2012: The first election white people couldn't win

Obama's margin of victory

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Romney's path to defeat

Without minority appeal, the GOP is toast.

American politics is about compromise.

Republicans are about intransigent righteousness.

Fact: The Whigs folded in the 1850's.
Fact: The GOP's Christian Base seems determined to destroy The Republican Party.
The question is: "Will they destroy the country first?"

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Look at the basic breakdown of Mr. Obama’s victory, according to exit polls (which may yet be revised). He won 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Hispanics, and 73 percent of Asians. He took 55 percent of the overall female vote, down only one percentage point from his comparable 2008 showing.

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, won about 59 percent of the white vote. That’s the best a GOP nominee has done among whites since 1988, and not too long ago such a performance might have guaranteed a winning margin of 270 electoral votes. After all, whites still make up 72 percent of US voters.

But that percentage has inexorably grown smaller election by election. In 2008 whites were 74 percent of the electorate.

Romney won white men by 25 points. 

As to other lessons from the preliminary exit poll data, it’s clear that Hispanics are quickly becoming a political force that national politicians must acknowledge. They increased their share of the electorate by about three percentage points; at that pace, they’ll tie or pass African-Americans as the largest minority voting bloc in 2016.

The Hispanic vote helped produce the dead heat inFlorida, for instance. That’s a state Romney needed to win to have plausible paths to 270 electoral votes, and he could reasonably have expected to do well among the state’s conservative Cuban-heritage population. But Obama performed three percentage points better among Florida’s Hispanics than he did in 2008, winning 60 percent of their votes. 

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/Decoder-Wire/2012/1107/Election-results-2012-Who-won-it-for-Obama-video

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An electorate that was 90 percent white in 1976 was only 76 percent white in 2008, and is now estimated to drop to about 46 percent white by 2050 as the minority vote soars into the majority.“The Republican Party is rowing against the tide of demographic change in the United States,” history professor Allan Lichtman of American University told AFP, who laid out nothing short of a doomsday scenario for conservatives.“If Republicans fail to expand their demographic base they will disappear as surely as the Whigs that they replaced in the 1850s,” he said, referring to the party plagued by internal divisions on the issue of slavery.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/international/08-Nov-2012/romney-defeat-exposes-republican-minority-problem

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Multiple Romney sources buzzed about one number in particular: 15 percent. According to exit polls, that’s the share of African-Americans who voted in Ohio this year. In 2008, the black percentage of the electorate was 11 percent. In Virginia and Florida, exit polls showed the same share of African-Americans turned out as four years ago, something that GOP turnout models did not anticipate.

“We didn’t think they’d turn out more of their base vote than they did in 2008, but they smoked us,” said one Romney operative. “It’s unbelievable that that they turned out more from the African-American community than in 2008. Somehow they got ‘em to vote.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83549.html#ixzz2BbUtT4WL