Brian Beutler says that conservatives won’t let Mitt be Mitt, while Ron Brownstein points out that Romney can break the record for winning white support and still lose the election. Somehow, those two things kind of melded in my mind.

Beutler is referring specifically to the collective conservative freak-out that occurred when Romney spokeswomen Andrea Saul simply pointed out that, thanks to RomneyCare, no one in Massachusetts misses out on cancer treatment just because they lose their job. In a more general sense, Beutler is talking about the right’s desire to constrain and control Romney, reducing him to nothing more than an auto-pen that will sign their legislation.

Brownstein delves into the demographics of the country and comes to a surprising conclusion:

Polls at the time found that whites gave from 56 percent to 61 percent of their votes to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1988.
For each of those men, those crushing margins among whites translated into an electoral landslide. Each won at least 426 Electoral College votes and cruised in the popular vote.

Yet this year, Romney could win as much as 60 percent of the white vote (or, amazingly, even slightly more) and still lose. The reason is the electorate’s changing composition. When Reagan was first elected in 1980, whites cast about 90 percent of the votes; even in Bush’s 1988 victory, whites represented 85 percent of all votes and minorities just 15 percent.

But by 2008, after two decades of steady growth, minorities cast 26 percent of all votes. One recent analysis found they represent 29 percent of eligible voters for 2012. Even if the minority vote share remains flat at 26 percent, should Obama hold his 80 percent of it, he can win a national majority with slightly less than 40 percent of whites.

The fact that Romney could roughly equal the towering performances of Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush among whites and still fall short ought to alert Republicans about the dangers of an electoral strategy so dependent on those voters alone. “If Republicans are going to be competitive at the presidential level over the next 10-20 years they have to do better among nonwhite voters, especially Asians and Hispanics,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “[If you] basically win a landslide among whites and still lose, the handwriting is on the wall.”

It doesn’t look like Mitt Romney is going to win this election, but he still has a puncher’s chance. His problem is that he is boxed into running as the champion of white conservatism, and this is probably the last nationwide election in which such a strategy will have even a theoretical potential for success. Brownstein explains:

But because the GOP now relies so heavily on support from the white voters most uneasy about demographic change (primarily older and blue-collar whites), it has almost completely lost the capacity to court Hispanics or other minorities—as Romney demonstrated during the primaries by pummeling any opponent who deviated from conservative orthodoxy on immigration issues. A dominating Romney showing among whites that produces at best a narrow win, and at worst a defeat, would reveal that insular approach as a dead end for the GOP—though more Republicans are likely to heed the warning after a defeat than a victory.

Let’s be honest. If you have played around with the Electoral College Calculator, you know that Romney can perhaps win, but he can’t conceivably win by more than the narrowest of margins. And the reason is simple. There simply are not enough states where white conservatives constitute anything close to the majority of the electorate. If the door is not already closed to the kind of campaign Romney is running, it is certainly in the process of closing. And we should think about what that would mean for a Romney presidency.

Having been elected by the narrowest of margins, he would face the prospect of certain defeat in his reelection campaign unless he pivoted hard to appeal to people of color. But there is no chance that his Republican colleagues in Congress would countenance such a move, and he would surely invite a primary if he attempted it. Romney’s presidency would be stillborn.

People wonder what Obama’s poll numbers would look like if the unemployment level was much lower, but they should also wonder what his poll numbers would look like if he wasn’t black. Would Hillary Clinton be incredibly unpopular all throughout Appalachia? How about Andrew Cuomo or Mark Warner or Martin O’Malley, or Joe Biden? Without the racial issue driving down Obama’s numbers in parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, would a Republican still have a chance anywhere on the East Coast? If so, it won’t be for long.

This election is still in doubt, but we are witnessing the last stand for a certain brand of conservatism. They must adapt in a major way or they will soon discover that they simply have no route to an Electoral College majority.