Via Sullivan: Nate Silver with a post on how simple demographics make the GOP’s uphill climb all the more steep:

Gallup has data out suggesting that 89 percent of self-identified Republicans are white; the comparable figure among Democrats is 65 percent. These numbers closely match those from last November’s Presidential election, when 89 percent of John McCain’s voters were white as were 60 percent of Barack Obama’s, according to exit polls.
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The Democrats, however, are becoming less white at a much faster rate than the Republicans. Whereas 85 percent of their votes were from white voters in 1976, the number was just 60 percent last November. This is, of course, a helpful characteristic, since the nonwhite share of the electorate, just 11 percent in 1976 and 1980, represented more than a quarter of the turnout in November.

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In certain ways, I wonder if the GOP isn’t paying a price for a strategy adopted years ago — namely, the Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy undoubtedly won the GOP many elections over the years, but it was adopted at a time when probably less than 10 percent of the electorate was nonwhite (if minorities were allowed to vote at all), whereas now about a quarter of the electorate is. The steady drumbeat of demographic change, coupled with an inability or unwillingness to adapt to it, has steadily made the Republicans’ job harder and harder.

Spent a lot of time over the weekend pondering the Sotomayor business. Last week, as the week went on, I got angrier and angrier at what I considered to be the obvious racism driving the opposition to Sotomayor. Because right-wingers are obviously going to oppose any Obama nominee, just as so many on the left opposed Bush’s nominees.

But it almost seems as if - with an eye on the above statistics, the right’s punditocracy went out of its way to craft language that enabled them to make a race-based appeal against Sotomayor without actually coming out and doing so, explicitly. It was coy, but it was bullsh*t. Is bullsh*t. But, per Silver, when your strategy hinges on appealing to the angry white males who still feel aggrieved (and will feel ever more so as their percentage of the overall population continues to drop), then you’re in trouble demographically; however much fire you may breathe, it kills you in the long run with the growing segment of the voting popluce that isn’t white.

The Southern Strategy was once a strength. Not it’s a liability.