As David Broder notes, the Republican Party has been, at least temporarily, reduced to a rump party with little appeal to minorities, and bleak prospects in future national elections.
In the end, Obama flipped nine states that had gone for Bush — Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico in the West; Ohio, Indiana and Iowa in the Midwest; and Virginia, North Carolina and Florida in the Southeast. That left Republicans with a shrunken base in the South and the border states, where rural and Appalachian counties delivered for the GOP, and on the Plains, where population is falling compared with the rest of the nation. That is not a formula for future success. As [Republican consultant, Steve] Lombardo concluded, “Given the demographic trends in the country, the GOP is unlikely to win any future presidential elections if it is losing 95 percent of the black vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote.”
The 2008 cycle was a particularly bad one for the GOP with blacks and Latinos. The combination of Barack Obama at the top of the ticket, the anti-Latino ravings of the lunatic right (culminating in Palinism), and the cratering economy, created a perfect storm. By the end of the campaign, GOP rallies were hard to distinguish from National Front hatefests. It’s likely that future election cycles will be less hostile to the GOP’s chances.
On the other hand, facing off against an urban, Ivy-League educated African-American (whose middle name is Hussein) with a white mother (who remarried a Muslim and spent a stint in Indonesia)…well…that allowed the GOP and their base to unleash a panoply of suppressed demons on the electorate as a whole. They attacked miscegenation, they attacked single mothers, they attacked intellectual (and coastal) elites, they attacked cosmopolitanism, they attacked Islam, they attacked the black church, they even attacked fame.
Their only real accomplishment in all this was to lose a generation of youthful voters that have zero patience for bashing people over their race, intelligence, sophistication, (or sexual orientation). The GOP (especially in its raw Palinist form) is a know-nothing party that denies science, is completely white-identity-centric, feeds off hate and fear of non-white-non-straight-non-Christian people, and will not win another national election until it changes completely.
