"Nobody loves me but my mother; but she could be jiving too!"
Priebus' grievances
Priebus' struggle is to calm the psyche of a Party scarred by a devastating election loss and stem its high anxiety over the real prospect of a future of electoral mega-routs. Addressing this begins with an understanding that at the end of the political day, fact or fiction is largely irrelevant. All that counts is perception; perception is political reality. For example, every piece of anti-gay, anti-reproduction rights, anti-immigrant, anti-women, and anti-labor legislation has its origin in the Republican Party, right? I'm not sure myself, but that perception -- true or false -- helped enable President Obama to carry over 90 percent of the African-American vote; 76 percent of the gay vote; 73 percent of the Asian vote ; 71 percent of the Latino vote ; 69 percent of the Jewish vote ; and 55 percent of women voters in his victory over Romney .
What's giving Priebus the vapors is the certainty of the demographic growth among these groups as his Party's unswerving core of angry white males age out of the political process taking with them many of the social mores that marked the era in which they came of age. An aggregation of recent national polling by several groups including ABC News, Gallup and the Associated Press show that 62 percent of Americans support a path to citizenship; 58 percent support stronger gun safety laws; 53 percent support same sex marriage; and 80 percent consider climate change a serious threat, all up significantly from prior years.
Meanwhile, the Census Bureau's 2012 Current Population Survey presents an in-depth examination of the demographic changes that -- as put by Nate Cohn in a story published in The New Republic -- should "terrify Republicans." Cohn points out:
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