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GOP problem: 'Their voters are white, aging and dying off'

When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.

"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.

"There will come a time when they suffer catastrophic losses with the realization of the population changes."

Over the next several generations, the wave of minority voters -- who, according to U.S. Census figures released this week, now represent more than half of the nation's population born in the past year -- will become more of a power base in places like Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. That hold will extend across the Southwest all the way to California, experts say.

The coming political revolution could result in a massive changing of the guard on nearly every level of government, potential cultural clashes, and the type of political alliances that are now considered rare.

In Georgia, those rumblings are already being felt.

It is a state that depends heavily on immigrant labor to pick peaches and peanuts and work in poultry plants. So when Georgia -- like its Southern sister states of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and South Carolina -- passed a tough anti-immigration bill that also penalizes businesses, Hispanic groups and farmers alike pushed back.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Southeastern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee boast some of the greatest percentage increases in Latino population growth. They are also states where the percentage of Hispanics roughly doubled.

Even Republican Hispanic lawmakers, such as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, have urged the GOP to soften its language when discussing immigration and such proposals as the House-passed version of the Violence Against Women Act, which killed expanded coverage for illegal immigrants and Native Americans who are victims of domestic abuse, and the failed DREAM Act, which would have given U.S. residency to immigrant kids with high school diplomas.

The GOP is trying to clean up its image with Hispanic voters, with an eye toward the demographic's looming political clout.

"There'll be a tipping point where you've got the Republicans in charge, but you'll get to the point when the population becomes minority," David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement, said. "When that happens the statewide offices will fall. Republican governors will fall. Things will change." http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/21/politics/gop-census-latino/index.html?hp
t=hp_t3 can only hope!