Two weeks ago I paged the article: This is the last time anyone will try to do this. Meaning this is the last time the GOP has a shot at winning as the white people’s party.

Romney already faces the daunting task this year of needing 61% of the non-hispanic white vote to win, which would make the GOP electorate nearly 90% white. In contrast, the Democrats’ electorate would be over 40% minority. With racial and ethnic minorities on the path to becoming the majority, due to the rapid growth of the hispanic population relative to the rest of the country, the changing national demographics dictate that in order to win elections in the future, the GOP will have to change in order to increase its share of the minority vote.

This brought the question to my mind, “or will it?” We have already seen the GOP’s efforts to suppress the minority vote with Voter ID laws, and dilute the hispanic vote with gerrymandering in Texas. Texas will challenge the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, which, if successful will give states with a history of Jim Crow laws greater freedom to engage in voter suppression tactics.

Of course these efforts will only delay the inevitable as the GOP base continues to shrink and racial and ethnic minorities grow. One thing which could change the game is if the GOP could redefine the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to babies born in the US whose parents are undocumented immigrants.

This campaign has already begun, and I expect it to become the next big GOP attack on minority rights after Voter ID. One study showed that in 2008 8% of US births were to undocumented immigrants, so this effort has the potential to strip US citizenship away from millions of hispanic-americans and generations of families.

I’m not a moonbat conspiracy theory mongerer, but I don’t see any alternative to this except the GOP becoming a permanent minority party, other than a sharp pullback toward the center from the extreme right, and that is not something the current GOP base would accept gracefully.