Rachel Maddow does a good job of explaining the math behind either an Obama or a Romney victory in terms of winning various demographics.

As I wrote HERE – the Romney campaign is trying very hard to play up racial resentments to appeal to white voters.  As the country has grown more diverse in its share of minority groups like Hispanics, African Americans, Asians etc … the Republican party has continued to become more white and less attractive to non-white citizens.  The current GOP is not inclusive; it isn’t a big tent filled with diversity of thought.  They focus on visceral, religious based demagoguery; everyone from the brown skinned immigrants, gays, atheists, muslims etc are responsible for the problems in the world according to today’s GOP.

They have said gays are ruining the traditional family, immigrants are stealing our jobs, secularism is eroding America having been born a Christian country, and Muslims are all secret Jihadists intent on destroying the country.  The Romney campaign is clinging on to that fear and that visceral hate of the “other” and now they really, really need white people to vote for them because they’ve alienated every demographic that isn’t white.

The National Journal was the basis for Maddow’s story; they explain in detail HERE:

For President Obama, the winning formula can be reduced to 80/40. In 2008, Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority voters, including not only African-Americans but also Hispanics, Asians, and others. If Obama matches that performance this year, he can squeak out a national majority with support from about 40 percent of whites—so long as minorities at least match the 26 percent of the vote they cast last time.

Obama’s strategic equation defines Mitt Romney’s formula: 61/74. Romney’s camp is focused intently on capturing at least 61 percent of white voters. That would provide him a slim national majority—so long as whites constitute at least 74 percent of the vote, as they did last time, and Obama doesn’t improve on his 80 percent showing with minorities.

Jonathan Chait says 2012 is the last time the Republican party will try to appeal so overtly only to whites HERE:

Harold Meyerson explains how much the white south influences the current GOP HERE:

The beliefs of the white South dominate Republican thinking. As the white share of the U.S. population shrinks and the Latino share rises, Republicans have passed draconian anti-immigrant laws and opposed legislation enabling immigrants brought here as children to gain legal status. They also exploit racist resentments in a way not seen since the Willie Horton spot of 1988.

This transformation of the GOP has also been spurred by the Southernization of the economy. The U.S. economy’s dominant sector is no longer the unionized manufacturing of the Northeast and Midwest, whose leaders included such Republican moderates as George Romney, and whose white working-class employees were persuaded by their unions to back Democratic candidates. Instead, the economy is dominated by a mix of the low-wage, nonunion retail and service sectors, and by high finance, which has shown itself fiercely opposed to regulation and taxation, happy to reap and shield its profits abroad at the expense of U.S. workers, and willing to invest plenty in a party that does its bidding.

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