The latest census report confirms what has been an unstoppable trend for the past two decades. That America is well on the way to becoming a majority non-white nation. With fewer white babies being born than Latino, black and Asian babies, that may come a lot sooner than the targeted year of 2042, which demographers repeatedly cite. The ethnic remake of America is already having a huge impact on land use, housing, social services, schools, and industries in countless small and medium sized towns, and rural areas that since the country’s birth have been exclusively or predominantly white.

The GOP knows that. And the brutal reality for the party is that more minorities in America’s population will continue to translate into bigger numbers for the Democrats at the polls. That pattern has been locked in place for the past decade. This is a prime reason that President Obama is President Obama. He was the biggest beneficiary of the happy confluence of demographics and politics in 2008 when an off-the-chart number of black, youth and Latino voters marched to the polls to help put him over the top in the handful of battleground states that for the past three decades have either voted solid GOP in the presidential race or tilted toward the GOP.

Former President Bush grasped the significance of the mounting non-white numbers and the potential peril to the GOP in 2000. He briefly flirted with the notion of overhauling the GOP and making it an ethnically diverse big tent party. He schmoozed, pandered to and courted Latino voters and organizations. It worked. He ramped up the number of Latino voters and that helped his election bid in several states. In 2004, he repeated the tact with Latino and black evangelicals. It worked again. He got more than 40 percent of the Latino vote, and a small but significant bump up in the black vote. This was just enough to tip Ohio, Florida and the White House back to him.

But Bush’s diversity pitch was an aberration. The GOP quickly reverted back to form in the 2008 presidential election and especially the 2010 national elections. It ramped up its standard attack on big government, tax and spend Democrats, and screamed for a scrap or gut of entitlement programs, and tough military preparedness. Its theme pitch was the old wink and nod mix of code terms to rile the racial juices of conservative whites who still see government and Democrats as synonymous with pandering to minorities.