Lincoln and Romney: Alpha and omega?

The Republican Party dates back to 1854, and its first president was Abraham Lincoln. More than a century and a half later, Mitt Romney seeks to become the 19th Republican president. None of us knows whether he will succeed. But if he does, there is a very real chance that he will be the last Republican president in the nation's history.

Surprised? Ridiculous, you say? Read on.

There are 538 electoral votes, and the candidate who wins at least 270 of them becomes president. And it is also the case that the Democrats and the Republicans can count on winning many states without breaking a sweat. In fact well over 30 states are totally dominated by one political party or the other. Thus, the real battle has been waged in the dozen or so "swing states."

Traditionally, the GOP has a lock on a large swath of reliably red states that begins at the Canadian border in the Intermountain West and the Northern Plains, runs due south to the Rio Grande River, turns east to the Atlantic Ocean and then north to the banks of the Potomac River.

Most of these solidly Republican states are rural, sparsely populated and homogeneously lily white. But one is not — Texas — and it's the anchor of the Republican electoral base. And the face of Texas is changing. In1980, Texas had 26 electoral votes. Today it has 38, second only to California.

So here's your challenge. Try to realistically amass the 270 electoral votes it takes to win the White House for a Republican without including Texas. Guess what? You can't do it. It's mission impossible. So what, you say. The GOP always carries Texas. After all, the Democrats haven't carried Texas since 1976.

But demography is destiny. And the demographics of America are rapidly changing. Last year, for the first time in our nation's history, more than half of the 4 million children born were minorities. Hispanics are now the second-largest population group in the United States after whites of European descent.

Furthermore, census data document that immigration is not the central factor that explains this transformation of America's population. The aging white population accounts for much of the change taking place. Last year, for example, only 1,025 white children were born for every 1,000 whites who died. And 2010 census data show that Hispanic women give birth to 2.4 babies on average, contrasted to 1.8 babies for white women. The birth rate for white women has declined by more than 10 percent — more than any other group.

The epicenter of this phenomenal growth of America's Hispanic population is right where you would expect — Texas. The census data show that Texas grew by 4.2 million residents, 20.6 percent, during the past decade. Whites accounted for an anemic 4.2 percent of this explosive growth. The black population grew by 22 percent. But Hispanics accounted for an astonishing 65 percent of the state's growth over the past decade.

Steve Murdock, a former Census Bureau director and now a professor at Rice University, said, "We're seeing the development of two population groups in Texas: aging Anglos and young minorities." During the past decade, Texas added nearly 1 million children under the age of 18, and 95 percent of them were Hispanic.

And the trends we're talking about here are not confined to the places you'd expect, such as Texas, Los Angeles and New York City. How about Schuyler, Neb.? Schuyler's a rural town of just over 6,000 that was settled by Irish and German immigrants. In 1990, its population was 4 percent Hispanic. In 2000, it was 41 percent Hispanic. Today it's 65 percent Hispanic. At the nearby Columbus Community Hospital, about 60 percent of the babies born over the past two years were Hispanic. And 90 percent of the students in grades K-3 in Schuyler's schools are Hispanic, as are 60 percent of its high school students.

A recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll shows that President Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by an astonishing 61 percent to 27 percent among Hispanics. If Romney can't narrow that margin significantly, he won't win this November.

Conventional wisdom teaches us that to win, a Republican presidential candidate needs to carry about 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Romney knows this, and there is little doubt that he will close part of this gap between now and Election Day.

But, given the continuing surge in the Hispanic population and the fact that the GOP has not successfully reached out to it, the long-term prognosis is both ominous and daunting for the GOP. Over the past 10 presidential elections, the Republican nominee has managed to win only 31.8 percent of the Hispanic vote. In addition, between 1992 and 2008, the Hispanic proportion of the electorate more than quadrupled.

During that time, the GOP has been schizophrenic toward Hispanics. The right-wingnuts want to round up and deport 12 million of them, while the GOP business establishment wants to continue to exploit them as a cheap source of labor in places like California's Central Valley and the apple orchards of Henderson County.

President Lincoln emancipated the slaves, and over time the Republican Party wrote their descendants off entirely. Doubling down on its blunder with Hispanics means "Vaya con Dios" for the once proud Republican Party.

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