition has become more white in recent years. In 2004, George W. Bush won [about 40 percent] of Hispanics. Four years later, John McCain, the author of an immigration reform bill, took 31 percent of Hispanics. And this year, Romney captured only 27 percent of Hispanics.”

Of course further aggravating the situation is the negativity many of the under 30 voters hold for conservative Christianity which is best defined by its hate and intolerance.  With 30 percent of the under 30 generations falling into the "none" religious category, the GOP's marriage to religious extremists is not a positive by any means.  I know I have beaten this horse many times before, but unless it changes, the GOP may ultimately become a permanent minority party.  If that happens, it will be much deserved and self-inflicted.