The NYT is running an article that speaks as if the GOP has a future in this country:

The trick [of regaining power], some Republicans said, is to guide populists’ energies toward an optimistic agenda built on those themes. “If we don’t take this anger and frustration, as legitimate as I believe it is, and channel it into a good, a positive, then we won’t be successful,” said Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania.

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997 and is a potential 2012 president candidate, cited the 1994 House elections as a model for what the party can accomplish now. In that election, he said, Republicans attracted voters who in 1992 had backed H. Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.

The one thing Bush did right? To attempt to adapt his party to this reality:

(FiveThirtyEight.com) Gallup has data out suggesting that 89 percent of self-identified Republicans are white; the comparable figure among Democrats is 65 percent.

This, however, is not exactly anything new. 88 percent of George W. Bush's voters in 2004, and 91 percent of them in 2000, were white. And nearly 98 percent of Ronald Reagan's voters in 1980 were white as were 96 percent of Gerald Ford's in 1976. The GOP is, in fact, slightly less white than it once was, as they do relatively better among Hispanics and Asians than among blacks (if still not particularly well), and Hispanics and Asians are starting to make up a larger fraction of the nonwhite (and overall) voting pool...

...Consider this remarkable statistic. In 1980, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Democrats (or at least white Carter voters) — likewise, in 2008, 32 percent of the electorate consisted of white Obama voters. But whereas, in 1980, just 9 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Carter voters, 21 percent of the electorate were nonwhite Obama voters last year. Thus, Carter went down to a landslide defeat, whereas Obama defeated John McCain by a healthy margin.

(CNN) — By 2050, minorities will be the majority in America, and the number of residents older than 65 will more than double, according to projections released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau looks at 2000 results and assumptions about future childbearing, mortality rates and migration.

Minorities, classified as those of any race other than non-Hispanic, single-race whites, currently constitute about a third of the U.S. population, according to Census figures. But by 2042, they are projected to become the majority, making up more than half the population. By 2050, 54 percent of the population will be minorities.