Worst News for Republicans: Demography

Next year should be a banner year for the GOP, and may yet be.

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But the existential crisis of the GOP, from which it has turned its eyes away since George H.W. Bush, is demography.

Yet the matter cannot be avoided now, for it is on Page 1.

“White Numbers Shrink,” was the headline on the lead story in USA Today. “More Whites Dying Than Being Born,” blared the Wall Street Journal. What does this mean?

In demographic terms, more white Americans died in 2012 than were born. Never before – not during the Civil War bloodletting, not during the influenza epidemic after World War I, not during the Great Depression and birth dearth of the 1930s – has this happened.

In ethnic terms, it means that Americans whose forebears came from Great Britain, Ireland and Germany, Southern and Eastern Europe – the European tribes of North America – have begun to die.

The demographic winter of white America is at hand, even as it began years ago for the native-born of old Europe.

In political terms, this is depressing news for the Republican Party. For nearly 90 percent of all Republican votes in presidential elections are provided by Americans of European descent.

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Between 2008 and 2012, the Hispanic vote rose 1.4 million, the black vote by 1.7 million, and the white vote fell by 2 million.

Where is America going? What does the GOP future look like?

America’s white majority, 64 percent of the population and 74 percent of the electorate, still declining in relative terms, has begun to decline in real terms. Deaths outnumber births. Among all U.S. births in 2012, white babies were outnumbered by babies of color.

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[The] answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

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