Should Republicans Just Focus on White Voters?

By THOMAS B. EDSALL, NYT

For two decades, from 1972 to 1992, the Democratic Party agonized over its loss of support among whites, especially those in the working class. Over the next two decades, from the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012, the party slowly came to terms with its loss and learned how to win the presidency with a minority of white voters.

Now the white vote has become a Republican problem. White voters cast 72 percent of all votes in the Obama-Romney election of 2012 compared to 87 percent in the Nixon-McGovern contest in 1972. Should the Republican Party accept the fact that the white majority in the United States is getting smaller or should it bet on boosting Republican margins and turnout rates among whites to record levels?

The debate within the Republican Party on this fraught topic has provoked new levels of over-the-top rhetoric among the old guard on the farther right side of the Republican spectrum.

Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative anti-feminist, declared in a radio interview on May 24:

The people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes — the white voters who didn’t vote in the last election. And there are millions of them. And I think when you have an establishment-run nomination system, they give us a series of losers, which they’ve given us with Dole, and McCain, and Romney.

(More here.)