Stevens: GOP needs more than white voters to win

In his column in the Daily Beast, former Romney campaign manager Stuart Stevens laid out the Republican Party's decline in the clearest math that anyone -  maybe even Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber - can understand.

The column heading said  it all:

 "There Aren't Enough White Voters for GOP Win".

Stevens' logic isn't hard to follow once he does the math. "Over the last six presidential elections,"  he writes, "Democrats  have won  16 states every time for a  total of 242 electoral votes out of the 279 needed to win.  In those same six elections,
Republican presidential candidates  carried 13 states for 103 electoral votes. Here's another way to look at it.  The last time a Republican presidential candidate won with enough votes to be declared the winner on election night was in 1988 [George H.W. Bush]"

The clincher?  Stevens argues that although it's erroneously believed that a smaller percentage of white voters supported Romney than Ronald Reagan. the opposite was true.   Romney lost  because the white voter pool  had shrunk.

 And will continue to shrink!

He  concludes that it's a myth to believe a great mass of white voters are lying back to vote when  the right Republican candidate eventually arrives.

"Call  it the Lost Tribes of the Amazon Theory: If only you paddle far enough up the river, and bang the  drum loud enough, these previously hidden voters will gather to the river's edge, " he writes.  "The simple  truth is that there simply aren't enough white voters in the America of 2016 to win a national  election without getting a substantial share of the non-white votes."

Republicans,  he says, need between 25 pct. and 35 pct.  of the non-white vote to win.

 But the party still has its sacred but less potent base, of sorts.

Anybody for demographics?