“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,” Bositis said. “When that happens the statewide offices will fall. Republican governors will fall. Things will change.”
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.
[…]
